Resistance Begins at Home: The Black Family and Lessons in Survival and Subversion in Jim Crow Mississippi

At a very young age, black children in rural Jim Crow Mississippi encountered notions of race and racial difference. The black family—including not only mothers and fathers but also grandparents, extended relatives, and other adults in the community—played a crucial role in helping children to navigate through these racial ideologies and practices. Oral histories and memoirs reveal a world of racial lessons in which black children learned both physical and psychological survival. Through regular instruction, stories of slavery and Jim Crow, and their own actions, black adults taught children a meaning of blackness rooted in racial pride and struggle.