During the current debate swirling around how Black history should be taught in Florida schools, I have been thinking a lot about how I approached this topic as a college teacher, particularly the subject of slavery.

There is so much to cover here, much of it grim and profoundly depressing. But there is also the story of human beings coping with the unimaginable circumstances of enslavement but still finding ways to express their mutual strength and humanity despite the conditions they were forced to endure. And this is where I spent a great deal of my time as a classroom teacher.

Of course I covered issues like the brutal Middle Passage that brought millions of Africans to the Western Hemisphere and the harsh realities of the domestic slave trade in the United States. Of course I dealt with an agricultural system that forced men, women and children into the fields in gangs, supervised by a whip-wielding white overseer and sometimes an enslaved Black driver as well. Of course I discussed the dehumanizing legal codes that gave masters and mistresses virtually unlimited control over the bodies of their human “property” and attempted to control their minds as well. But I did not end there.

In particular, I did my best to convey to my students the critical role family played in Black life under bondage. And one family I had studied seemed to resonate with my students more than any other, the story of Sam and Nancy Williams and their children.

Readers of the Tampa Bay Times may remember this man and woman. I have written about them a couple of times in these pages. They lived near Lexington in the Valley of Virginia, where Sam was a skilled ironworker at a place called Buffalo Forge. He and Nancy Jefferson “married” in 1840, when he was 20 years old and she was 23 (I put quotations marks around “marriage” for a reason: Slave marriages had no legal standing in the antebellum South). During the next four years, they had four daughters, Elizabeth, Mary Caroline, Ann and Lydia.

Mary Caroline’s name carried special meaning, I soon came to realize.

As I pieced together the story of Buffalo Forge, I learned that the owner, William Weaver, and his partner, a man named Thomas Mayberry, had purchased a number of slaves in 1815 along with their acquisition of the forge, a blast furnace, and farm and timber land that constituted the totality of their acquisitions. Among these slaves was a woman named Mary and her seven children. When Weaver and Mayberry had a falling out in the 1830s and Weaver successfully sued his partner, a division of their slave “property” took place in 1837: Mayberry acquired Mary and three of her children and took them out of the Valley, east across the Blue Ridge Mountains, to a new ironworks in the Virginia Piedmont; Weaver retained four of Mary’s children, including a daughter, Sally, and her six children, one of whom was her 17-year-old son, Sam Williams.

Sam Williams never forgot that his grandmother Mary had been carried off by Thomas Mayberry. How can I say this? I obviously cannot know what Sam Williams was thinking, but his and every subsequent branch of the Williams family tree had a girl named Mary in each generation for as long as I was able to trace this family, to the beginning of the 20th century, as it turned out. I think it is fair to say he, and his children, and his children’s children, remembered.

Tragedy stalked Sam and Nancy Williams’ family during the Civil War. Three of their four daughters died during these years: 22-year-old Elizabeth, of diphtheria, in September of 1862; 20-year-old Lydia, of typhoid fever, in October of 1864; and 23-year-old Mary Caroline, of “consumption” (we would now call it tuberculosis), in January of 1865.

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As I put together the names and dates and details of this family’s life, I noticed something striking. Lydia Williams was near death from typhoid on Oct. 7, 1864, when her sister Mary Caroline had given birth to a healthy baby girl. Two days later, on Oct. 9, Lydia died. And Mary Caroline named her daughter, born two days before her sister Lydia’s death, Lydia Maydelene. Was she honoring her dying sister? The answer seems obvious to me.

When I was sitting at my desk and I saw this sequence of events unfolding, I was reminded, once again, that family, with all of its joys and sorrows, lay at the center of slave life. It was the absolute core of their existence, a haven in a heartless world, if ever there was one.

After emancipation, Sam and Nancy Williams went in to the Freedmen’s Bureau office in Lexington in 1866 to register their marriage. It was, at long last, legally binding. But they were only able to list their one surviving daughter, Ann, who now was 23 years old. Neither Elizabeth nor Lydia nor Mary Caroline had been there to experience that miraculous day, in May of 1865, when freedom came to Buffalo Forge.

Can we not teach this sort of history to our young people here in Florida today? Can we not tell them how these remarkable men and women created a life worth living under circumstances so dire? Can we not honor their history along with the history of everyone else? Shame on all of us, governor, if the answer is “no!”

Charles B. Dew is Ephraim Williams Professor of American History, emeritus, at Williams College. He is the author of “Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge.”