"American history," writer James Baldwin told a group of teachers in 1963, "is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it" (1963/1996, 227). Children, Baldwin argued, have "the right and necessity to examine everything." In particular, they need to examine the history of the United States so that they will question the systems of racial privilege and racial discrimination that exist in it. To exclude such questioning from teaching is, according to Baldwin, enormously dangerous. More than forty years after Baldwin's "A Talk to Teachers," race continues to be one of the most important and controversial issues in our society. In this article, the author explores what research has shown about teachers' objections to raising serious and controversial issues with their elementary students. She then examines what actually happened when the topic of race was raised in a fifth-grade class. The author describes how the teacher introduced provocative materials about race in the context of the history of the Revolutionary War. In allowing students the opportunity to grapple with controversy, the teacher opened the door to meaningful questions about slavery and freedom, and students demonstrated complex thinking about relations of power in United States history.