Historians and African-American culture experts say “the talk’’ dates back to 1863, following the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves living in still-rebellious states.

Encounters between freed slaves and whites were fraught, and Charles Stith, director of Boston University’s African Presidential Archives and Research Center, said black parents made it a point to caution their sons who had been slaves that if they celebrated their freedom too publicly, they could trigger an angry and potentially lethal reaction.

From emancipation, to the US Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 that upheld the legality of the “separate but equal’’ segregation doctrine, to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, to the war on drugs of the 1980s that included police profiling that snagged noncriminals who happened to share skin color with criminal suspects, the essence of the talk has remained.

“The talk,’’ Stith said, has always ranged from the simple - maintain eye contact, no back talk, and the like - to more complex concerns, such as how to maintain a sense of identity when authority figures are perceived to be intimidating.

“The shame of this is that no proud father wants to have to tell his son to humble himself in a way that is demeaning,’’ said Stith, who got his version of the talk from his mother.

“But there has been such justifiable fear over the years that a cross look, an outfit, even a shade of skin could be enough to get one’s child hurt or killed, that that pride has been swallowed in a way that … white fathers, collectively, have never felt, because it has not occurred to them collectively that their sons could land in serious trouble for a look or a tone.’’