It is well documented that Black children are disproportionately suspended and expelled in schools, but less explored is the importance of place in shaping disciplinary decision-making and student experiences of punishment. Drawing on over a year of ethnographic work at Abundance Junior High School (AJHS), a predominantly Black school of 150 students, I argue that school discipline in the rural northeast Louisiana Delta is shaped by racial, spatial, and social dimensions of place. Specifically, I argue that treatment and punishment of Black children in schools is shaped by (1) cultural expectations that they remain in “a child’s place,” a social position characterized by obedience and deference, and (2) socialization reinforcing respectability and compliance with authority informed by historical and contemporary threats of racial violence and Louisiana’s carceral logics. I conclude by discussing how these disciplinary and socialization practices, while motivated in part by the desire to protect Black children, ultimately reproduce forms of social control and harm students.