WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — A building believed to be the oldest surviving schoolhouse for Black children in the U.S. was hoisted onto a flatbed truck and moved a half-mile Friday to Colonial Williamsburg, a Virginia museum that continues to expand its emphasis on African American history.
The original structure, built 25 years before the American Revolution, stood near the college campus of William & Mary. The pinewood building held as many as 30 students at a time, some of them free Black children studying alongside those who were enslaved.
Hundreds of people lined the streets to celebrate its slow-speed trip into the heart of the living history museum, which tells the story of Virginia’s colonial capital through interpreters and restored buildings.
For historians and descendants alike, the Bray School contradicts the belief that all enslaved Americans were uneducated. But the school’s faith-based curriculum — created by an English charity — also justified slavery and encouraged students to accept their fate as God’s plan.
“Religion was at the heart of the school, and it was not a gospel of abolition,” said Maureen Elgersman Lee, director of William & Mary’s Bray School Lab.
“There was this need to proselytize and to bring salvation while still not doing anything to destabilize the institution of slavery,” Lee said. “Save the soul, but continue to enslave the body. It was the here versus the hereafter.”
It was a brand of duplicity that fit easily into the larger contradictions of the country’s founding, when the Democracy being forged explicitly denied rights and freedoms to many of its people.
‘A remarkable story of survival’
Williamsburg is less than 10 miles from Jamestown, which England established in 1607. Enslaved Africans were supplied to the colony for labor just a dozen years later. A century and half after that, Black people, most of them still enslaved, represented just over half of Williamsburg’s 2,000 people.
The Bray School was…
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