ACROSS THE COUNTRY
Enslaved Black Children Were Educated Here. Now the Public Can Learn the History.
Beginning on Juneteenth, a restored Virginia schoolhouse where enslaved and free Black students were taught to read is on view in Colonial Williamsburg.
WHY WE’RE HERE
We’re exploring how America defines itself one place at a time. In Williamsburg, Va., an 18th-century schoolhouse reveals the history of Black life in colonial America.
Audra D.S. Burch covers race and identity.
The building with a forgotten past sat on the campus of William & Mary for nearly a century. It served as the home of the military science department at the college in Williamsburg, Va., and before that, a women’s dormitory. But its story is even older.
In 2020, researchers discovered that it was not just a facet of the historic campus, but a rare artifact in the history of Black life in colonial America. About 250 years ago, the unassuming structure housed the Williamsburg Bray School, making it the oldest known building where enslaved and free Black children were formally educated.
Since the discovery, the Bray School has been fully restored. It will open to the public on Thursday — Juneteenth — in Colonial Williamsburg, where it was relocated in 2023 to be preserved. The space will give visitors a sense of the lives of the students, and the museum will scrutinize, through interpreters, the mission of the school, which not only taught the children church doctrine and reading but sought to “convince enslaved students to accept their circumstances as divinely ordained,” according to the museum’s website.
The opening of the school comes at a particularly fraught time in the United States as Black history, diversity and established historical narratives are being challenged, sanitized or even erased. Its story also unlocks another layer of the historic city, whose identity is shaped, in part, by its role in the American Revolution. Located in the coastal Tidewater region, Williamsburg was once the capital of the British colony of Virginia. The city is a unique place to examine colonial life — including slavery — and the nation’s founding ideals.