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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.
The school’s discovery was based on research by Terry L. Meyers, Chancellor professor of English emeritus at William & Mary. It inspired a yearslong mission among a broad community of scholars, historians, archaeologists, genealogists and descendants to learn more about the school and its students. It was rare during the colonial period for a space to be dedicated to formally educating enslaved and free Black children. In 1831, decades after the school had closed, Virginia outlawed the practice.
“The Bray School is happening around the same time that the fundamental ideas of American identity are being shaped and articulated. The existence of the school tells us that African Americans were a part of the fabric of Williamsburg despite the desire to not see them,” said Dr. Maureen Elgersman Lee, director of the William & Mary Bray School Lab. “The children grew up. They created lives within the system they lived in, whether free or enslaved. They entered this new period, this soon-to-be republic, and they were part of America’s story.”
The Williamsburg school was one of five Bray schools in the colonial United States. As many as 400 Black children attended the school beginning in 1760. It moved to a larger facility after five years and closed in 1774 after the death of its only instructor, a white woman named Ann Wager. The existence of the school was known — through documentation and family stories — but it would be centuries before the original building was reclaimed from history.
The first known record of the children, identified by name, is dated 1762. At the time, there were 30 students, ages 3 to 10. Twenty-seven were enslaved. Three were listed as free. They walked to school and attended Bruton Parish Church on Sundays. Around this time, African Americans represented more than half of Williamsburg’s population.
“I always knew there were pieces missing from the story of Blacks here in Williamsburg,” said Janice Canaday, who traces her family to Elisha and Mary Jones, who attended the Bray School in 1762 as free students. Ms. Canaday works as Colonial Williamsburg’s African American community engagement manager, and said she often thought about the children. “I wonder what songs they sang.” she said, “Did they go home, wherever home was, and share what they learned? Did they look out the window and somehow see hope?”
Colonial Williamsburg, which recreates the colonial era through a collection of more than 600 restored or reconstructed buildings and costumed interpreters, is taking steps to more comprehensively tell Black history. On Juneteenth, it is also breaking ground on a project to rebuild the African Baptist Meeting House, the first permanent structure used by the present-day congregation of the First Baptist Church, which was founded in 1776 and is just steps from where the school now sits. And, on the William & Mary campus, archaeologists have begun a formal dig in search of more pieces of Bray’s remarkable history.
Collectively, the three projects explore the complicated intersection of race and religion that shaped Williamsburg during the colonial period, while also helping create a fuller portrait of enslaved and free Black life there.
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which owns and operates the museum, has been accused of both presenting a whitewashed version of the colonial period and of going “woke” by making the 18th-century storytelling more inclusive.
“We are going to tell a full story,” said Ron Hurst, chief mission officer for the foundation and its senior vice president of education and historic resources. “We are going to tell you the good and the bad. We are not going to tell you what to think about it. That’s up to you.”
For years, researchers have pored over official correspondence and archival documents related to Bray and have conducted oral interviews to piece together the school’s history.
The Bray schools were founded by the Associates of Dr. Bray, an Anglican Church missionary organization, to teach Black children to read and to follow the faith. The girls were also taught needlework.
“It was not exactly an altruistic mission,” Mr. Hurst said. “The intent was to Christianize and particularly imbue the Anglican religion into children of color but at the same time reinforce what was perceived as their place in society. To me, one of the most interesting parts of this story is that once the tool of literacy is freed, you can’t put that genie back in the bottle.”
Earlier this year, Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists unearthed the school’s nearly complete foundation, along with a cellar. An archaeological team from William & Mary then expanded the excavation and recovered artifacts from the 18th century to the mid-20th century, including buttons and fragments of slate pencils.
Most of the children who attended are not known by name. But 86 names were found on original rosters from three separate years in the 1760s. Some were listed by their first names only or their first names and ages — John and Aggy and Bristol and Shropshire. Centuries later, those details help humanize the children, who at the time were considered property.
The names of some Bray students show up again in documents related to their slave status, such as wills, tax lists, estate sales or bills of sale. Researchers are tracing their lives into adulthood to determine what happened to them but also to help fill in the blanks of family lines with the help of the descendant community.
Researchers point to one student, Isaac Bee, as an example of resilience and resistance. After attending the Bray school, he was moved to another plantation and decided to flee.
A runaway ad seeking his return, dated 1774, described Mr. Bee as 18 or 19 years old. The ad noted something else: “He can read.”
Audra D. S. Burch is a national reporter, based in South Florida and Atlanta, writing about race and identity around the country.
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