WILLIAMSBURG, Virginia: A building believed to be the oldest surviving schoolhouse for black children in America was hoisted onto a flatbed truck Friday and driven a half-mile to a Virginia museum in Colonial Williamsburg that continues its emphasis on African American history. keeps.
Built 25 years before the American Revolution, the original structure stood near the College of William & Mary campus. The Pinewood Building housed as many as 30 students at a time, some of them free black children studying with slaves.
Hundreds of people line the streets to celebrate their slow-motion journey into the center of the living history museum, which tells the story of Virginia’s colonial capital through interpreters and reconstructed buildings.
Employees of Colonial Williamsburg, believed to be the oldest schoolhouse for black children in the United States, is slowly moved down a street in Williamsburg, Va., to the Living History Museum on Friday, February 10, 2023. (AP)
For historians and descendants alike, the Bray School refutes the belief that all enslaved Americans were illiterate. But the school’s faith-based curriculum – maintained 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 abolitionist gospel,” said Maureen Elgersman Lee, director of the William & Mary’s Bray School Lab.
Lee said, “It was necessary to bring about conversion and emancipation while doing nothing to destabilize the institution of slavery.” “Save the soul, but continue to enslave the body. It was here versus the hereafter.”
It was a brand of duplicity that fit easily into the larger contradictions of the country’s founding, when the sham democracy had blatantly denied rights and freedoms to many of its people.
Williamsburg is less than 10 miles from Jamestown, which the English founded in 1607. The colony was supplied with enslaved Africans for labor a dozen years later. A century and a half after that, black people, most of them still enslaved, represented more than half of Williamsburg’s 2,000 people.
Bray School was founded in 1760 under the name of the philanthropist Reverend Thomas Bray on the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin, president of the London-based Anglican Charities. The charity also established schools in other cities, including New York and Philadelphia.
The curriculum ranged from spellers to the Book of Common Prayer. But even within the patriarchal framework of schools, education can still be empowering, perhaps even subversive.
“I was looking at a replica of one of the books, and there are words like ‘freedom,'” Lee said. “What did learning those words do to expand these children’s sense of self? Their understanding of the world?
Isaac B., a Bray schoolboy, would run away from a slave owner named Lewis Burwell as an adult. An advertisement that was placed in The Virginia Gazette in 1774 offered Burwell a cash reward for his return and warned that the bee might read.
The white teacher, a widow named Ann Wager, lived upstairs in the school, and taught an estimated 300 to 400 students, ranging in age from 3 to 10, according to surviving records.
The Williamsburg Bray School operated until 1774; Only Philadelphia reopened after the Revolutionary War. The structure became a private home for many years before being incorporated into the William & Mary complex.
The former school was eventually moved from its original location to make way for the hostel. The original structure had 1.5 floors, with a smaller top floor. It was expanded over the years to include two full stories, and was last used as an office for ROTC, the college program that prepares military officers.
Historians believed that they had identified the original Bray School building, but this was not confirmed until 2021 through the use of dendrochronology, a scientific method that uses wood samples to determine the date of felling. Examines the rings.
“It’s a remarkable story of survival,” said Matthew Webster, Colonial Williamsburg’s executive director of architectural preservation and research. “And for us, it is very important to bring it back (to its original condition) and tell the complete and true story.”
The Bray School was exceptional: although Virginia waited until the 1800s to enact anti-literacy laws, most white leaders in colonial America forbade educating enslaved people, fearing literacy would lead to their freedom. South Carolina made it a crime in 1740 to teach slaves to write English.
Inside the schoolhouse, the original post under the walnut staircase still stands, its square top rounded and weathered from centuries of use, Webster said, making it “a very powerful piece for many people.”
For Bray School Lab’s oral historian, Tonia Merideth, the building stirred up many emotions on her first visit. This was physical evidence against the legend that his ancestors were illiterate and dumb.
“Everything I learned about my ancestors was wrong,” she said. “They could learn. They learned. They were capable.
Merideth said: “Regardless of the school’s intentions, the kids were still taking that education and possibly serving it for their own good and to help their community.”
Merideth can trace her roots back to the Armistead family, who enslaved people in the Williamsburg area and are believed to have sent at least one child named Grasshopper to the Bray School. But only the student list of three years has survived.
The moving of the Bray school is part of Colonial Williamsburg’s own back story of black history and its ongoing reckoning with the nation’s origin story. The museum was founded in 1926, but it didn’t tell Black Stories until 1979.
In 2021, it revealed the brick foundation of one of the oldest Black churches in the country. Last year, archaeologists began excavating tombs at the site.
The new location of The Bray School is right next door.
Merideth said, “We’re going back and we’re getting that school and we’re getting that legacy.” “And we’re bringing it back into historic territory.”