By Ben Finley —
The Associated Press
A wooden construction considered the oldest school in the United States where black children were segregated was lifted off the ground and moved on a truck to a museum in Colonial Williamsburg (Virginia).
Built 25 years before the American Revolution, the original structure was near the University of William & Mary campus.
The pinewood building could hold up to 30 students at a time
, some of them free black children studying alongside others enslaved.
Hundreds of people lined the streets to celebrate the building's slow journey into the heart of Colonial Williamsburg's living history museum, which tells the story of Virginia's colonial capital with street performers and restored buildings.
Workers move the school believed to be the oldest in the US where black children were segregated into a museum, in Williamsburg, Virginia, Friday, February 10, 2023. Ben Finley / AP
For both historians and descendants of enslaved people,
the Bray School
contradicts the belief that all Americans who were slaves lacked education.
However, the school's faith-based curriculum, created by an English charity, also
justified slavery
and encouraged students to accept their destiny as "God's plan."
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“Religion was essential in the school, and it was not a gospel that supported abolition,” said Maureen Elgersman Lee, director of the Bray School Lab at William & Mary University.
“There was a need to proselytize and bring salvation without doing anything to banish slavery as an institution,” Lee added.
“(It was about) saving the soul, but continuing to enslave the body
.”
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The educational system easily fit into the great contradictions of the founding of the country, when the democracy that was being forged explicitly denied rights and freedoms to many of its citizens.
Williamsburg is less than 10 miles from Jamestown, a city founded by England in 1607.
The colony relied on enslaved Africans for labor a decade later
.
A century and a half later, mostly enslaved black people made up just over half of Williamsburg's 2,000 residents.
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The Bray School was established in 1760 on the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin, president of a London-based Anglican charity named after the philanthropist Reverend Thomas Bray.
The charity also created schools in other cities, such as New York and Philadelphia.
The curriculum covered readings that could be considered subversive.
“I was flipping through a facsimile of one of the books and there were words like 'freedom,'” Lee explained.
“How did learning these words contribute to expanding the sense that these children had about themselves and their understanding of the world?”
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Isaac Bee, a student at Bray School, is believed to have fled as an adult from a slave owner named Lewis Burwell.
An advertisement Burwell placed in The Virginia Gazette in 1774 offered a cash reward for his return and warned that Bee could read.
The school's teacher, a white widow named Ann Wager, lived upstairs in the school and taught about 300 to 400 students, ranging in age from 3 to 10, according to surviving records.
Williamsburg's Bray School operated until 1774.
Only Philadelphia's reopened after the Revolutionary War.
The wooden building was a private home for many years before being incorporated into the William & Mary campus.
The old school was moved from its original site to function as a dormitory.
The original structure had a story and a half and a small upper story.
Over the years it was expanded to two full floors, and the last time it was used was as an office for ROTC, the university program that prepares military officers.
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Historians were unable to identify the building as the original Bray School until 2021, doing so using dendrochronology, a scientific method that examines tree rings in wood to determine the felling date.
“This is an extraordinary story of survival,” said Matthew Webster, Colonial Williamsburg's executive director of architectural research and conservation.
"And for us it is very important to return it (to its original state) and tell the full and true story."
The Bray School was exceptional: Although Virginia waited until the 19th century to pass laws against literacy, white rulers in much of colonial America forbade education for enslaved people, fearing that literacy would further their
freedom
.
South Carolina penalized the teaching of English to slaves in 1740.
Inside the school, the original post at the foot of the walnut staircase still stands, its square top rounded and chipped from centuries of use, Webster said, adding that it's a “very powerful piece for a lot of people.”
For Tonia Merideth, an oral historian at the Bray School Laboratory, the building aroused many emotions when she first saw it.
It was material proof against the narrative that her ancestors were illiterate and mute.
"Everything I had learned about my ancestors was false," he said.
“They could learn.
they learned.
They were capable."
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Merideth added: "Regardless of the intentions of the school, the children were taking that education and possibly using it for their own good and to help their community."
Merideth has roots in the Armistead family, which enslaved people in the Williamsburg area and is known to have sent at least one boy, named Locust, to Bray School.
But student lists are only kept for three years.
The move from the Bray School to the museum is part of Colonial Williamsburg's ongoing reckoning process with regard to the telling of Black history and the nation's origins.
The museum was founded in 1926, but did not tell the stories of the slaves until 1979.
