A structure that is said to be the oldest Black schoolhouse still standing in the US was lifted onto a flatbed truck and transported Friday a half-mile to Colonial Williamsburg, a museum in Virginia that keeps emphasizing African American history.
The first building, which was constructed 25 years before the American Revolution, was located close to the William & Mary campus. Up to 30 students might be enrolled at once in the Pinewood facility, some of whom were free Black youngsters who were studying with the enslaved.
To celebrate its leisurely journey through the center of the living history museum, which uses interpreters and reconstructed buildings to tell the tale of Virginia's colonial capital, hundreds of people lined the streets.
The Bray School disproves the notion that all enslaved Americans lacked an education for historians and their descendants alike. However, the school's religious curriculum, which was developed by an English charity, also supported slavery and urged children to view their predicament as God's will.
According to Maureen Elgersman Lee, head of the Bray School Lab at William & Mary, "religion was at the center of the school, and it was not a gospel of abolition."
According to Lee, "there was this urge to preach and deliver salvation while still doing nothing to undermine the institution of slavery." "Save the soul, but keep the body in servitude. It was this world versus the next.
It was a type of deceit that was simple to fit into the greater inconsistencies of the country's creation, when the Democracy that was being built openly rejected many of its citizens' rights and liberties.
Jamestown, which England founded in 1607, is only ten miles away from Williamsburg. Just a dozen years later, the colony was given access to African slaves for labor. A century and a half later, slightly over half of Williamsburg's 2,000 residents were Black, the majority of them still in slavery.
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