Enslaved Black Children Were Educated Here. Now the Public Can Learn the History.; The New York Times, June 19, 2025

 Audra D. S. Burch , The New York Times; Enslaved Black Children Were Educated Here. Now the Public Can Learn the History.

"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...

“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?”...

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."