A Virginia building believed to be the oldest surviving schoolhouse for Black children in the U.S. was hoisted onto a flatbed truck and moved a half-mile into Colonial Williamsburg.
from a slave owner named Lewis Burwell. An ad that Burwell placed in The Virginia Gazette in 1774 offering a cash bounty for his return warned that Bee could read., lived upstairs at the school, and taught an estimated 300 to 400 students, whose ages ranged from 3 to 10, according to surviving records.
The former schoolhouse eventually was moved from its original spot to make way for a dormitory. It was expanded over the years, last used as an office for ROTC, the college program that prepares military officers.Historians believed they had identified the original Bray School building, but it wasn’t confirmed until 2021, through the use of dendrochronology, a scientific method that examines tree rings in lumber to determine the wood’s harvest date.
The Bray School was exceptional: Although Virginia waited until the 1800s to impose an anti-literacy laws, white leaders across much of Colonial America forbid educating enslaved people, fearing literacy would encourage their liberty. South Carolina criminalized teaching slaves to write English in 1740.
“Everything that I learned about my ancestors was wrong,” she said. “They could learn. They did learn. They were able.”
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