The College of William and Mary was instrumental in opening a school in 1760 — at the urging of Benjamin Franklin, no less — and so became the first college in America involved in the education of black students.
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At a time when some venerable Southern colleges are finally acknowledging and apologizing for their past ties to slavery, an inquisitive scholar at the College of William and Mary thinks he has made a more inspiring find: the nation’s oldest surviving schoolhouse for African American children.
The story of the Williamsburg Bray School evokes a different Virginia than the one known as a political and ideological epicenter of slavery. It is the Virginia that was an outpost of the European Enlightenment and host to an intellectual movement that would spawn the Declaration of Independence, with the nascent college at the fore.
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