My church’s observance of Black History Month got a jumpstart last week when we hosted All Together Williamsburg’s January meeting, featuring an update from Nicole Brown on the Bray School Initiative. Ms. Brown is a graduate assistant at William & Mary’s Bray School Lab and a public historian at Colonial Williamsburg. She portrays Ann Wager, the white teacher at the Bray School, where hundreds of free and enslaved African-American children were educated from 1760-1774.
Nicole’s first All Together presentation at St. Martin’s in November 2022 was the beginning of what has become a wonderful monthly community gathering in our parish hall, sponsored by this organization that has been bridging racial, ethnic, and cultural lines in our community for almost 30 years.
As a W&M alumna, CW fan and Episcopal priest, I’m intrigued by the complicated threads of education, history and religion weaving together in the story of the oldest building in the country dedicated to the education of Black children. So last Feb. 10, I joined the crowd watching the building being moved to its new home in the historic area, passing by students from Matthew Whaley holding up signs with the names of Bray School students. And I came back that afternoon for the ceremony officially launching its preservation, where Gov. Glenn Youngkin praised what he called “the mighty role the church and the classroom played in the progress toward the goal of all people being equal.”
While that’s true, its opposite is also true. The church and the classroom also played a mighty role in hindering that goal. Bray School students were taught to read the Bible and to accept their place in society, a paradox captured on the lab’s website: “The school’s faith-based curriculum justified slavery; yet their practice of literacy seeded agency.” In other words, the education the students received transformed them and eventually their society in ways far beyond what the Bray School founders intended.
A few days after the building’s move, we talked about this paradox at our Wednesday service at St. Martin’s, keeping the Feb. 15 feast of Thomas Bray, priest and missionary. Bray was a 40-year-old country parson in 1696 when the bishop of London asked him to oversee church work in the colony of Maryland. He eventually founded two Christian educational societies still in operation, 39 libraries and a number of schools. His Williamsburg namesake was among those founded after his death by the associates of Dr. Bray. Some biographies call him an abolitionist, which makes me want to do some more research.
Like many of those remembered among our church’s “lesser feasts and fasts,” Bray was a person of his time, and the complexities of his commemoration are part of a bigger challenge. Can we both unsparingly name and lament the evils of slavery and its legacy and marvel at the strength and creativity of those who, like the Bray School students and the founders of Historic First Baptist Church, lived through it? Can we hold the tension between the worst and best things about our national and religious histories, tolerating the discomfort of both/and?
After all, the Bible itself, and probably all sacred texts, are as full of contradictions as we are. Along with passages that remind us that all human beings are created in God’s image we find stories of how we have judged, demeaned, abused and hurt one another. Sometimes we have to look hard for the seeds of agency, compassion, liberation and peace, but they’re there. And the more we can build our capacity for complexity in our spiritual and cultural lives, the more we will be up to welcoming and celebrating the gifts and stories of all our neighbors.
Parker J. Palmer writes about this invitation in his book, “A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.” “The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.”
This Black History Month, I’m going to take advantage of the many ways our community offers to lean in to both the brokenness and beauty of our shared past, doing my part to prepare for a more just, loving and peaceful future for all of us.
You can learn more about the Bray School at a community event coming up Saturday, Feb. 17, at 11 a.m. in the Lane Auditorium at Bruton Heights Education Center, 301 First St. in Williamsburg. You’ll meet the people involved in the initiative, learn about ongoing discoveries, and find out how you can help shape how we understand and interpret the Williamsburg Bray School. Refreshments will be served and registration is encouraged at go.wm.edu/nsDgtT.
You’re also invited to St. Martin’s for the monthly All Together gathering every fourth Tuesday of the month at 6:30 p.m.; the next meeting is Feb. 27.
The Rev. Lisa Green is rector of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Williamsburg.
