Introduction

Racial inequity has been central to the design of public education in the US—and in Williamsburg—from its beginnings. Following Emancipation and the Civil War, the Black community held hopes that Reconstruction would bring opportunity—including the education that was denied during slavery. In 1868, Daniel M. Norton, a Black man from Williamsburg, was a delegate to the Virginia constitutional convention and contributed to a new constitution that promised such opportunity. The constitution not only gave Black men the right to vote in the state but also called for “a uniform system of public free schools and for its gradual, equal, and full introduction into all the counties of the state by the year 1876.”¹ Despite this promise, Jim Crow laws would soon disenfranchise Black men and the promises of “equal” public education would be denied to the Black community in Williamsburg and across Virginia. Many white elites in Virginia, as elsewhere, resented the idea of public education as an effort to “break down all ranks and put the negro upon a plane of equality with the whites.”² White people resisted paying for Black education in part because the primary source of revenue for public schools was taxable property, of which the Black community had little.³ This view, of course, neglected the reality that Black people had been denied access to property—indeed Black people were constructed as property—through slavery and that the Black community’s forced and unpaid labor during slavery had subsidized white property ownership and intergenerational transfer of wealth.⁴

Black parents, churches, and community members in Williamsburg, as in other places, played a central role in the education of their children and community following Emancipation, as they had during the period of slavery. The Black community envisioned education as a form of resistance that could disrupt racial and class hierarchies. The Black community supported the public schools financially and through volunteer labor, even amid the deep wealth inequities that existed due to centuries of slavery. School principals, teachers, and parents fostered a culture of resistance within segregated schools by building a sense of identity and belonging and a supportive community while advocating to the School Board for more resources to support Black education.