About the Author

Michael Caraballo is an intern for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media for the 2025-2026 academic school year. He is currently a Lead Historical Interpreter for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and his research interests currently focus on race, gender, and slavery pre-American Civil War.

The Bray Schools: Colonial Education for Enslaved Youth

Tue 21 2025

With the opening of the Williamsburg Bray School at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, interpreters welcome guests in the building to dissect themes of education versus indoctrination; religious oppression versus religious acceptance; race and identity in Colonial Virginia. 

After meeting with Benjamin Franklin in London, The Associates of the late Dr. Thomas Bray, a charitable organization attached to the Church of England, created these schools to teach enslaved boys and girls in Williamsburg, Virginia to learn skills that would make them more valuable to their enslavers. Skills included reading, spelling, and counting for all students and cross-stitch and sewing as well for the girls. Arguably from the enslavers’ point of view, the most important lesson taught at the Williamsburg Bray School, was teaching the children obedience and their catechisms. By raising enslaved Black children to accept their enslavement as though it was ordained by God would theoretically assimilate a population of youths and create a generation of docile enslaved people. The Bray School system functioned as an educational facility indoctrinating enslaved Black children to be subservient by accepting their position in an Anglo-European social order. This story can be difficult to teach. “People-ing” the space makes the story more real for the children attending the exhibit. Talking about children like Aggy, who was enslaved to the Speaker of the House of Burgesses, Peyton Randolph, and explaining the dichotomy between an enslaved person and the people that enslaved them allows the story to be personal, rather than existential. Why might Peyton Randolph send Aggy, Sam, or Roger to the Bray School? The historical record indicates Aggy stayed enslaved to the family through the 1800s and would likely have been the family’s enslaved laundress. Sam ends up escaping bondage in the 1770s during their American Revolution. Did their attendance at school affect them differently? One escapes and the other has children who continue to be enslaved with her. By phrasing the school’s intentions through the lens of historical figures, the historical narrative of this space can feel more nuanced and personal. 

As a historic interpreter for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, I have found that public history (history taught in non-traditional classroom settings) is a useful approach to teaching subjects like slavery, race, gender, education, or religion to better understand the complexities of these systems. Allowing students to experience these systems firsthand at historic sites, monuments, or museums can articulate these subjects for younger students better than the classroom. Students entering the Bray School will see the schoolroom of the children, learn some of the lessons they did, and read some of the material the children read. This allows the students in the present day to compare what their education is to that of these enslaved children and what makes it so different. With mismatched benches lining the walls of the small classroom, these children as young as three and as old as ten were expected to sit facing the teacher, Ann Wager, at her desk, be attentive and diligent, and never idle in their work. 

At the Bray School in Williamsburg, the enslaved children likely were not taught writing, so they did not receive desks. While there is some historical precedent to say writing was taught at the Bray School, it likely was not a skill every child learned. If enslaved people learned how to write, the societal assumption was they could write a freedom pass. Nowadays students are often taught reading and writing together, but over 250 years ago, writing was viewed as a privilege. In addition to the physical classroom space, various reproduction books the children were required to learn like, The Child’s First Book or The Church Catechism Broke into Short Questions, are available to read. The books look a lot different from today’s curriculum as The Child’s First Book utilizes phonics, which some students might not be familiar with. The children sent to the Bray School were expected to recite what they read or repeat what Ann Wager said aloud, rather than writing things down. Once they proved they could understand the alphabet and read one-syllable words, children will then read short religious passages and prayers.

With the school day starting as early as six or seven in the morning, the students were expected to attend everyday, only wear uniforms approved of by the administrator, and report to the local parish church every Sunday to recite their catechisms in front of the entire parish to show that the school was a success. However, what little is known opens up more questions than answers. The children were expected to attend at least three years to receive the proper amount of religious education, but the administrator of the school noted that the children would only attend when they completed the chores they were forced to do and were pulled out of school once they learned to read. Knowing this, one wonders how the children felt knowing that their education is in the hands of their enslavers –not their parents– and they could lose it at any moment.  

What does it mean to be a child in the Bray School? What kind of work were these children doing at their enslaver’s home before attending school? These questions can be answered by exploring Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s Bray School Map and the William and Mary Bray School Lab’s Research Portal. Both of these digital history projects are spearheaded by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the Bray School Lab at the College of William and Mary, respectively. These sites tell fuller stories of the students that we know attended the school during the Colonial Period. While historians estimate upwards of 400 enslaved and free Black children attended, historians only know of 87 names, split between three student lists in the historical record. Of these 87 children’s names, six are free Black children (Mary Anne; Elisha and Mary Jones; Harry, John, and Mary Ashby). Seven children overlap on the students lists, meaning they may have attended for the three-year-minimum (Doll/Dolly, John, John Ashby, Catherine, Joanna Bee, Roger, Sam).

Visiting historic sites like Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and exploring their digital history content allow students to more fully understand the complexity of being human in history. Without being physically present at historic sites or exploring digitally recreated systems or events better establishing communities of people in history, historical figures and events are often left to being words on a page in a textbook. Whether they are situating themselves within exhibits, like the Bray School, or exploring the resources offered by public history sites, they are better able to “people” the spaces of history and understand what a child near their age experienced in American history.