In Colonial Williamsburg, the country's most famous living-history museum, a Black church dating back to America's founding sat buried beneath a parking lot—a testament to how the US has long failed to tell the full history of itself.
following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, communities across the country debated whether the scores of monuments dedicated to slave owners and the Confederacy should be left standing.
Throughout the process, Colonial Williamsburg has committed to working with First Baptist to determine what should ultimately happen with the site. A reconstruction of what sat there so many years ago is practically a given. “We’re not real shy about that at all, let me just tell you,” Harshaw says. “We’ve made our position clear to Colonial Williamsburg. We’re saying, ‘Not this time. You’re not going to tell the story for us this time.
“Today’s racism is evasive; it’s the racism of denying racism,” Blakey says. The document “talks about the problem of the extraordinary disavowal, denial, omission, and distortion of the past that goes as mainstream history. It is part of the way white people, especially, have been taught to view the world, with slavery marginalized in a way that encourages white supremacy at the center of that.”
First Baptist Church isn’t on the Frenchman’s Map, but Fleet says, “We don’t know if that means it was an omission or it actually wasn’t there.” The congregation traces its history back to 1776, but historians don’t know exactly when its members first had a dedicated place of worship. At the start, they gathered outdoors, in defiance of laws that prohibited Black people from congregating, in rural areas several miles from town.
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