Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment.

Thirty-one years ago, there was a slave auction at Colonial Williamsburg.

On October 10, 1994, two Black men and two Black women were led up the steps and onto the porch of an 18th-century tavern. They were made to stand in front of thousands of people as their bodies were examined by prospective buyers. An auctioneer informed the crowd that only gentlemen with appropriate letters of credit would be permitted to bid. Some in the crowd looked on in astonishment; some turned away and began to cry. That the people onstage were actors did not make the spectacle easy to watch.

“It was done realistically, with all the horror and pain that you’d expect,” Ron Hurst told me recently. Hurst, who has worked at Colonial Williamsburg for more than 40 years, was a curator at the time. He now oversees preservation and education efforts at the site. Reactions to the event were mixed, he recalled. Some people thought it was a powerful indictment of the 18th-century injustice. Others were deeply upset; members of the local Black community had tried to stop the auction from happening. Two protesters sat on the steps of the tavern and challenged officials to call the police. How, they wondered, could the event’s organizers not have understood the pain and humiliation it would cause?

The slave auction was the first and last of its kind. But it was hardly unique for Colonial Williamsburg in its blurring of the lines between performance and reality. In the ’90s, visitors might encounter the sounds of human beings being whipped, or the sight of fugitive slaves trying to escape. Black actors would portray enslaved people while white actors portrayed men on slave patrol. A few visitors attacked the white actors, attempting to wrestle away their muskets. Another visitor tried to lead a revolt against the enslavers. “There are only three of them and a hundred of us!” he shouted. The site no longer depicts slave patrols, but it does not shy away from the realities of slavery.

In June, I went there to find out how the nation’s largest living-history museum is telling America’s origin story at a time when questions of how best to convey the truth about the past have become highly politicized. Since January, the Trump administration has put pressure on schools, universities, and museums to provide students with a so-called patriotic education. In March, an executive order outlined a policy to “restore” federal historical sites “to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage” and “unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.” In this environment, even private historical sites that rely on federal funding have been forced to lay off staff and halt the opening of long-planned exhibits. Colonial Williamsburg, which is run by a private foundation and receives no federal funding, has largely been spared these painful choices.

[Clint Smith: What it means to tell the truth about America]

Still, the site, which welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, has long had to consider questions of whose history it is telling, how, and to whom. The land on which it sits was purchased during the 1920s by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who used his wealth to re-create Virginia’s colonial capital with an eye toward nostalgic patriotism. Colonial Williamsburg’s founders, Hurst told me, holding his thumb and index finger about an inch apart, were seeing “a picture that was this big.” World War I had just ended, and Rockefeller wanted the site to look back fondly on the nation’s founding.

This sensibility persisted through World War II and well into the Cold War. The site made extensive efforts in the 1980s and ’90s to incorporate more stories of Black life—hence the slave auction and the whippings. But critics argued that these efforts did little to change the overall narrative put forward by Colonial Williamsburg, in which, they said, slavery was not so much part of a greater set of American contradictions as a speed bump on the otherwise straight road of progress. In 1997, the scholars Richard Handler and Eric Gable referred to the site as a “Republican Disneyland.”

Black people visiting and working in Colonial Williamsburg have felt these tensions keenly. Parts of Colonial Williamsburg, notably its facilities for employees, remained segregated throughout the 1950s and ’60s. In more recent decades, up through the present, Black “interpreters”—Colonial Williamsburg’s word for its employees who dress in period costume—have shared stories of being subjected to harassment and abuse from visitors: Are you going on the auction block today? How much do you sell for? On other occasions, Black interpreters have had “boy” shouted at them jeeringly or had the old Dixie anthem whistled in their direction.

As we sat in front of the Governor’s Palace, where Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry once lived, Hurst said that Williamsburg has tried to become more thoughtful about the way it depicts the history of Black life, both free and enslaved. Today, for example, one can go on the Freedom’s Paradox walking tour, which examines how America’s revolutionary ideals of liberty and freedom could exist at the same time as the savagery of chattel slavery. “I think our founders in the 1920s and ’30s would be shocked at the stories we tell today,” Hurst said.

So are many contemporary Americans. In 2023, Hurst said, Colonial Williamsburg was criticized by both “The 1619 Project” docuseries and the Heritage Foundation: “ ‘1619’ saying we weren’t doing enough history of the enslavement. Heritage Foundation saying we were doing too much. So we figure we must be in the right place.”

To Hurst, talking about things like slavery is a matter not of politics, but of empirical truth. He cited the fact that more than half of Williamsburg’s population was Black at the time of the Revolution. Colonial Williamsburg, he said, has a duty to tell the stories of the people who were, in fact, the majority, most of whom were enslaved. If that makes some visitors uncomfortable, so be it.

[From the December 2023 issue: Lonnie G. Bunch III asks why America is afraid of Black history]

According to Hurst, the foundation’s board deliberately reflects a mix of political views and professional backgrounds; Carly Fiorina, who ran for president in 2016 as a Republican, serves as chair. Interpreters are careful not to give contemporary political opinions when interacting with the public, and to ground their commentary in the historical record. “We’re not trying to convince them of anything,” Hurst said. “We’re teaching them American history.” Mostly, visitors are grateful. “What we hear most often, and we hear it again and again, is ‘I had no idea. Thank you for doing this.’ ”

The goal, Hurst said, is “to tell you everything that happened—the good and the bad.” But of course that isn’t as simple as it sounds.

“So my nephews were shocked to hear that you owned slaves,” a woman behind me said to the man playing Thomas Jefferson. How, she asked, could this Founding Father have held people in bondage—more than 600 over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children—while proclaiming that all men were created equal?

Beneath a canopy of white oaks and red maples, “Jefferson” stood onstage in a knee-length navy-blue coat and a black tricorn hat. He leaned forward with both hands on his cane to make eye contact with the woman’s 5-year-old nephew, Nathan. “Is that the question, young friend?” Nathan nodded.

The actor, Kurt Smith, straightened up. “The truth is, I grew up in one world,” he said as Jefferson, extending his left arm, “and I’m hoping to create another”—here he extended his right arm. He explained that when his father died, he, as the eldest male, had inherited everything, including his father’s enslaved property. “This is a strange thing,” he said, “to be 14 years of age and own people.” His voice became softer. “I grew up with them. I grew up in that society. And yet, in ’76 we had the opportunity to convert what we grew up with, what we literally inherited, and ask ourselves, Can we do something else? Can we do something better? Can we create a society that is different from the one that we inherited?” Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers, of course, failed to rid the nation of its original sin; in many ways, they actively codified it.

Earlier, during Jefferson’s monologue, Smith had posed another rhetorical question. “We have asked ourselves an audacious question in 1776—is mankind ready to self-govern?”

“Doesn’t seem like it,” a woman said from the back row. Some in the audience laughed nervously. Others shook their head.

A few hours later, I met Smith, who was still in costume, under the shade of an oak tree behind Wetherburn’s Tavern, a popular gathering place in Williamsburg in the 1750s. It was swelteringly hot and humid, and sweat rolled down both of our faces. “Can I take this thing off?” Smith asked, pointing to his wig. He fanned himself with his tricorn hat. Even when he was out of character, his voice carried the melodic cadence of theatrical performance, as if he was always within a moment of transitioning into song or soliloquy.

Smith started playing Jefferson nearly 10 years ago, and is one of two people in the world who play the role full-time. (The other, Bill Barker—who plays an older Jefferson—worked at Colonial Williamsburg for 26 years before moving to Monticello in 2019.) His job involves research as well as acting: Smith told me he’s read tens of thousands of documents written by Jefferson. The day we met, he had just come back from the Huntington’s library in San Marino, California, which has an extensive collection of the third president’s letters.

Smith often does a presentation on the contentious election of 1800, in which Federalists in the House of Representatives, faced with a choice between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, two Democratic Republicans, began plotting how they might steal the election, preventing either candidate from being elected by appointing someone of their choice. After January 6, 2021, Smith said, people would ask, Are you trying to say something? “And the truth is, no. This is just what’s in Jefferson’s life.”

During his tenure, which has included two Trump presidencies, COVID‑19, and the murder of George Floyd, Smith has encountered visitors from all across the political spectrum. Most audiences, he said, ask about Jefferson’s slave ownership. Some people think that Jefferson has been unjustly castigated by the woke mob, while others see him as an indefensible monster. “I had someone right down the street put his finger in my chest,” Smith told me. “He said, ‘You are America’s original sin.’ ” Another time, a man stood up in the middle of Smith’s performance and yelled, “Why do you hate white people?”

“I think in many ways, our job here is just to provide a place where we can talk about ourselves,” Smith said. As visitors learn America’s founding story, he believes, they inevitably make connections to the present, and think about the ways America is moving closer to, or away from, what is laid out in its aspirational documents. “It’s safer to talk about them”—colonial Americans—“even though we’re actually talking about us.”

Stephen Seals grabbed his wide-brimmed straw hat to stop it from blowing away. He adjusted his glasses and straightened his brown waistcoat. Seals, who has worked at Colonial Williamsburg for 17 years, portrays James Armistead Lafayette, an enslaved man who served in the Continental Army. He estimates that he has performed as James Lafayette more than 1,000 times.

Many Black people would find the idea of playing an enslaved person at a public historical site emotionally taxing or simply humiliating, and Colonial Williamsburg has always had a difficult time finding actors to fill those roles. I myself was uneasy when I realized that Seals would be doing a first-person interpretation of an enslaved man. I worried, in part, that he would try to use an exaggerated 18th-century Black vernacular in a way that can render enslaved people as caricatures and obscure their humanity and intellect.

But Seals doesn’t use dialect; he wants the audience to focus less on how he’s speaking and more on James Lafayette’s story. Born on a Virginia plantation, James was enslaved by William Armistead, an ardent Patriot who allowed him to enlist in the Continental Army. James may have done this hoping his service would be rewarded with freedom. He soon began working for the Marquis de Lafayette as a spy: Pretending to be a runaway slave, he crossed British lines, pledged his allegiance to the redcoats, and became a courier on their behalf. During the remainder of the Revolutionary War, James operated as a double agent, sharing important tactical and operational information with the Americans and feeding British officials false information about American military plans. Many historians credit his espionage with helping American and French forces defeat the British during the siege of Yorktown, which effectively ended the war. In 1787, James was granted his freedom by the Virginia Assembly, in part thanks to Lafayette’s personal advocacy. After he was emancipated, he chose to adopt Lafayette as his last name.

Seals is constantly reading new documents that historians have discovered and refining his presentation, and he keeps in touch with James Lafayette’s descendants. He finds it particularly gratifying when people tell him that he’s helped them understand enslavement, and the revolution itself, in new ways. Growing up in Charleston, West Virginia, and later Richmond, Virginia, Seals attended predominantly white schools that he said mostly overlooked the role of Black Americans in their curriculum, except during February. “I don’t want any Black kids coming to a historic site and not seeing themselves reflected in their history like I did,” he told me. “Because it made me worry that maybe there was no place for me in this country.”

We stood together outside the Williamsburg Bray School, one of the first schools in America created to educate Black students. Ann Wager, the founding teacher, opened the school in 1760 with the aim of using it to convince hundreds of Black children between the ages of 3 and 10 that their position at the bottom of the social hierarchy was a natural one, ordained by God, and that, as such, they should be “obedient to their masters.” The school closed in 1774, after Wager died, and is the oldest remaining 18th-century structure in which Black children were educated. After undergoing an extensive renovation and relocation, it was reopened to the public this summer as a new exhibit in Colonial Williamsburg.

To Seals, the site is a moving testament to the creativity, ingenuity, and resilience of Black people in 18th-century Williamsburg. Even though the school’s intent was to use education to indoctrinate Black students about their own inferiority, he said, many of them used the education they received, specifically the ability to read, to more fully imagine a future where freedom was possible, and to advocate for it. (This was before white Virginians made it illegal, in 1831, to teach an enslaved person how to read.)

Seals never planned to remain at Colonial Williamsburg for this long, but he hadn’t anticipated how fulfilling he would find it to talk about slavery every day. Discussing it made him emotional. “I’m realizing just how powerful what I’ve been able to do over the last 17 years has been, and how much of an honor it is to give a voice to the ancestors after all this time.”

Not every Black person working at Colonial Williamsburg has had such a straightforwardly positive experience. For Janice Canaday, who has worked at the site in various capacities for 22 years, it’s been far more complicated.

Canaday attends and serves on the board of the same nearby church to which her relatives belonged generations ago. It traces its origins to the American Revolution, when a small group of free and enslaved Black worshippers began gathering on plantations near Williamsburg. They were led by an enslaved tavern worker and minister, Gowan Pamphlet, and in the early 19th century, they built the First Baptist Church on land that a local businessman had offered them. The project came with enormous risks: Virginia law prevented Black people from assembling freely, out of fear that such a gathering could lead to revolt.

After the church was destroyed by a tornado, congregants built another, larger structure in 1856. They would continue to worship there for a century, until they relocated again; Colonial Williamsburg bought the second church building in 1956 and subsequently demolished it. This was consistent with how Colonial Williamsburg had approached its relationship to the Black community throughout the early-to-mid-20th century. As Colonial Williamsburg expanded, Black people were bought out, pushed out, and left out.

In September 2020, a few months after nationwide protests erupted following George Floyd’s murder, Colonial Williamsburg’s archaeology department began to excavate the original church site, in consultation with the local Black community. Below what had become a parking lot, they discovered pieces of the original church building, as well as a cemetery that held the remains of more than 60 of the congregation’s members.

I met Canaday, who is 68, at the excavation site this summer. “The history’s bubbling up out of the ground,” she said. Colonial Williamsburg is one of the largest employers in the area, and Canaday told me it had been a part of her life for as long as she can remember: “Everybody in my family worked at Colonial Williamsburg.” Her 91-year-old sister worked there for nearly 50 years. Her grandfather worked at Colonial Williamsburg in the 1940s. Each of her six children has worked there; one son started as a junior interpreter when he was 5. Today he drives a carriage bringing visitors around the grounds.

Canaday is the first person to serve as Colonial Williamsburg’s engagement manager for the African American community. But as a young person, Canaday did not feel a connection to the site. “I never saw myself in the story,” she said. “I can’t tell you how depressing that was.”

When she first applied to work there as a teenager, she told me, she was offered a job as a maid. She refused the job, seeing it as a symptom of what many in the local Black community perceived to be a flattening of their historical contributions. A local Black minister once suggested that Colonial Williamsburg was trying to bring back “slavery times.” Canaday told me that some Black people in Williamsburg still feel this way, and tell her she shouldn’t be working there.

But Canaday believes that, today, Colonial Williamsburg does a better job of telling the truth about its whole history, even if some visitors aren’t always receptive to what they hear. “It depends on where they come from and how they grew up—what their grandma and granddaddy told them. Because when you tell our story”—she brought her index finger to her chest—“you’re really shaking the foundation of other people’s stories.”

[From the August 2019 issue: Drew Gilpin Faust on race and history in Virginia]

The way people react to this foundation-shaking has contributed to the difficulty Colonial Williamsburg has had in hiring and retaining Black interpreters. “You can ask any of the Black interpreters here—every week, somebody is going to remind you of who you are,” she told me. Not long ago, Canaday was taunted by a group of teenage boys wearing MAGA hats. In what seemed like an attempt to goad her, they asked her how she felt about the hats. “It’s on your head; it’s not on mine,” she responded. When they realized they could not provoke her, the boys lost interest and moved on.

For Canaday, the provocations and insults she’s heard from visitors are reminiscent of her experiences being called the N-word while she was growing up in Williamsburg. Her mother would try to comfort her by telling her that eventually these people would all die off and things would get better. But Canaday doesn’t see it that way. “People die, but the idea doesn’t,” she said.

This notion, of history continuing to reverberate across generations, is central to understanding the fight taking place at historical sites across the country: The Trump administration’s attempt to reshape what is taught in museums and classrooms is fundamentally an attempt to obscure the relationship between the past and the present. It is not so much that proponents of “patriotic education” want to end any discussion of slavery because they don’t believe it happened, but more that they don’t want people to see how slavery continues to shape social inequality in America today.

[Clint Smith: The meaning of Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian]

Colonial Williamsburg’s commitment to evidence-based public history helps visitors see the relationship between the past and the present, and discover that the story of America is perhaps more complex than their textbooks had them believe. America’s founding history, the site shows, is the story of both the Marquis de Lafayette’s fight for American liberty and James Lafayette’s petition for his freedom. It is the story of Patrick Henry’s Governor’s Palace and of Gowan Pamphlet’s demolished church. It is the story of enslaved children being taught to read the Bible to make them more subservient, but instead using what they learned to forge a deeper connection to freedom. It is what Jefferson said, and it is what Jefferson did.

Canaday told me about a teacher who brought her students to Williamsburg on a field trip a few years earlier. After Canaday told the group about the experiences of Black people in Colonial Williamsburg, both historically and in the present, the teacher became upset, Canaday said, and began yelling at her, saying she disagreed with Canaday’s interpretation. To Canaday, she seemed like an example of someone whose ideas would never change. But two years later, the teacher wrote to Canaday and apologized, admitting that she had been wrong. This is why Canaday believes that it is important to continue pushing Williamsburg to embrace the contradictions of American history.

“We don’t always get to see what we plant,” Canaday said, nodding to a large oak to our right. “But that doesn’t mean that something doesn’t bloom.”

This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “Just How Real Should Colonial Williamsburg Be?”

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