Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 9, 1994 TAG: 9410100074
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WILLIAMSBURG LENGTH: Medium
The ``slaves'' will be actors and the auction a drama, part of a three-day program called ``Publick Times'' designed to re-create life in Colonial Williamsburg.
Organizers say the auction is intended only to educate visitors about a brutal yet important part of black American history. But critics around the state contend that education could be trivialized as entertainment and that in any case, the slave auctions were too painful to bring to life in any form.
``Our phones have been ringing off the hook,'' said Salim Khalfani of the Virginia branch office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Richmond. ``The consensus is that people are outraged at what they're doing in Williamsburg.''
Paradoxically, the re-enactment is part of an effort to balance the portrayal of history here in Williamsburg, where 18th-century streets and buildings have been meticulously restored and history is kept alive by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
The auction's organizer is the foundation's African-American interpretation and presentations department, formed 15 years ago to develop exhibits that reflect elements of black history that are not always included in school curricula or municipal museums.
Previous projects have dealt with other aspects of Colonial slavery, including runaways, parenting and interracial relations. Five years ago, reproductions of slave quarters of rudimentary log cabins, with slave families' meager belongings, were built on Carter's Grove, an expansive riverside plantation about five miles from downtown Williamsburg. Enslaved Africans were brought to the estate to tend crops at the end of the 17th century.
But until the foundation's African-American department was created, visitors who ambled along the brick sidewalks of Williamsburg and strolled through its historic buildings were shown history only through a prism of the white experience. Little reflected black life, even though blacks made up as much as 50 percent of the region's population during Colonial times.
``This is just the natural progression of what we've been doing,'' said Christy Coleman, director of the department, which includes 12 other blacks.
``I recognize that this is a very, very sensitive and emotional issue. But it is also very real history, and it distresses me, personally and professionally, that there are those who would have us hide this or keep it under the rug.''
Coleman said the 45-minute presentation will begin with a woman in contemporary clothes explaining what is about to take place. Then, as the bidding starts, Coleman and the three other ``slaves'' will be brought out in period dress. All those bidding will be white, she said, except for one black man representing a free black trying to buy his wife's freedom.
``That's the way it was back then,'' Coleman said. ``A wife came with the land, not her husband.''
Khalfani said that many callers to the NAACP say that the auctions represented such a wrenching chapter in black history that ``they don't want to see it rehashed again.''
But Coleman argues that only by open display and discussion can people understand the degradation and humiliation that blacks felt as chattel. She compared the pain of the auctions for blacks to that of the Holocaust for Jews and said if museums are built to illustrate the horrors of one, attempts should be made to illustrate the other.
``The legacy of slavery in this country is racism,'' Coleman said. ``Until we begin to understand the horrors that took place, the survival techniques enslaved Africans used, people will never come to understand what's happening in our society today.''
by CNB