Mock Slave Auction Disputed -- Presentation Stirs Up Emotions, Protesters

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. - An NAACP official shouted angrily, protesters sang "We Shall Overcome," and boos and claps rippled through the restless, nervous crowd. A weeping black woman pleaded for people to keep an open mind.

The slave auction was about to start.

But after yesterday's dramatization of the real-life 1773 sale of four black people in Williamsburg, it was the NAACP official, Jack Gravely, who was wiping tears from his eyes.

"I would be lying if I said I didn't come out with a different view. The presentation was passionate, moving and educational," said Gravely, with the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The mock auction was a re-enactment of a day in Colonial Williamsburg, a museum town of restored 18th-century houses and shops.

More than 2,000 people, mostly white, watched the drama from a cobblestone street. Some were weeping when it finished.

Others were still angry.

"If you want to show slavery, don't do it with some watered-down version where people clap at the end," said Jelani Roper, a black senior at the nearby College of William and Mary.

"I think the most important part of the program was the discussion afterward," said Colonial Williamsburg Foundation President Robert Wilburn. "I was glad to see people stayed because people really don't understand this chapter in American history."

Four actors portrayed slaves being sold - along with land and farm equipment - as part of an auction to settle estates and debts. The re-enactment went smoothly, without any of the catcalls or fake bids officials had feared. Most of the impromptu shouts the auction did produce were urgings that a plantation owner buy the wife of the male slave he had just purchased, but the script had the couple being split to show how slavery disrupted families in the 18th century.

But before the program, activists almost blocked the presentation. Members of the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference sang "We Shall Overcome." Curtis Harris, president of the Virginia branch of the SCLC, demanded to be arrested but was not.

Presentation of painful history

The protests forced Christy Coleman, Williamsburg's new director of black history - she was also one of the black actors - to come out beforehand and face down protesters over the presentation of the painful history she shares with them.

"I think today is a very, very real tragedy," said Coleman, choking with emotion. "We came here to tell the story of our mothers and our grandmothers. We wanted to do this voluntarily, to teach about the evils of slavery."

Before their public protest, Gravely and Harris met privately with Wilburn and Coleman, who also had met with local NAACP members last week.

Wilburn said, "It's disappointing when you get a few people who want to disrupt the event. We met with them two times today, including an hour this morning, and they were not to be satisfied."

Harris said after the re-enactment, "I felt terrible about it. I felt it was a show. It was not authentic history. They just wanted to have a show."

The word "show" spawned several exchanges among the crowd, between those who shouted "Let's get on with the show!" and those who felt that word represented an expectation that the re-enactment was supposed to be entertainment.

The foundation did consider canceling the program, Wilburn said.

"It's always an option," he said. "You try to listen to people's concerns and then decide whether to go on. It could have happened. You don't go on at any cost."

Coleman said of the activists, "I am open to talking with them in the future, but I cannot let popular opinion determine what kind of history we are going to teach."

Yesterday's slave auction was a composite of actual 18th-century slave auctions. It reflected, Coleman said, a typical slave auction in Virginia's capital city of the time: the selling of household slaves and other property to settle estates and debts.

Teaching method debated

The event brought alive the arguments over how black history should be taught. Andrew Highsmith, a junior at William and Mary, argued that the event confirms Colonial Williamsburg as a haven of history from a white's point of view.

Highsmith charged that the slave characters were too obedient and too neatly dressed to be accurate, and he held up a red sign reading, "Remember the Fighting Histories: John Brown, Nat Turner and the Freedom Fighters" throughout the program.

Colonial Williamsburg black-history actor Larry Earl confronted Highsmith after the program and told him one Colonial Williamsburg program talks about a slave who kills his master, and the foundation shows a film about runaway slaves.

"If we show only the story of fight-backs, we're not doing our job," Earl told Highsmith. "Today is just one program. You're not going to see everything all the time. When you see all our programs, you will see it."

Colonial Williamsburg actors dramatize various aspects of 1770 Williamsburg - a town whose population was 50 percent black - but the slave auction was a dramatic step for a museum that had no black actors on its streets 20 years ago.

But Williamsburg has presented black history for 15 years. And it was time to deal with the transaction of a human being as property, Coleman said.

"More than anything else, the slave auction epitomizes what slavery was about," she said. "It epitomizes the degradation of people, and it epitomizes families being split apart."