Museum begins honoring Black coachmen from the Jim Crow era
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — The Black men who drove horse-drawn carriages through the streets of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia were both everywhere and invisible during the Jim Crow era.
Their wooden coaches helped conjure up the late 18th Century for visitors including Queen Elizabeth, Sir Winston Churchill and then-Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. And yet the men were forced to use separate bathrooms and water fountains, among the many other sanctioned indignities of segregation.
“These guys were resilient,” said Paul Undra Jeter, the living history museum’s director of coach and livestock. “I tell my young (Black) drivers that they face nothing compared to what they faced back in the day because (racism) was okay.”
Colonial Williamsburg has begun to honor the coachmen by naming a new carriage after one of them, with hopes that more will follow. The first is for Benjamin Spraggins, who was sometimes said to be the most-photographed man in Williamsburg — although few captions bore his name. A carriage processional and ceremony will also celebrate Spraggins on Saturday.
The tribute is part of the museum’s ongoing reckoning over race and its past storytelling about the country’s origins and the role of Black Americans.
Colonial Williamsburg tells the story of Virginia’s late 1700s capital and includes more than 400 restored or reconstructed buildings. The museum was founded in 1926 but did not tell Black stories until 1979. More than half of the people who lived in the colonial capital were Black, and many were enslaved.
Segregation-era coachmen were exclusively Black. And they were part of a much larger Black workforce that underpinned the museum’s operations as cooks, maintenance workers and landscapers, said Ywone Edwards-Ingram, a professor in the Department of Focused Inquiry...
