As the nation marks its 250th birthday, Williamsburg stands as a destination of reckoning, where Black history isn’t hidden behind nostalgia, but is honored honestly.
As the United States approaches its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026, Williamsburg, Virginia stands as one of the most consequential – and complicated – historic destinations in the nation. Long celebrated as a cradle of American democracy, this region also tells a deeper and more difficult truth: The country’s founding was shaped by Indigenous displacement, African enslavement, and the perseverance of people denied freedom, even as they built the infrastructure of the United States and sowed its wealth.
My first visit to Williamsburg and its surrounding areas came at a time in which revisionist historians are attempting to rewrite the messy racial past of this nation. I knew instinctively that traversing the region required standing firm in the knowledge that enslaved Africans were not peripheral to the nation’s founding, they were foundational. Their forced labor built the region, their resistance challenged its contradictions, and their perseverance continued to shape its future. Fortunately, Williamsburg and its neighboring cities have taken ownership of its history, good and bad, so concerns about being gaslit quickly faded.
To experience Williamsburg today, including Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown Settlement, and nearby Yorktown, is to encounter the raw origins of America itself. At the center of this story are Virginia’s Indigenous people and Africans whose lives, labor, resistance, and resilience shaped a nation still reckoning with its provenance.
Before 1607: Virginia Indigenous Nations and a Living Landscape
The presence of the Indigenous and their displacement are foundational to understanding American history. For centuries before English colonists arrived, the Virginia landscape was home to thriving Indigenous societies. The Powhatan Paramount Chiefdom, composed of more than 30 Algonquian-speaking tribes, stewarded the land, waterways, and ecosystems of the Tidewater region. These communities possessed sophisticated political systems, agricultural practices, trade networks, and more long before Europeans set foot on Virginian soil. However, the arrival of English colonists permanently altered Indigenous life through land seizure, violence, disease, and forced cultural erasure.
Jamestown Settlement: Where the Colonists Waged Culture Wars
American history begins in Jamestown Settlement, where the earliest cultural collisions occurred. In 1607, colonists established the first permanent English colony on land already occupied by Indigenous people. Complex and often violent encounters between the colonists and the Indigenous people reshaped the region.
In 1619, another world-altering event occurred. Enslavers took West Central Africans from the Kingdom of Ndongo, which is present-day Angola, and brought them to British North America. These Africans, who included skilled artisans and tradesmen, were brought to Virginia to toil in fields of cash crops against their will. This marked the beginning of an African presence in what would become the United States of America.
Today, Jamestown Settlement recounts these early moments by recreating the environments in which Virginian Indigenous people, English colonists, and Africans interacted. Living-history programming and exhibitions also examine and interpret their interactions. These encounters planted the seeds of a new nation while laying the groundwork for slavery, racial hierarchy, and, eventually, resistance.
Williamsburg: A Capital Built by Enslaved Africans
By the time Williamsburg became Virginia’s capital in 1699, slavery had been codified into a rigid, race-based system. At this point in history, Africans comprised a substantial portion of the population. They were enslaved bricklayers, carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, cooks, domestic workers, and field laborers whose expertise sustained the colonial economy…