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.

Explore the November 2025 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More

“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.