Meridiana

When the Roberson Project hired me in July 2021, I was a newly minted PhD from Howard University. Coming from a program that trained activist scholars,  I was excited to work for an organization that consciously endeavored to scrutinize its institution’s past. My first assignment was to help research the history of the University’s founding. Eager to prove myself and before I made the move to Sewanee, I ordered two books to be sent to my home in Washington, D.C.: Sewanee Perspectives: On the History of the University of the South (2008) and Sewanee Sesquicentennial History: The Making of the University of the South (2008).  I immediately devoured these books, soaking in as much knowledge about the University’s history as I could prior to my first in-person meeting with the Project’s director, Dr. Woody Register. Impressed by this newfound knowledge, Dr. Register shared with me the “Fairbanks List.” Little did I anticipate how much working with this document would influence my development as a historian and scholar in the digital humanities. 

Unfortunately, the list is not as straightforward as a researcher would like: most of the “founding funders” are listed by surname and donation amount with a spare notation to help identify an individual funder: first name, an initial, a title, or a place of residence. Due to these limited hints, efforts to identify these funders have taken significant time. When I joined the Roberson Project, about half of the funders had been identified. My assignment was the same as many of the tasks undertaken by the Roberson Project: to fill in the gaps in the record of Sewanee’s past that earlier researchers missed, neglected, or chose not to address. 

I began working on the “Fairbanks List”in August 2021 alongside my other tasks for the Roberson Project. Juggling events, last-minute research requests, archival visits, and leading a seminar on arguments regarding reparations for slavery, I made some progress identifying funders in late 2021.  As more biographical and background data was gathered and gaps in previous research were addressed, Dr. Register and I discussed how to make the information public facing.  ArcGIS, a geographic information software that is used to create digital maps, was already a proven tool that Dr. Register and Mr. Potts used to create a map to show information on the 37 original Board of Trustees of the University of the South (Within the Pale of the Plantation States: Slavery and the Governance of the University of the South in 1860). The digital map provides a biography of each trustee, their census information, the value of their property, and the number of people they enslaved. This would serve as a template for what became the Founding Funders Map Project. 

With ArcGIS as the chosen tool, I sought the expertise of Dr. Christopher Van de Ven, director of Sewanee’s Landscape Analysis Lab, and his assistant, Joshua Alvarez. We met often during that fall and early spring. Mr. Alvarez created the first iteration of the Founding Funders Map. By extracting data from a spreadsheet, he created multiple maps layered over the same region. Each map layer reveals a specific data category, such as the number of enslaved owned or funders’ property values. As I identified more names on the list and the map continue to expand, I began to see how these funders represented the multiple walks of life within the late antebellum period’s leadership class. These men and women  included plantation owners, politicians, ministers, newspaper editors, lawyers, doctors, railroad barons, and cotton brokers, with donations ranging from $500 to $25,000. Many owned multiple properties in the South, or homes in the North. Even a Louisiana native studying in a Paris medical school, James Dick Hill, pledged a donation. This was truly a complex network of people. Many later served as civilian or military leaders of the Confederacy during the eras of the American Civil War (1860-1865) and Radical Reconstruction (1865-1877). 

As more and more funders were added to the spreadsheet, we had to decide how to display this information. We didn’t want the map to be “academic,” something that would make sense mostly to college faculty-types. We wanted it to be broadly accessible and meaningful to any potential user. We brainstormed innovative ways to use ArcGIS and determined the following: 

1. To have three “layers” (enslaved, pledged amount, and personal property) to highlight the demographic profiles of the funders;
2. To have a pop-up biography (like the back of a baseball card) displaying personal and other information about each funder; 
3. To include information about primary and secondary professions, because many were plantation owners with an additional occupation; 
4. To limit each funder, no matter how many properties they owned, to a single pop-up biography linked to location they called home in the 1860 census, which we call their “home” property;
5. To provide links to census documents to show where we found much of our information about wealth and slave-holdings and to make that information accessible to all users.

In Spring 2022, we added two undergraduate students to the team: Silas McClung C’24 and Klarke Stricklen C’22. Mr. McClung worked with me to identify several names and track their census information. As spring turned to summer, we drew closer to the project’s launch. The Roberson Project 2022 undergraduate research interns – Plum Champlin, Sofina Behr, Lillian Holloway, Callista Abner, and Carrie Schupack – worked with me for a few weeks to collect and digitize census records. Ms. Schupack and I uploaded these virtual documents to the database. During the summer, there were many nights that I didn’t leave the office until 10 or 11 after long days of working with the interns on their other work for the Roberson Project. The excitement to complete this project was all the fuel I needed. 

As the summer continued, Dr. Register and I discussed how to present this information to users beyond the interactive map. We decided to accompany the ArcGIS map with an informative website. Mx. Champlin and I created the first version of this, and then we brought on Dr. Hannah Huber, the Digital Technology Leader and Project Administrator for the Center for Southern Studies, and the website continued to evolve. This experience was enlightening, as I was introduced to the basics of web page creation and digital publishing. In its current state, the website allows users to learn more about the Founding Funders, as each page provides context for the interactive map. The Roberson Project hopes this site helps Sewanee students, staff, faculty, and alumni, as well as the general public, gain greater insight into how and why this institution was created in the context of U.S. slavery.

As with the creation of our nation, the foundation of the University of the South is complicated. The evidence provided by the Founding Funders virtual map illustrates that the University of the South was created by men and women who benefitted from the institution of slavery. Their goal was to raise an endowment to sustain a “Southern institution” that would further southern ideas and industries, primarily agricultural production using enslaved labor. In this way, the history of the University is a microcosm of the history of the United States and its trading partners on both sides of the Atlantic. All were built and prospered on a foundation of enslaved people. Sewanee, like so many ancient universities in the Americas and Europe, was a contributing part of this historical development. While there is much to celebrate about what these institutions have contributed over the generations, that estimation has to acknowledge and reckon with slavery’s role in their evolution. 

Editor’s note: Dr. Maginn will be presenting on the Founding Funders Map Project on March 17, 2023 at the University Studying Slavery Conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In addition, Dr. Maginn is using Founding Funders Map Project within the classroom. His Spring 2023 course, entitled Slavery, Race and the University, encompasses a comparative exploration of Atlantic World institutions of higher education and their foundational ties to the global slave trade.

The following remarks were given by Sewanee student Plum Champlin before the University of the South’s Inaugural Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service. To honor this day, the Office of Inclusive Excellence partnered with Sleep in Heavenly Peace, inviting the entire Sewanee community to help build beds for children in the local community who otherwise would not have a bed to sleep in. This piece has been revised for clarity of message, and to include accessible sources.

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I first want to thank all of you who rose early to join in this morning. I’m so excited to get to work on constructing these beds, but I wanted to take a moment on this day honoring Martin Luther King Jr. to discuss the ways the community service we engage in today relates to the driving forces behind the Civil Rights Movement. 

Many of my friends will be able to corroborate the fact that I say, frequently and unabashedly, that I do not think that justice is real. I believe it is a word which stands for subjective, arbitrary points of view informed by human social norms, biases, and flaws (both overt and subconscious) prevailing in a given time — components which have ruled over our emotions as a species for tens of thousands of years. I believe the word justice can, more times than not, be replaced with a more candid word, the other side of the coin: “punishment.”

That is not to say that subjectivity and compromise are not necessary to maintain order in any given society; rather, in refuting “justice” as a term, I seek to stake a claim to a major ideological shift that I and many others believe to be necessary: in broad strokes, to craft a society which consistently makes the choice of love, of forgiveness, over revenge? The choice to override the instinctual desire for power over others, and instead embrace them as equals. The choice to share joys, share the pleasures of life, and make our world safer and more loving for all of us, rather than taking joys away from our fellow human beings through acts of punishment. 

I’ve chosen to share this outline of my own ideology because I have been deeply influenced by the wisdom of many great philosophers and leaders working in social movements from the Civil Rights Movement, to Black Lives Matter, to abolitionists who have tirelessly battled slavery, the police, and the prison industrial complex. But even moreso, I share my own criticisms of justice’s illusory nature in order to properly frame my relationship to one quote which uplifts justice, one which I keep close to my heart: 

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love” (38). 

Taken from Where Do We Go From Here, the final book he penned before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote this passage as a direct reply to, and refutation of, points on power and Christian love by Friedrich Nietzsche. Dr. King wrote that the “misinterpretation” of love’s relationship to power is not only Nietzsche’s, but “one of the greatest problems of history…” — namely, that “…the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love” (37). Yet, again, King’s refutation holds undeniable weight, bringing together rather than pushing away: “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” 

To think of these things in connection is, for me, to accept the possibility of a return to form; to turn away from retributive justice, which itself stands against love, and towards the restorative. The compassionate. The brave. 

Stepping towards a restorative justice looks like providing care for those we disagree with, including those who cause harm. A Dr. King asserted in his Nobel Lecture in 1964, the true solution to violence cannot be more violence: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.” 

I cannot begin to encapsulate the nitty-gritty of restorative justice or prison abolition in these few words, and I will not try (though I would encourage anyone to start with the words of Angela Y. Davis, who encouraged us at her University of Michigan Keynote in early 2020 to reflect on the unsung facets of Dr. King’s legacy: “They remember King the Dr. Orator, but not Dr. King the disrupter of unjust peace.”). But in short, in my own mind and heart, the essence of restorative justice is one of recognition: seeing oneself as a flawed human being, recognizing the humanity in those we disagree with, and extending compassionate care to all parties instead of choosing vengeful condemnation, shaming, or violence. This violence doesn’t just look like physical confrontation or psychological torment, but also the silent dehumanization which is created by racism, sexism, other homophobia, transphobia (and other identity-based biases), and by the prison industrial complex. 

As with all good things, the path towards uniting power and love begins with a single lesson: learning from those like Dr. King who spread the message of love, so we might be able to teach it to ourselves, our communities, and our world. To let the message of loving, powerful justice truly affect us is to rethink everything about how we treat ourselves, and one another. Because this ideology, the mission to devote our individual and collective agency to bolster joy and betterment for the oppressed, is its own kind of activism — it is why I call myself, after Adrienne Maree Brown, a pleasure activist in all that I do. 

And today, in working with Sleep in Heavenly Peace, we engage in taking this very sort of collective action: to bring more joy into the world. 

I would bet (or at least, I sincerely hope) that most folks in the audience know, from at least one night in their life, the comfort of a warm bed, the pleasure of a good night’s rest. It is a thing of loving. And it is an act of love, the verb, for us to work towards bringing that joy to another human being. 

I hope today, as we engage in this work, each of us can reflect on the roles we as individuals hold by acknowledging our agency, our power, and putting it towards good. And, perhaps, towards a justice which centers betterment, joy, peace, and love.

I’ll end by giving my sincere gratitude and thanks to every person who worked to provide the supplies we will work with today, all those in attendance, and all those who will receive joy from resting in these beds — and especially all those who created the infrastructure and programming that brought us together today. Thank you very much!

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All of us at the Roberson Project were deeply saddened to learn on Saturday that Father Joseph Green had died the day before in Norfolk, Virginia. He was 96 years old.

In 1965 Father Green and his first cousin William O’Neal became the first African Americans to receive a Sewanee degree. 

In September 2018, Dr. Woody Register, Director of the Roberson Project, spent two days talking to Father Green and his wife, Evelyn, in their warm and inviting home in Norfolk.

The following is a transcription of remarks Dr. Register made at the dedication ceremony for the installation of a portrait of Father Joseph N. Green, Jr., T’65, at the School of Theology, The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, on September 15, 2020. Concern about the COVID pandemic prevented the Greens from attending the ceremony in person in Sewanee, but they were able to Zoom in for the occasion.

It is a particular honor and delight for me to have this opportunity to say a few words today on this occasion. Two Septembers ago I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Father Green and his wife Mrs. Evelyn Green at their home in Norfolk, Virginia, which they generously opened up to me for two days and then allowed me to pester them continuously with questions for the next two days. 

This event, for me at least, this meeting, this time I spent with the two of them, was one of the highlights of my professional  and academic career, and it had a profound and lasting effect, the stories they told and that I heard, that they shared with me and through me with others in the Sewanee community, changed my perspective on the history of this University, and on the reasons why I became involved with this project to begin with.

Let me say a few words to try to put Father Green’s career, before, during and after Sewanee, and he was here only for, I think, five summers out of the long course of his life. Let me try to put those in a little context here.

In 1965 there were two young African American men who were first cousins and who had grown up together, gone to school together, and I imagine even picked cotton together, on their family farms in the tiny and nearly all-Black town of Jenkinsville, South Carolina, 25 or so miles northwest of Columbia.

In 1965, these two young men, Bill O’Neal and Joe Green, both priests in the Episcopal Church, earned and received the Master of Sacred Theology Degree from the School of Theology of the University of the South. 

To my knowledge, neither of them attended a formal ceremony here on the Mountain that late spring, to receive those degrees, but they became on that day the first African Americans to graduate from this University. That’s 100 years after the end of the Civil War and the actual emancipation of nearly four million people held in the bonds of slavery, and that was 97 years after the first students matriculated at this University of and for the American South.

It is entirely fitting that we focus on that historic moment in honoring Father Green as we are today, but the right way to do it — the right way to honor that moment and those achievements 45 years ago — is not to isolate them, but to see their achievement in Sewanee in 1965 in the stream of two lives that were dedicated — long before they started at Sewanee and even longer after they finished at Sewanee — 

Two lives that were dedicated to what Father Green told me two years ago was “the only way to know the kingdom, right here, right now” — that way was “to fight for justice in this world.”

And let me add here that Father O’Neal died tragically in 1975. And I do not doubt that Sewanee would be honoring him today if he were still with us today.

When Fathers Green and O’Neal started their study at Sewanee in the summer of 1959, they already were veterans of the fight against Jim Crow. 

Ten years earlier, when Father Green was in his last year of college at St. Augustine’s, they had joined with other young Black men to fight for justice in the Episcopal Church. All of these men were determined to enter the Episcopal priesthood but all also refused to attend the church’s segregated seminary. Instead, they planned and executed a collective action to attend white seminaries outside the South. Not Sewanee or the Virginia seminary, but those outside the South. Father Green went to Philadelphia Divinity School, and Father O’Neal to General in New York City.

When they entered the summer graduate program at Sewanee in 1959, they knew they were not the first at Sewanee, they knew they were following in the footsteps of young men before them, John Moncrief in 1953 and Merrick Collier in 1954. These two young men had officially broken the color line here. However, neither had finished their studies: Moncrief was killed in an automobile accident in 1955, and Collier had elected to leave Sewanee instead of enduring the hostility he received in his one year of study here at the School of Theology.

Fathers Green and O’Neal had known their predecessors. John Moncrief in particular had been their teacher of sorts. So they consciously and deliberately took up the task of finishing the work, the fight for justice, right here and right now, at Sewanee. So there is no accident in any of this. This is a story about agency, about choice, about courage undergirded by faith. As Father Green told me two Septembers ago, the decision to come to Sewanee “was deliberate.” “We wanted to go [to Sewanee] and break down the barriers that we had broken down in other places. And we felt this was our obligation in a sense. The church cannot function as a separate and unequal institution, and the school [Sewanee] certainly cannot.”

No surprise, then, to learn that in the summer of 1961, that they were not only studying, but that Fathers Green and O’Neal joined three white men on the summer Theology faculty and tried — and failed — to be served at the restaurant of the segregated Sewanee Inn. 

Sewanee, Father Green told me, helped him “to know that I could deal with tough situations. Because dealing with the Jim Crow in the city of Norfolk that I faced when I came there was the same Jim Crow I was dealing with at Sewanee.” This was part of his education here. 

No surprise, either, that throughout the 1960s, Father Green, once he had received the calling to Grace Church in Norfolk, Virginia, expanded his fight for justice in the cities of Norfolk, Hampton Roads, and Portsmouth. 

In the 1960s you could find the Civil Rights agitator, Father Green, on the streets of those cities, in the midst of the Poor People’s march in Norfolk, or the successful fight to desegregate the YMCA. 

Later you could find him as a member of the city’s school board, working to bring excellence in education, for once, to all of that city’s children.

For many years, twenty I think, you could find him elected to and serving on the Norfolk City Council, leading urban renewal projects to upgrade housing in the city’s Black neighborhoods, to enhance public transportation, to upgrade the facilities and opportunities at Norfolk State University and Tidewater Community College, to renovate the Black neighborhood’s theater into the Crispus Attucks Cultural Center. Travel to Norfolk as I did two Septembers ago, and you will find Father Green’s fingerprints all over that city.

And for the 30 years after he started in 1963, and even quite frequently since then, you could find Father Green in the pulpit, the rector of Grace Church, ministering to his parishioners. Within the four walls to be sure, but also reaching always beyond those walls to the world right here and right now.

There is a tendency people have to make abstractions into historical actors. You see this especially with loyal alums of any college like Sewanee to say that their college did this or that in the past. That the college made them who they are etc. But I think the emphasis there is in the wrong place. It’s the people at Sewanee — the students, the faculty, the others who worked or studied here — they are the ones who did things in the past. They are the ones who shaped this place where we live, work, or study today. 

This observation applies to Fathers Joseph Green and William O’Neal. I think we need to remember that it was their choices, their determination and resolve, and their religious faith that saw them through five difficult summers of study in Sewanee to get their degrees and bring change and justice to Sewanee. 

And then, enlightened and toughened by those summers here, they continued in the stream of their lives, picking up where they had never left off, fighting for justice and healing in the world. And for this, the whole of the Sewanee community can be thankful.

Thank you.

A short obituary for Father Green can be found here.

Editor’s note: This past summer, the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation was fortunate to have five talented and hardworking undergraduate research assistants working with us: Callista Abner, Sofina Behr, Plum Champlin, Lillian Holloway, and Carrie Schupack. We asked each of them to contribute to the Project blog some reflections on their work and experiences from the summer. The opinions expressed in the blogs are solely theirs and not necessarily those of the Roberson Projects. Our third post is by Sofina (Sofie) Behr, a junior Philosophy and Psychology major at Sewanee from Montgomery, Alabama.  

The Legacies of Slavery: Acklen and Reparative Work

When I was interviewing for the Summer 2022 research assistantship with the Roberson Project, its director, Dr. Woody Register, looked at me through our Zoom screen and asked, “so, what are your thoughts on reparations?” This question was meant to see what I had thought about the complicated issue, but it made me realize how little thought I had previously given the topic. At that time, I wasn’t sure what my thoughts were on reparations. To this day, I’m still not fully satisfied with my ability to answer that question.

Reparations generally refer to compensation given to those who have experienced abuse or injury.ⁱ  In the context of the University of the South’s indebtedness to slavery, reparations would refer to damages experienced by victims of slavery and/or their descendants. In the national context, supporters of reparations have proposed a variety of actions, including but not limited to affirmative action, scholarships, individual monetary payments, and systematic initiatives.ⁱⁱ For victims of slavery and/or descendants of enslaved people, evidence of this disadvantage is indicated in the wealth disparities between Black and white Americans. For example, in 2016, researchers found that the “median black household net worth ($17,600) is only one-tenth of the white net worth ($171,000).” .ⁱⁱⁱ While I was aware of these arguments before starting my internship, I hadn’t been directly exposed to a specific example of reparations for this disparity in action. Over the course of the summer with the Roberson Project, I was introduced to the story of the Acklen family and their descendants, and it has stuck with me because of its relevance to the discussion of reparations and generational wealth.

I encountered the Acklens’ story while working on a project with Dr. Andrew Maginn, the Roberson Project’s Senior Research Associate and Program Coordinator. We were trying to compose biographies of the original supporters of the University of the South. We are calling them the “Founding Funders.”  Joseph Alexander Smith Acklen (1816-1863) was a Mexican War hero and lawyer from Huntsville, Alabama. He and his wife, Adelicia Acklen, frequently surfaced in our research, and we quickly found that their family was connected to other “Founding Funders” with deep and troubling ties to slavery, such as Isaac Franklin and John Armfield. Isaac Franklin was Adelicia’s first husband, and his death in 1846 made her the wealthiest woman in the South.^iv Adelicia was left with a fortune of almost $1 million, which included seven cotton plantations in Louisiana, a farm in Tennessee, and hundreds of enslaved people.^v The one property that stood out to me was the Acklens’ West Feliciana property in Louisiana. The 1860 Slave Schedule of the U.S. Census reported that 659 enslaved people toiled on this property. This was a clarifying moment for me. I realized a reality about the university’s “Funders” and the Acklens specifically. They were not just representative of the institution of slavery. They were the institution of slavery. 

 In late June, the Roberson Project Summer researchers visited the Belmont Mansion in Nashville, the home of Joseph and Adelicia Acklen. We were fortunate to sit down with a guide who provided some important insight into the legacy of the Acklen family and their wealth. He explained that Joseph Acklen’s knowledge and experience in planting assisted in the growth of Adelicia’s wealth, all through the enslaved labor at their West Feliciana plantation. Adelicia capitalized on this economic and social status by networking and connecting with other members of the southern aristocracy through lavish dinner parties and events at the mansion. Throughout the Civil War, Adelicia relied on her social status and connections to other wealthy planters to protect her fortune. As Union troops drew near Nashville in 1862, Adelicia traveled to New Orleans, where she negotiated the sale of her plantations’ remaining cotton for $960,000 in gold, equivalent to more than $16 million today.^vi

According to records and information from our guide, the descendants today of the Acklens are the Kaiser family, who remain quite prominent and wealthy .^vii The story of the Acklens and their Kaiser descendants is by no means unusual. While I knew that many slave-owning families had living descendants who benefitted from the generational wealth their ancestors created, I had never been exposed to a specific example. When we talk about reparations and the need for reparative work, it is often easy to remain comfortable engaging in abstract or theoretical discussions. In contrast, the legacy of the Acklen family, and the knowledge of the Kaisers as the descendants of the Acklens, made the discussion of reparative work strikingly concrete. The conversation no longer centered around the general talk of “descendants” or a family of forgotten or faceless names. Here was a family whose vast wealth has roots in the institution of slavery. 

The Acklens’ story is one of the many stories exploring the legacy of slavery, and more specifically, the legacies of slavery in connection to Sewanee. Families like the Acklens built their fortunes with enslaved labor. However, they were able to maintain generational wealth due to a number of factors, not least of which was the socioeconomic status granted to them as members of the southern upper class. This wealth was not at all accessible to enslaved people and their descendants, and this lack of access to wealth creation is why the conversation about reparative work needs to be encouraged. After emancipation, former slave owners like the Acklens and their descendants were able to remain afloat, as their status and prestige remained and provided opportunities for financial gain. In contrast, freed people and their descendants had to build wealth, quite literally, from scratch. Here, it is clear to see the shortcomings of Reconstruction era policy and a disregard for this inequity in the last half century.^viii While enslaved people did become “free,” they lacked the resources and the wealth many white families had used their labor and property value to accumulate over decades and across generations.  

So what can be done to remedy the economic inequity faced by descendants of enslaved people? One answer to this question is located about five minutes away from Belmont Mansion. Down the hill from the Acklens’ estate is Freedom Plaza, which Belmont University dedicated in 2021. 

Freedom Plaza, according to the University, serves to “celebrate and memorialize the lives of the enslaved individuals who are known to have labored on the estate owned by Joseph and Adelicia Acklen more than 170 years ago, prior to the establishment of Belmont College.”^ix This sort of reparative work, sometimes called “symbolic reparations,” is important, but is not by any means sufficient in remediating the effects of slavery. In a report written by the United Nations Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent, the erection of “monuments, memorials, and markers” is recommended as a means to “facilitate the public dialogue.”^x At first glance, I felt the Freedom Plaza achieved this goal. Upon further thought, however, I became less convinced that the dedication of the Freedom Plaza was anything more than a performative gesture. Freedom Plaza lists the names of six known individuals enslaved at Belmont Mansion. But in my view, that is precisely the issue with this example of reparative work: there are only six names. 

Given what we know about the extent of the Acklens’ slave ownership, it is unlikely that only six individuals were enslaved there. Even more questionable is the fact that researchers working for the mansion could find the names of only six enslaved laborers and, it seems, were satisfied enough to place those names on the monument. While symbolic reparations like Freedom Plaza may “facilitate dialogue” among visitors to the mansion, there is something to be said about the effort and attention given to discovering and naming the enslaved. When I examined Freedom Plaza through this lens, it seemed limited in its impact. In the words of William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen, authors of [insert title], memorials and plaques are useful in commemorating the enslaved and those who have fought for justice, but these acts on their own are mere “piecemeal reparations.” They do little to change the actual material conditions of slavery’s descendants.^xi Darity and Mullen assert that the federal government enforced the institution of slavery until 1865, and thus the payment of reparations for the harm the national government caused is an American obligation.^xii

Colleges and universities bear responsibility, too. Like Belmont University, the University of the South has deeply rooted ties to the Acklen family and the institution of slavery. (The Acklens pledged the enormous sum of $10,000 to the founding of the university.) In order not only to reckon with this reality but also to partake in actual reparative work, students like me as well as academic institutions as a whole must give greater thought to Darity and Mullen’s call to action: “Instead of seeking piecemeal reparations from their institutions on a one-by-one basis, activists should push these institutions to join the lobbying effort for congressional approval of black reparations.”^xiii Honoring and recognizing the enslaved people whose property value bankrolled the founding of my university is important for us to do. We need to know that historical truth. But if we want to promote real reparations for the slavery that made our university possible, we have to go beyond these piecemeal steps. That, to answer Dr. Register’s original question, is what I am thinking about reparations.

Notes to the text: 

i  “Reparation Definition & Meaning – Merriam-Webster.” Dictionary by Merriam-Webster: America’s Most-Trusted Online Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reparation. 

ii  Araujo, Ana Lucia. Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, p. 2. 

iii  Darity, William A., and A. Kirsten Mullen. From Here to Equality. UNC Press Book, 2020, p. 31.

iv  Brown, Mark. “Acklen, Adelicia | Tennessee Encyclopedia.” Tennessee Encyclopedia, Tennessee Historical Society, 11 Feb. 2018, https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/adelicia-acklen/. 

v 1860 United States Census and Slave Schedules for Joseph Acklen

vi  Watts, Jennifer. “Adelicia Acklen: The Lady of Belmont.” Tennessee State Museum –  Nashville Attractions, https://tnmuseum.org/junior-curators/posts/adelicia-acklen-the-lady-of-belmont?locale=en_us. 

vii  Bliss, Jessica. “Adelicia Acklen’s Treasures Return to Belmont after 126 Years.” Tennessean, 16 Aug. 2014, https://www.tennessean.com/story/life/2014/08/16/adelicia-acklens-treasures-return-belmont-years/14085917/. 

viii  Araujo, Ana Lucia. Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, p. 2. 

ix Hefner, April. “Belmont Dedicates Freedom Plaza Memorial | Belmont University News and Media.” Belmont University News & Media | Official News from the Office of Communications, Belmont University News & Media, 18 Jan. 2021, https://news.belmont.edu/belmont-dedicates-freedom-plaza-memorial/. 

x  Araujo, Ana Lucia. Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, p. 182.

xi  Darity, William A., and A. Kirsten Mullen. From Here to Equality. UNC Press Book, 2020, p. 257.

xii  Darity, William A., and A. Kirsten Mullen. From Here to Equality. UNC Press Book, 2020, p. 269.

xiii Darity, William A., and A. Kirsten Mullen. From Here to Equality. UNC Press Book, 2020, p. 269.

Editor’s note: This past summer, the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation is fortunate to have five talented and hardworking undergraduate research assistants working with us: Callista Abner, Sofina Behr, Plum Champlin, Lillian Holloway, and Carrie Schupack. We asked each of them to contribute to the project blog some reflections on their work and experiences from the summer. Our second post is by Callista Abner, a rising senior history major at Sewanee from Pleasant View, Tennessee.  

Identifying a Founding Funder: Maunsel White

In the early days of my summer research assistantship with the Roberson Project, my colleagues and I were locked in on identifying “White,” one of the major pre-Civil War contributors to the founding of the University of the South. This “Founding Funder,” as we are calling them, pledged the impressive sum of $5,000 (equivalent today to $176,000 and probably more) [Figure 1]. He, like most donors, were white, wealthy, Episcopalian men of the South who enslaved masses of human beings. Initially, we thought we had a match in John White, one of the founding members of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. He was geographically favorable since we knew that donors to the University of the South were concentrated in the cotton and sugar plantation regions of Louisiana. This, along with John White’s service as a lay delegate to the Twenty-First Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of Louisiana in 1859, made a connection to the University of the South very feasible. ^[ii] However, we couldn’t find census records or other documentation that would improve the odds that John White was wealthy enough to donate $5,000. But, after scouring records of the Episcopal Church, Louisiana history, and Southern education resources, I realized that another of John White’s contemporaries, Maunsel White [Figure 2], was a more likely benefactor. Maunsel White’s opulent wealth via enslaved laborexhibited support of the cause to preserve “Southern values,” and connections to many powerful individuals made him the more likely “White” of the University donor list. The more research I did into Maunsel White, the more persuaded — and excited — I became that I had found a likely connection between the founding of the University of the South and an unusually influential and recognizable Southern character.

Maunsel White was not born into wealth. He was an Irish immigrant who arrived in the U.S. at a young age. ^[iv] Like many immigrants, he moved around.  White first lived in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was a childhood friend of future president Zachary Taylor. In 1800 and at the age of thirteen, he was living in New Orleans, where he had likely moved with his family.^[iv]   There, he gained prominence from his service in the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, most notably as a member of the envoy that negotiated peace with the British commander at the behest of General Andrew Jackson. His skill in brokering peace solidified his friendship with many prominent figures.^[v] One of these connections is to Andrew Jackson, which serves as yet another example of a relationship with a presidential and influential figure that Maunsel continuously cultivated. Maunsel also gained the trust of a prominent Louisianan,  Pierre Denis de la Ronde. The head of a wealthy, well-connected, politically active, and very French New Orleans family, de la Ronde resided in what is known as the “Versailles Plantation,” considered “the most beautiful sugar plantation home in Louisiana of the day.”^[vi]

Following the war, White became a wealthy merchant, civic leader, and planter.^[vii] His relationship with Andrew Jackson grew as both a friend and business partner. ^[v] His connection to Pierre Denis de la Ronde brought him the notoriety and wealth associated with the de la Ronde family. He married his daughter, Ysavel (Elizabeth) Celeste de la Ronde, and after her death, her sister, Heloise de la Ronde.^{[viii & ix]} 

Maunsel White’s primary plantation, Deer Range, in Plaquemines Parish, grew sugar cane, corn, and other crops with the labor of approximately 200 enslaved people.^[vi] His residence was described in the southern journal, De Bow’s Review: “no home was wider known through the valley of the Mississippi; and in no period of its history was its credit or character tarnished by a breath.”^[v] Even when White was in dire financial straits and being hounded for repayment of loans, public opinion still held him in esteem. The Daily Nashville Union described how “no one doubts the ability of Maunsel White, individually, to meet every outstanding claim,” and reported that his New Orleans real estate was worth $500,000 [Figure 3].^[x] The newspaper, in highlighting the value of his property (including his human property), attested to his character: a reliable, wealthy, and industrious man. 

White’s sentiments about the institution of slavery are evident in the harsh methods he used to maintain order among those he enslaved. He “put Negroes who feigned sickness in the stocks” and gave those who did not work hard enough dry bread instead of meat. ^[xii] In his own records, White noted his use of forms of violence, such as whipping, on his enslaved, including a woman named Caty, and condoned such actions done by his overseers, as well.^[xiv] To his contemporaries, White’s was a model plantation, where, according to De Bow’s Review, “order and system, health and contentment reign through its limits.”^[v] 

This was the type of man whose wealth enabled the founding of the University of the South. They were devoted to the institution of slavery; they belonged to the Episcopal Church; and they were connected to powerful political and business interests in the American South. White’s success and renown were impressive for his time, and in the league of many who pledged their wealth to the southern university. Regardless, he was one of the “founding funders” whose contributions and legacy we are working to investigate and illuminate. Uncovering this connection made me feel that my work was contributing important information to the research of the Roberson Project. Each source I found in this process further filled out our network of connected individuals. Hopefully, this will allow the Roberson Project and other Sewanee constituents to form a more comprehensive understanding of the circumstances of our founding and development. This discovery was a wonderful start to my internship, and I’m grateful to be able to contribute to the annals of Sewanee and American history in such a way. 

Notes to the text: 

[i] 1859 list of University of the South donors, from the University of the South Archives. 

[ii] Journal of the Proceedings of the  21^st  Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of Louisiana, 1859, https://books.google.com/books?id=_3jkAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. p. 15.

[iii] Colonel Maunsell White Sr., March 21,  2016, https://www.geni.com/photo/view/6000000026681114003?album_type=photos_of_me&photo_id=6000000041093069251. 

[iv] Memorial Page for Col Maunsel White (1783-17 Dec 1863), Find a Grave Memorial ID 7567088. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/75687088/maunsel-white. 

[v] De Bow, J. D. B., 1858. The Pioneer’s of the South, No. 1. De Bow’s Review: Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial Progress and Resources, XXV, https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=siQKAAAAIAAJ&pg=GBS.PA480&hl=en pp.480-482. 

[vi] Meredith, M., 2021. Pierre Denys de LaRonde (1726-1772) – HouseHistree. [online] Househistree.com. Available at: https://househistree.com/people/pierre-denys-de-laronde. 

[vii] Evans, C., 2022. The Real History of Tabasco® – Chuck Evans’ MONTEZUMA Brand Sauces & Salsas. [online] Chuck Evans’ MONTEZUMA Brand Sauces & Salsas. http://montezumabrand.com/articles/the-real-history-of-tabasco/. 

[viii] Ancestry.com. n.d. Ysavel Celeste Laronde in the Louisiana, U.S., Compiled Marriages, 1728-1850. [online] Available at: https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/5670:2090.

[ix] Familysearch.org. n.d. Colonel Maunsell White Sr.. [online] Available at: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/timeline/K2TZ-BWW.

[x] “Communication,” Daily Nashville Union (Nashville, Tennessee), February 5, 1852. https://www.newspapers.com/image/?clipping_id=103936118&fcfToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJmcmVlLXZpZXctaWQiOjYwMzkzNDEzNywiaWF0IjoxNjU2NjIwODE3LCJleHAiOjE2NTY3MDcyMTd9.UI2snk8RkLfcVAmQ2CdE9TKeUx_mwbbNV18qJfjpLFE, p. 2. 

[xi] Duncan, H., 1888. Diocese of Louisiana: Some of Its History, 1838-1888. New Orleans: A. W. Hyatt, Printer, pp.138-141.

[xii] Eaton, Clement. The Mind of the Old South, (Louisiana State University Press, 1967), p. 80. 

[xiii] Eaton, Clement. The Growth of Southern Civilization, (Harper and Row, 1961), p. 61.

[xiv] Regan, J., 2021. “Irish Overseers in the Antebellum South.” Irish Historical Studies, [online] 45(168), pp.203-222. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/irish-historical-studies/article/irish-overseers-in-the-antebellum-us-south/EE2DBBA131BB8F571347268888AB8D5E#fn68 

Two weeks ago, on August 7, all of us who work with the Roberson Project were stunned and saddened to learn that our friend and colleague, Matt Reynolds, had died. Our deepest sympathy goes out to his wife, Viva, their daughter, Fiona, his extended family, and his many close work associates.

Seven years ago, in 2015, Matt came to Sewanee as Associate Director of University Archives and Special Collections. One of the first tasks he took on was helping Professor Woody Register and his research associate, Tanner Potts, pull together and put up an exhibition in the University Archives: “Founded to Make Men: Explorations of Masculinity at the University of the South.” Neither Register nor Potts had ever done anything like this before. Matt jumped into the project with gusto. He was superhumanly patient and helpful with every aspect, including the transfer of the exhibit to an online platform.

In addition to his expertise in information management and archiving, Matt was a historian by training and inclination. He also was a fast learner, diving into Sewanee’s crazy closet of materials to locate and learn the location of items that have eluded cataloging and systematic organization for generations. If he didn’t know where something was, he usually managed to find it. And if he couldn’t find it, that usually meant it wasn’t there, to begin with. Someone with less energy and love of history would have quailed before the mountainous climb of learning our archival collections demanded. Matt seemed to relish the hunt — the more difficult, the better — and exult in the find. 

And speaking of enthusiasm, the Roberson Project has not had a more generous and supportive friend than Matt. And we have leaned on him unsparingly over the last five years. And we usually could have been much more considerate about getting our requests to him in a timely manner. It is no exaggeration to say that Matt was a right arm of the Roberson Project. He found what we requested, and he found a lot of things we didn’t know to request. The density of our research reflects his many contributions.

One big example: three years ago, we staged the first of several digitization events at the St. Mark’s Community Center here in Sewanee to launch a much bigger project to work with local residents in collecting, preserving, and telling Sewanee’s “Black History.” Again, the Roberson Project had never done anything like this before, and there was Matt, again, ready to help us with the nuts and bolts of it as well as the bigger picture. He helped train volunteers in the technologies and methods of taking oral histories, scanning and photographing documents and memorabilia, and organizing the first stage of an online archive that officially launched a year ago: https://blacksewanee.org/. All of us needed some serious hand-holding on this project, and Matt was there for us. We have him to thank for this project’s continuing successes in rebuilding the historical resources of what we call the #savesewaneeblackhistory initiative.

If it is not already clear, allow us to underscore what made working with Matt so rewarding and enjoyable: his good cheer, hearty laugh, love of historical inquiry, faith in education, fondness for college students, and dedication to archives as priceless resources to be used for understanding the past and the present. We could continue in this vein.

We mourn Matt’s death and give thanks for the seven years of collegiality, intellectual partnership, and friendship that he gave to us both as individuals and as a program. We miss him, and we will remember him in all the work we do for the Roberson Project.