Remembered, Not Forgotten: Recognizing Racial Inequity in the Sewanee Cemetery

Editor’s note: This 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 this summer. We begin with the thoughts of Lillian Holloway, who will start her second year at Sewanee this fall.

Less than a year ago, I began my freshman year at Sewanee. I was enrolled in “Finding Your Place,” an intensive first-year program that focuses on local issues and history and begins a few weeks before the start of the semester. To help the class get situated, my professor led us on tours of campus and the surrounding communities. One of the earliest sites we visited was Convocation Hall. Dedicated in 1886, it is among the oldest academic buildings on campus. It was and is a stunning space, filled with the musky aroma of academia, but some feel unwelcome. Depending on the experiences and identity of visitors, the portraits of white men that line the walls can be alienating.

William Porcher DuBose, George Rainsford Fairbanks, Francis Asbury Shoup, Hugh Miller Thompson, Nicholas Hamner Cobbs, Leonidas Polk, Charles Todd Quintard, Telfair Hodgson, James Hervey Otey, Henry Champlin Lay, Thomas Frank Gailor, Alexander Gregg, Richard Hooker Wilmer, Edwin Gardner Weed, and Wylie Blount Miller. They’re just names, but in Convocation Hall, they’re fifteen faces surrounded by Episcopal vestments and gilded picture frames. The institute has proudly decorated these historic walls with their images  to honor the religious, financial, intellectual, and social support they gave to the University of the South. These men have names, and faces, and many are subjects of Wikipedia pages, websites and books; in other words, their lives are well-documented and publicly accessible.

This summer, I’m working as a student research assistant for the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation. Launched five years ago, the Roberson Project aims, among other goals, to recover, preserve, and tell the histories of Sewanee’s Black residents. My research is primarily focused on the Black Cemetery Project and the recovery of the names and personhoods of those interred in the burial ground the University’s white leaders set aside for  African Americans. The “Sewanee Negro Cemetery,” as it was called for most of its history, is beside the University cemetery, which for nearly a century was separated from its neighbor by a stone wall. I say “recovery” because the few sources that document this history, and African American history in general, are often incomplete and disorganized. During the first week of work, we spent most of our time in the Sewanee Archives, transcribing information from the registers of the local Episcopal Otey Memorial Parish (recently renamed St. Mark’s and St. Paul’s, to disassociate it from its slave-owning and slavery-defending namesake) and the cemetery records of Franklin County. Now, we’re filtering through this data and collecting census records to more thoroughly understand the lives of Sewanee’s Black residents.

Recently, the Roberson Project teamed up with archaeologists from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville to conduct a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) scan of the Black side of the University Cemetery. An analysis of the data collected from the area, which covers a little more than an acre, shows about 300 graves. Some 156 conventional gravestones have been documented, and field stones seem to indicate another 16 burials. Those numbers suggest that about 130, or a little less than half, of the graves are unmarked. Presumably, when these Black citizens were buried, their resting place was identified with a small curio—like a shell or broken bottle—but over the span of the past 150 or so years, the traditional markers the Black community used to remember their dead have been forgotten or removed. Time has worn away some markers, like the words on standard gravestones, but white conservationists and groundskeepers, unaware of Black cemetery practices, have also removed burial markers, mistaking them for trash or debris. These landscaped ruins lie adjacent to the white side of the University Cemetery and its well-preserved family plots.

Graveyards are durable, and in the years since the legal end of Jim Crow, as memorials of racial segregation disappear, sites like the University Cemetery continue to cast a shadow over today’s society with visual reminders of the severity of racial inequity within the United States. In 1963, white students and community members moved the wall that separated the cemeteries and used the stones to rebuild the wall on the far side of the Black cemetery, combing the two¹. Today, remnants of the wall that used to separate the Black and white cemeteries still remain in their original place. I’m not sure how I feel about this fact; it doesn’t seem practical to destroy the individual stones for being abiotic constituents of racism, but it doesn’t seem right to reuse them. To anyone aware of the cemeteries’ history, this repurposing, especially for use in the same space, seems to forget the racial oppression faced by the Black community members buried on the “historically” Black side of the cemetery. Sure, the cemeteries are now united under one name, but even without an official divide, the two sides of University Cemetery are racially distinct. These tracts of land hold some of the most influential people in Sewanee’s history—both white and Black, yet the respect with which these bodies are or are not treated is not measured by respectability. The Black community still holds a place in Sewanee’s history, but individual identities have been lost. Instead, their legacies are defined by race; meritocracy be damned.

I know I sound angry. I guess I am. The men on the walls live on. Their steely eyes continue to look down on University visitors, while their Wikipedia pages color their “Life and career” with pictures and references to books and websites that detail their exploits. The unnamed men and women buried on the Black side of the cemetery, on the other hand, are lucky to survive on a single line of the hand-written burial records from St. Mark’s Chapel, tucked away in a folder in a box on the well-organized shelves of the William R. Laurie University Archives & Special Collections. Convocation’s fifteen portraits forget the person and remember a face, while so many of the University Cemetery’s Black gravesites no longer remember the person at all. Nikole Hannah-Jones, journalist and author of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, writes about the national misunderstanding of race in the United States, saying, “I understood that the absence of 1619 [the first year enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia] from mainstream history was intentional… I was starting to figure out that the histories we learn in school, or more casually, through popular culture, monuments, and political speeches, rarely teach us the facts but only certain facts.”² In most narratives, the study of history uses an Anglo-centric microscope that’s blind to the rich past of African American communities at the national level, as discussed by Hannah-Jones, and in local settings like Sewanee. The increasing number of people of color in the student population and faculties of the university has increased the need for honest histories that include populations who have never been welcome in the canonical history of the United States or Sewanee.It’s also important to remember that this institution is part of a larger community and has a responsibility to respect the needs and wishes of Black Sewanee. 

I started writing this blog post with the intention to study Convocation Hall and the fifteen portraits it contains. I wanted to list their moral failings and involvement with the Confederacy and slavery, but I’d rather promote Sewanee’s Black community. I think it might be a good idea to “pack the court” and supplement these white men with people of color who deserve well-informed respect—not the uninformed esteem afforded to those fifteen men by formal portraiture. Their visibility in the University’s mock hall of fame hasn’t been offered to Sewanee’s Black community members. White privilege protects these individuals and their moral legacies, while the Black community struggles to prevent the erasure of their names from the historical record. 

We can’t yet identify any of the unmarked graves located by the GPR scan, but I’d like to start the process of remembering by sharing a few names that can be found on marked and researched burial sites: Dora Irene Turner, Willie Lee “Inky” Turner, Willie Lee “June” Turner, Gail Renata Turner, Bertha Geneva Shedd, Cheryl Diane Newell, Rufus Moseley, George Allen Moseley, Mary Agnes Chappell Moseley, Mollie Sims, Willie “Six” Sims, Clemmie Hill, Grace Childress, Walter Wooten, and Henderson Willis. Fifteen names, fifteen headstones, fifteen people I don’t want to forget to remember.

Endnotes

1.  Gerald L. Smith, Sean T Suarez, Samuel R Williamson, and University of the South, Sewanee Sesquicentennial History Project, Sewanee Places: A Historical Gazetteer of the Domain and the Sewanee Area, (Sewanee Sesquicentennial History Project. Sewanee, TN: University of the South, 2010), 396-397

2.   Hannah-Jones, Nikole, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein. “Origin.” Preface. In The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, xx. New York, NY: Random House Large Print, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2022.

Humanities 215: Introduction to Digital Humanities Through Post-Soviet Identity and America’s South

This past spring I designed and taught HUMN 215: Introduction to Digital Humanities through Post-Soviet Identity and America’s South. The comparative focus of the first part of the course juxtaposed the history of Russian serfdom to that of slavery in the United States, and we got at the historical understandings of slavery through readings in books and in digital archives. Through the Roberson Project for example, students learned about recent research to uncover the history of African Americans at Sewanee, including the historical era that is tied to the construction of the university. The Roberson Project, at the same time as being a source of deep historical information, is an exemplary digital humanities platform, and thus a model to incorporate into an introductory digital humanities course. Digital humanities platforms host unique collections, have search functions, and allow for collaboration, among other characteristics. Through hands-on training students learned to use digital tools to create visuals that augmented their research arguments: ThingLink, Omeka, graphing, and to analyze and display text: Scalar and Medium.com. In their assignments and final research projects, students demonstrated their fluency in digital tools by using them to support their claims and historical findings about the comparisons of U.S. slavery to Russian serfdom, rural capitalism in America’s South and Russia, as well as the future of the rural village in Russia.

One component of digital humanities projects involves essentializing and condensing chapters and bodies of knowledge into brief paragraphs (or even into labels and categories or numbers). In addition to employing digital skills to embed annotated images into their public-facing writing, the format of Medium.com’s platform helped students streamline their writing.  Students also learned lessons on concision via the art of annotation, which involves not only gaining technical skills, but also critical thinking skills. What does it mean to represent information, in particular historical information, online? When you label a historical document for display, for instance, what agenda are you ascribing to it? Thus, students labeled their chosen historical images after deeply researching their topic. As researchers of contradictory, unjust, and traumatic histories, students collaboratively developed their own definition of reconciliation: We cannot change the past, but we can use today’s technology along with historical research skills to uncover injustices of the past.

Literature woven into the course that led to some of the most dynamic discussions included:

• The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity by James Cobb
• Four Russian Serf Narratives ed. John MacKay
• Deep in the Piney Woods: Southeastern Alabama: from Statehood to the Civil War by Tommy Brown
• Growing up Black in Rural Mississippi: Memories of a Family, Heritage of a Place by Chalmers Archer
• The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russian Studies, Editors: Daria Gritsenko, Mariëlle Wijermars, Mikhail Kopotev
• The Way Things Were by a Ukrainian former slave woman who wrote under the pen-name, Marko Vovchok.

For their final project, students wrote research essays based on reading passages that excited them and used visualizations to support their arguments. They displayed their chosen visualizations in a digital exhibition of historical images to highlight connections between US slavery and Russian serfdom. This digital companion to the final essay trained students in an essential digital humanities skill: online exhibition. It also helped students hone their writing skills as students’ exhibits were accompanied by robust written descriptions of the images for this compelling text+image display. The course exhibition can be viewed here: https://humn215.omeka.net.

For more details about course assignments and to view examples of students’ final project, check out Professor Weygandt’s course folder on Google Drive. 

Four years ago today, December 21, Dr. Houston Bryan Roberson died after a long illness. He was 58 years old and had been teaching at Sewanee since 1997. Today we at Sewanee have honored his memory and the impact he had on this community by naming our project on slavery, race, and reconciliation after him.

The last week or so this anniversary has been very much on my mind and that of Julie Berebitsky, my wife, now retired from teaching U.S. women’s history, who began her Sewanee career the same day as Houston Roberson. For both of us, Dr. Roberson was a cherished friend and colleague. These reminiscences sent me into my electronic files to dig up the remarks I made at his memorial service in All Saints’ Chapel on April 2, 2017. Looking over them, I thought that others, who may or may not have known Dr. Roberson, would appreciate the chance to read my tribute to him. A video of the full service can be found at this link. Following my remarks is a short biography that accompanied the Sewanee announcement of his death. — Woody Register

Remarks by Woody Register at the memorial service for Houston Bryan Roberson, April 2, 2017, All Saints’ Chapel, The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.

I am so grateful for this opportunity to say a few words – and, believe me, far fewer than I would like – about Houston Roberson, a scholar, teacher, colleague, and, for so many of us, a beloved friend.

Let us be honest, though: Houston was as modest a person as ever walked the planet, and if he were here today, he would protest against all the attention, and he would happily put a muzzle on me. With all due respect to him and his wishes, there are things that must be said, and trust me I am not saying them all. I cannot speak for us all, and I will not try.

I am especially thankful for being able to say these words – really of gratitude – for all that he did for us and gave to us in this chapel, which he loved, which sits at the center of a university that he loved, which is part of a church that he loved, and that in turn belongs to a faith that he shared and carried with him always. I am stating the obvious in saying that Houston loved teaching – that no one could have been more determined over the twelve months between when he first collapsed over Thanksgiving break in 2015 to the very week before he left us this past December –  that no one could have been more determined to get back into the classroom – that no one looked forward with as much excitement or anticipation to what we were planning to do with our courses and curriculum than Houston. Honestly, Houston then as he had many times before put me to shame with his fight to get back into the classroom – his zest for teaching and his belief in teaching.

There was no cynicism to be found in Houston. Now granted – our colleague loved a break as much or more than anyone else. He could make the most of those interregnums of rest at midterm or Thanksgiving or Spring break, when he would dash off in his car – and I do mean dash – to see friends and family – and really for him, friends were family – in his Virginia hometown of Stuart or Charlotte or Atlanta or Chapel Hill and Raleigh or perhaps above all New York City. Or, perhaps best of all for my wife Julie Berebitsky and me, the way he savored the night after the last day of classes – when the three of us and sometimes others would convene, and combine our love of cooking and eating, and toast the jobs we had – or we hoped we had done well with, in December, a sweet and spicy Manhattan or two, and in May, a martini – mine a gin concoction, his a vodka, and his always as dirty as we could make them. But even these transgressive times were about teaching and learning, reflecting on what we had done and would try to do better in the future, catching up on the research or writing we hoped to jam into January or cultivate over the warm months of summer.

Speaking of food – and only food this time – many of us here know that Sewanee likes to talk about its long tradition of inviting students into our homes, a folklore usually exaggerated to reinforce our branding, but it is important to remember something that many of you younger ones and those from Chapel Hill, too, remember – and that is how Houston’s classrooms always encompassed his kitchen and the bounty of his larder. A reward to students who took his classes was a meal at the end as only Houston could do it. Efficiency and time management were no consideration; they were not in his vocabulary at these times. Houston cooked long and hard, brewing up a complex mole or tenderly coaxing a bordelaise into existence to give to his students. And it was a gift from his kitchen. I remember the late spring of his last full semester of teaching – he needed to borrow something for a dish he was preparing, and I took it over to his house, where I found him in full cooking splendor: short pants, t-shirt, scruffy bedroom slippers, surrounded by the shocking disarray of his hot and steamy and full-going kitchen, giving his all, when he really had so little to spare, to the preparation of what was a genuine feast for his students. That was Houston, I thought to myself then – cooking, teaching, giving all that he had, for his students.

That is why it is no exaggeration to say that there are nearly countless numbers of women and men today, aged 20 to nearly 60, who believe that Houston was one of, if not the great teacher in their lives.  In the long list of those who feel blessed to have been in his classroom, I put myself at the greyer end of that spectrum. If I am a good teacher in and beyond the classroom – and people tell me I am – it is because over the course of my life I have had good teachers who have taught me most of what I know. Houston Roberson was and will continue to be one of my most important teachers.

I met Houston twenty years ago this past January in New York City at the dreadful annual meeting of the American Historical Association, where we were interviewing candidates for a position – Sewanee’s first ever – in African American history. Houston was our first interview of the cycle, probably 9 at the latest in the morning. I was a youngish assistant professor at Sewanee and I was joined across the table from Houston by my assistant professor colleague John Willis. It was my first time conducting job interviews – and maybe John’s too – and I doubt Houston was the beneficiary of the fact that I really did not know what I was doing. Nor did I understand the importance of what we were delegated to do. I think I thought of our mission as an academic enterprise – to add an important segment to our curriculum – but I am pretty sure I did not think of myself as being sent out to shake the foundations of the university. Nevertheless, somehow, several months later my colleagues were able to convince Houston to come work and teach at Sewanee, and again it is no exaggeration to say that nothing – no aspect of the institution, no dimension of its curriculum, certainly no student who has benefited from his classes, and nothing about myself as a teacher or scholar or friend – nothing has been the same.

Sewanee calls itself the University of the South, but for most of its history, it has been the University of and for the White South. Over the last half century there have been historic efforts to change its character, and there have been notable achievements, but Houston’s arrival at Sewanee fundamentally changed things. And let me make clear that those changes came not because of anything I or my colleagues did. They came because of Houston and what he did at Sewanee and especially because of how he did it. He was the first fulltime member of the college faculty to teach his subject area fulltime. He taught African American history in broad strokes and in fine detail: the general survey courses, to be sure, but also African-American Intellectual History, The American Civil Rights Movement, the African-American Church in Slavery and Freedom, African American Women and Religion. And, Civil Disobedience from Ancient Greece to Modern Africa – that is, the long arc of history from Sophocles to Nelson Mandela.

Houston was also the first African American to join Sewanee’s faculty fulltime – the University of the South I’m telling you – in what was then its 130-year history. And though the people of Sewanee opened their homes and their hearts to Houston, let us just concede that this was not an easy course for Houston to follow, that Sewanee people had a lot to learn from Houston, and he taught us all – with courage, wisdom, and above all patience and love for those in our community.

To reflect on that point – the good works Houston did at Sewanee – I, like him,  will return to the New Testament book of Timothy: Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses (1 Timothy 6:12) One of the major themes in Houston’s history of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery – Fighting the Good Fight – addresses the persistent tension within African American religion during enslavement and after emancipation between the Christian’s calling to attend to the soul, to prepare for the life hereafter, and the historic need to fight injustice and oppression in this world. Does Christianity teach us to suffer silently, knowing that God is the ultimate arbiter of justice and salvation, or does it teach us to rise up against the cruelties and exploitation of this fallen world? That tension between the call to Christian ministry and the call to social activism. The members of the Dexter Avenue Church, he tells us, “‘fought the good fight’ for the cause of Christian evangelism and full citizenship rights for all Americans.” But, as Houston told the story, this was not a story of outsized historic events, the King years alone, but a long and dense history of people on the ground – the generations of congregations As Houston writes,

This church’s greatest significance is not found in the dramatic turning points in its life, but in the tedium of board meetings, missionary society activities, and pastoral searches. It was the day-to-day regular activities that anchored and stabilized life for church members as they experienced and endured the oppression of racism and segregation.

What Houston wrote about the Dexter Avenue Church, I think, applies no less to his own life as a teacher and it describes how he approached his work as an educator: Houston’s good work – his good fight – was like that of the church’s congregations, not just in the famous and stirring historic moments or in the high moments of publishing books that were universally admired or indulging in end-of-term martinis. It was especially there in the day-to-day tedium of teaching and grading – of preparing for class, meeting with students, writing letters of recommendation, working on committees, and pushing against the inevitable institutional inertia.

But his good fight also was like that of Dexter Avenue’s long history, as both a spiritual sanctuary for its community of believers and the foundation for social and political action. Christian salvation and regeneration but hand in hand with confrontation with injustice and oppression in this world. So it was with education with Houston: You learned to write well the better to express your ideas and confront those of others; you learned about the past the better to equip yourself to understand the history of injustice and discrimination. Studying history was a moral exercise: learning the history of civil disobedience, what it could accomplish and what it could not. What he said of Dexter Avenue Church was true of his classroom: just substitute classroom for church:

The classroom was for Houston a world: a sanctuary, yes, but also a place to seek power, to become and prepare leaders, and where students learned to affirm themselves and others as worthwhile, capable beings.   

And how did he do this? By teaching the history of African Americans from enslavement to emancipation to today.

I want to finish by quoting from some notes that Houston shared with me last year, which summarized the basic lessons he was trying to teach his students in his Civil Rights Movement course. Both were drawn from his great intellectual influence W. E. B. DuBois:

The African American history narrative is both distinctive from and inextricably part of the larger narrative of American history. The distinctive narrative is a defining element of the larger narrative. To summarize: African American history is American history.

Second: The story of African American history runs counter to the narrative of most other minority groups in America. There are periods of gains, backlashes and losses. That has meant having to fight again and again for the same freedoms won in an earlier generation. Thus, for African Americans and all of us as Americans, emancipation was and is an ongoing process. It was never a moment. There were antecedents and the process continues to this very hour.

Over the last three weeks I have seen the new movie, I Am Not Your Negro, twice. It is a hard movie for me to watch. As probably most of you know, the movie is about the great writer and intellectual James Baldwin, which animates and brings to public notice a manuscript he never finished at the end of his life about the murders of his three friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. Both times watching this movie, time and again I thought to myself, how I wish Houston were able to see it – how I wish we could see it together, and talk about it, and how he could help me learn more from it – less selfishly, how I wish that Houston could teach this movie in his classroom. It is a complicated movie, but Baldwin’s central message and the message of the movie, in his words, is this: “The story of the Negro in America is the story of America.” Those were essentially Houston’s words to me in those notes about his classes and bear repeating: The African American history narrative is both distinctive from and inextricably part of the larger narrative of American history. The distinctive narrative is a defining element of the larger narrative.   

To put these words into my own: the central and most visible history of this nation – if we open our eyes to see it – is not a story of progress, but of ongoing struggle, and nothing teaches us this lesson so well as history. And no one, in my experience, has taught this lesson so well or enduringly, as Houston. And no one through their teaching has done more to make Sewanee a university truly of the South than our teacher and friend Houston Roberson.

A Brief Biography of Houston Bryan Roberson

Houston Bryan Roberson, Professor of History, passed away on December 21, 2016. A light went out for Sewanee with the passing of this deeply loved colleague, teacher, and friend — a man of quiet demeanor but tremendous strength, who influenced for good all who were fortunate enough to know him.

Houston grew up in Stuart, Virginia, a small town in mountainous country not unlike this part of Tennessee; he was the son of the late Ralph and Madelene Roberson, and one of seven siblings. He attended Patrick County High School, where he is still remembered with affection and admiration by some of his teachers. He received a BA from Mars Hill College, an MA from Wake Forest University, and a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina. Before starting his graduate work at UNC, he taught history for many years at Chapel Hill High School; he never lost his love for the city and its people, and it is impossible to exaggerate his influence on students and his fellow teachers there or how much they admired him as a person and teacher.

Coming to Sewanee in 1997, Houston was the first African-American to be appointed a full-time member of the College faculty. He brought the study of race and of African American history to Sewanee in unprecedented and historic ways, contributing as he did so to profound change in the university’s curriculum as a whole. He was a personal mentor and friend to many students, especially the college’s growing numbers of African-American students.  He was also an accomplished scholar, widely admired for his work on the history of African American religions and Civil Rights in the U.S. His first book was Fighting the Good Fight: The Story of Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, 1865-1977 (2005). In 2014, he co-authored Witness: Two Hundred Years of Faith and Practice at the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem, New York; it was a source of special pleasure to him that one of his co-authors was Genna Rae MacNeil, his former graduate advisor, who has movingly described him as “a free man with a pure spirit.” In 2002 he co-authored with Rhonda Y. Williams, Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement: Freedom’s Bittersweet Song.

Especially valuable to Sewanee was his short essay, “The Problem of the Twentieth Century: Sewanee, Race and Race Relations,” published in the University’s sesquicentennial volume, Sewanee: Perspectives on the History of the University of the South (2009). This essay was the first piece of written scholarship to address directly and forthrightly the history of race on campus and in the Sewanee community. Finally, Houston was an invaluable colleague: insightful, constructive, deeply conscientious, and profoundly committed to the History Department’s goals and those of the University at this formative stage in its history. His generosity of spirit, understanding of people, courage, and wisdom continue to animate discussions in the department, the college, and the university, and will resonate for many decades among hundreds of friends, colleagues, former students, and members of the family he loved so much.

Houston was preceded in death by his parents, Ralph and Madelene Roberson, and by a brother, Mitchell W. Tatum. He left behind to cherish his memory a brother, Elder Dr. Larry D. Tatum (Iris), of Cleveland, OH; four sisters, Mrs. Elaine Thomas (Charlie), the Rev. Sheila Thomas (Albert), of Stuart, VA, Ms. Teresa K. Roberson and Dr. Olivia R. Givens (Kem), both of Charlotte, NC, along with a host of nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews for whose futures he cherished the greatest of hopes.