Sewanee Praises Project

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Project Overview

The SEWANEE PRAISES Project is a collaborative public humanities initiative involving teams of architecture instructors and their students from Virginia Commonwealth and Virginia Tech universities in partnership with the people of Sewanee's historic African American neighborhoods.

Our Goal: to design and construct a commemorative "outdoor classroom" on the site of the segregated Kennerly School, built in 1949 and demolished in 2010.

Our Mission and Vision: to recognize, honor, and preserve the history of Sewanee's Black St. Mark's community and its century-long commitment to educate their children for full personhood and citizenship rights.

In doing so, this project will help arrest the erasure of local African American history and memory from the Sewanee landscape by partnering with the people rooted in that Black community and enlisting their creative resources and time-tested resilience to build a new monument that revives and sustains their memories and experiences — first for the benefit of their descendants and then of all others who pass through our rural college town, today and in the future.

The SEWANEE PRAISES Project is a pillar of the larger St. Mark's Community Heritage Trail. Explore the context of the Trail here, or use the links below to learn more about it and other community initiatives undertaken by the Roberson Project and its partners from the Black communities of our region. The foundational work on this project is funded by the friends of the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation.

Save Sewanee Black History

St. Mark's Heritage Trail

Black South Cumberland

The Kennerly School, 1949-2010

Statement of the University of the South's Indigenous Engagement Initiative in regard to a land acknowledgement:

The University of the South is situated on land sacred to numerous Indigenous tribes. As part of its commitment to Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation, the University, through its Indigenous Engagement Initiative, is reaching out to tribal representatives to build a mutually respectful and sustainable community. Initial efforts have underscored the importance of deep listening and deference to tribes through a mindful and holistic process of exploring shared history and discovering common goals, including how tribes would prefer to be acknowledged. It is the University's goal that specific acknowledgment, in whatever form it takes, will ultimately comprise only a small part of a healing and shared future.

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