Between 2020 and 2025, Sewanee: University of the South (Sewanee, TN), served as a Regional Collaboration Partner in CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery network. Located on a campus that was explicitly designed to reflect and commemorate a slaveholding South, the institutional team chose to focus on the theme of Commemoration and Memory—with the ambitious goal of creating a collaborative database of memorials to the Lost Cause on college and university campuses across the nation. The Locating Slavery’s Legacy Database (LSLdb) has grown to include contributors from two dozen private and public institutions (and counting). It now catalogues “memorials erected in opposition to the Lost Cause and white supremacy and in support of racial equality and universal Civil Rights” as well as “monuments and memorials linked to slavery, the American Civil War, and the Confederacy.”
An overview of activities undertaken by Sewanee as part of CIC’s Legacies of American Slavery initiative. The presentation was recorded during the Independent Colleges & The Legacies of Slavery conference in Memphis, TN, on September 20, 2024.
Download the presentation slides
Reflections on the Legacies initiative by Woody Register
From the project team’s final report:
The funds entrusted to us have had a transformative impact on our work here at Sewanee and our ability to build collaborative relationships with fellow investigators at institutions across the United States. The initiatives the grant has empowered us to launch and establish have augmented the reach and impact of our work, enabling us to make good on our mission to be a leading participant “in the global movement to confront and reckon with higher education’s indebtedness to slavery.”
We saw opportunities for inter-institutional and cross-disciplinary collaboration. We also saw opportunities to leverage the impact of one of Sewanee’s greatest challenges, which is its dense tapestry of Lost Cause memorials that decorate everything on our campus. … Not everything we planned or attempted panned out, however. For example, we were never able to marshal the cooperation on or off our campus for building an investigation into the Black roots of regional Blue Grass music. Our colloquium on the use of unfree labor in the region was a brilliant one-off … [but] did not grow into the movement we had hoped.
Our proudest achievement is the Locating Slavery’s Legacies database, which continues to grow in depth and breadth. … [We hear from our partners about] the positive impact of embedding the research in class assignments and involving students in the production of research and contributions to a publicly accessible digital humanities resource. Faculty members and archivists tell us of the impact that participation has on their campuses, how the network reduces their personal experience of isolation and institutional disregard for the work on their campus.
Our project is not just about gathering data. It also is about student learning, research, and engagement, and it still takes a human imagination to discover and make known the ways the Lost Cause was embedded in higher education. Our ability to muster those resources in the emerging political climate and era of diminishing grant resources will determine the future of the LSLdb. … [But] we predict that the Legacies grant will do as much as any support program to insure the continued existence and operation of the Roberson Project at Sewanee.
👁This is part of a series of reflections on the Legacies initiative.