WHO WE ARE

WE ARE the people whose roots are in the segregated African American neighborhoods of Sewanee, the largest of which was south of the University Cemetery and today known as “St. Mark’s.”

WE ARE the team of the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, an initiative of the University of the South that seeks, among other goals, to give overdue recognition to the African American people who for generations have contributed to and supported this university.

WE ARE design and architecture faculty and students at Virginia Tech University and Virginia Commonwealth University, who are seeking to design a commemorative structure that expresses the wishes, experiences, and hopes of the people of Sewanee’s historic Black neighborhoods.

OUR WORK WILL help arrest the erasure of local African American history and memory from the Sewanee landscape by designing and building a new monument that revives and sustains the memories and experiences of the people of this neighborhood — first for the benefit of themselves and their descendants and then for that of all others who pass through our rural college town, today and in the future.