The Campbell-Stuart Scholarship Trust Fund Story
by Claude Stuart III
The Mississippi Delta (and especially its Queen City, Greenville) have had a long and storied relationship with the University of the South since its inception. Anne and Claude Stuart, formerly of Greenville, Mississippi and later Houston, Texas, have recently endowed a scholarship fund which seeks to foster and cement that deep nexus. There is no better example than William Alexander Percy, a Greenville native who graduated from Sewanee in the early 1900’s and lyrically chronicled that relationship in Chapter IX (“Sewanee”) of his classic autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee. Mr. Percy and Anne’s grandmother, Anne Thomas Dyer, were dear lifelong friends. In fact, Anne has a lovely silver bowl given to her grandmother by Mr. Percy as a party favor from a prom she attended as his guest of long ago. Engraved is “Sewanee 1905.”
The Stuarts established the Campbell-Stuart Scholarship Trust Fund to honor the memory of their fathers who were committed to excellent education and equal opportunities for all. Anne’s father, Roy D. Campbell Jr., was president of the Greenville School Board in the 1960’s and spearheaded its public schools’ becoming the first to integrate voluntarily in the State. Claude’s father, Claude L. Stuart, Sr., was the chairman of the Greenville Public Schools’ Science Department and routinely produced a steady stream of top-rated students who went on to become doctors and scientists in their own right.
Sewanee has a long standing and active program to recruit outstanding students with financial needs from the Mississippi Delta. The Campbell-Stuart Trust Fund Scholarship will provide a continuation of that recruitment to help provide an excellent education at the University of the South.
Now having built a home near Sewanee, Anne and Claude plan to live here permanently and become even more involved in the University community. As such, they will be able to work with and mentor the scholarship recipients and thus further continue to bind their own ties to Sewanee and the Mississippi Delta.
