Since 2017, the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation at the University of the South has completed several projects within their investigation into the University’s historical entanglements with slavery, its legacies, and white supremacy.
The basic objective of the Locating Slavery’s Legacies database (LSLdb) is to collect information about monuments and memorials identified with the Civil War and Confederacy on the campuses of American colleges. This information will help us analyze and understand the impact of Lost Cause movements on higher education in the United States in the 160 years after emancipation.
The Save Sewanee Black History Project endeavors to recover, preserve, and publicly share the 160-plus-year record of the African American people who lived and worked in this university community and helped shape its history. The task of building an enduring archive and an active program of public education is jointly undertaken by people with roots in Sewanee’s Black community in partnership with the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation at the University of the South.
The Founding Funders Map Project, produced by the Roberson Project research team, assesses the depth and breadth of investments in enslaved human property by the nearly 300 persons who assembled the financial foundation of the University of the South between 1856 and 1865.
The Roberson Project is working in conjunction with the forestry department to construct a Heritage Trail through the central campus of the University of the South. It will memorialize spaces and places significant to the St. Mark’s community, the historically black community of Sewanee.
This was an ARC GIS Story Map project completed by the Landscape Analysis Lab & The Roberson Project that reviewed some of the confederate sites on campus, a matter currently being discussed by the University Administration. It was completed in 2021.
This was an ARC GIS Story Map completed by the Roberson Project to example the original Board of Trustees of the University of the South and their connection to the Institution of Slavery. It was completed in November of 2018.
The debate over granting reparations to the descendants of the enslaved has intensified over the last decade, with universities and seminaries now instituting programs that directly benefit persons with ancestral ties to the enslaved. To discuss the debate over reparations, the Roberson Project invited University students, staff, and faculty members to participate in a “Reading Group” entitled, Perspectives on Reparations for Slavery in the Fall of 2021. The reading group was led and moderated by Dr. Andrew Maginn, Senior Research Associate and Program Coordinator for the Roberson Project.
