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https://www.washingtonpost.com/race-america/

Race & Reckoning

Stacy Kranitz for The Washington Post

SEWANEE, Tenn. — Reuben E. Brigety II gazed at the smashed tequila bottle found outside the front door of his family's campus home and seethed. The first Black vice chancellor and president of the University of the South knew on that fall morning that the perpetrators he calls "phantoms" had struck again.

He resolved then, after suffering indignities in silence, to call out these unknown intimidators in public. So he delivered, in quiet, stern and measured tones, an explosive speech here on Feb. 7 at the All Saints' Chapel that launched a wave of introspection for the school known as Sewanee.

“Chen Hall, our home, has been repeatedly vandalized by phantoms who came at night,” Brigety told the university in remarks <a href="https://new.sewanee.edu/campus-life/engaging/dialogue-across-difference/eqb-reflection-response/vice-chancellor-s-remarks/" title="new.sewanee.edu">recorded on video</a>. “They have trashed our lawn with beer cans and liquor bottles. They have left threatening messages on pilfered signs near our back door. And they have taken measures to ensure my family and I saw the indecent insults that they left behind.”

Brigety declared that he would forgive the phantoms but not give in to them. “The sanctity, the security and the dignity of my family are inviolate, and we are not leaving,” he said. And then Brigety summoned the university community — faculty, staff, students and alumni — to hold a dialogue about its values. “It is up to you to decide who we are, what we will tolerate and how we will live together,” he said.

Last month, another incident rocked Sewanee. On March 14, Brigety <a href="https://new.sewanee.edu/index.php?bigtree_htaccess_url=news%2Fincident-at-march-13-men-s-lacrosse-game%2F" title="new.sewanee.edu">disclosed</a> that a few Sewanee students attending a lacrosse match the day before had shouted the n-word and other racist epithets at a visiting team from Emmanuel College in Georgia. The visiting squad included African American, Asian American, Native American, White and Latino men, Brigety wrote. The Sewanee roster appears to be mostly White.

“So pronounced were the shouted slurs in the third quarter that the game officials on the field ordered that Sewanee fans be cleared before play could continue,” Brigety wrote in an email to the campus community. He and the athletic director apologized to the visitors after the match and pledged to investigate. Exactly how many students were implicated in the use of epithets was unknown. Hundreds walked out of class Monday, Brigety said, to demonstrate against racism.

These events have accelerated a moral and racial reckoning for a school founded just before the Civil War to serve as an academic force for a slaveholding society devoted to White supremacy. The reckoning began several years ago and intensified last year with Brigety's arrival.

Colleges and universities nationwide are reexamining their past and present — <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/james-madison-u-names-dormitory-after-founding-fathers-enslaved-servant/2019/02/08/3ee10718-2bbe-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html?itid=lk_readmore_manual_21" title="www.washingtonpost.com">renaming buildings</a>, removing statues or plaques that honored Confederate leaders or other advocates of White supremacy and acknowledging ties to slavery and the nation’s long history of racial discrimination.

[Johns Hopkins, benefactor of namesake university, was an enslaver]

Brigety’s Feb. 7 speech raised instant questions: Who were the perpetrators, what were their motives and what exactly did the threatening messages say? Brigety, in an interview last month at the house where he lives with his wife and two teenage sons, declined to give much detail.

“I will tell you that there were not any conventionally understood racial epithets included in them,” he said of the messages posted outside his house in October, “but neither was it a love letter.”

Sewanee, with about 1,725 undergraduates and another 75 or so graduate students, was founded by Southern Episcopal bishops and remains affiliated with the Episcopal Church. Bishop Robert S. Skirving of the Episcopal Diocese of East Carolina, who is university chancellor and chairs the Sewanee board of trustees, denounced the vandalism.

Citing the confidentiality of internal discussions, Skirving declined to specify what he had heard about the threats. But he said questions about race could not be ignored after the university’s first African American leader had been subjected to such incidents.

“It absolutely has a racial component,” said Skirving, who is White. “It’s not my story to tell. It’s his. He’s the person of color against whom these actions have been taken.”

There have been no arrests, and Brigety said he is not interested in pursuing an investigation.

[Georgetown plans to apologize for its role in slavery]

Brigety, 47, a native of Jacksonville, Fla., took office in June as Sewanee’s 17th vice chancellor after serving five years as dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Previously, he was U.S. ambassador to the African Union under President Barack Obama. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, holds a doctorate in international affairs from the University of Cambridge and recently had an article on power, tribalism and conflict risk assessment published in Foreign Affairs.

A self-described Anglophile, he is fond of bow ties and horseback riding — even, yes, fox  chasing — and has embraced the distinctive culture of academics and outdoor adventure found here on the wooded campus known as the Domain in a rural expanse of the Cumberland Plateau northwest of Chattanooga.

U.S. News & World Report ranks Sewanee among the top 50 liberal arts colleges. The university also has a school of theology and master’s degree programs in English and creative writing. More than half its students come from Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Virginia and North Carolina.

About 4 percent of undergraduates identify as Black or African American and 5 percent as Hispanic or Latino, according to federal data. One percent of undergrads are Asian American, 3 percent are multiracial and 4 percent are international. The school has always been overwhelmingly White. Its first Black graduate received a theology degree in 1965. The first Black student to receive a bachelor’s degree graduated in 1970.

Sewanee is pushing to diversify, a steep challenge for many liberal arts colleges. Financial aid will be crucial. Last year, the university announced that it will meet full financial need for all admitted students through a combination of scholarships, grants, federal loans and work-study opportunities. Under the previous policy, it would sometimes ask families to pay much more than they could afford. Sewanee’s annual charge for tuition, fees, room and board, without aid, will total $63,530 in the next school year.

Several students of color praised the academics here and many aspects of the social experience.

Lakeisha Phillips, 21, an African American junior who was born and raised in Germany, wears a black gown decked with pins to display her pride in Sewanee as she gives campus tours. The Order of the Gown, a group open to high-achieving students, is led this year by a senior from Myanmar.

Phillips pointed out that one of her pins signifies her allegiance to Ravenclaw, a house at the fictional Hogwarts school from the Harry Potter tales. The omnipresent Gothic stone architecture of Sewanee draws many Hogwarts comparisons these days from students and visitors.

Phillips describes herself as an outspoken advocate for the Black community on campus, active in student government and efforts to recruit more diverse students to the university. “I’ve really grown into my identity as a Black woman,” she said.

Some students report enduring racism and feelings of weariness.

Cameron Noel, 22, a Black senior from D.C., said he was walking on campus one day when some White men he didn’t know drove past and called him the n-word. He didn’t know where they were from. “I started yelling back,” he said. In classes with mostly White students, he said, it can be exhausting. “You don’t want to always be the spokesperson for racial equality,” he said.

When he heard about what happened to Brigety at his house, Noel said, “My initial reaction was, disappointed but not surprised.”

Klarke Stricklen, 21, a junior from Chattanooga, is vice president of an NAACP unit launched here recently. “Black students on campus feel racial tension every day,” she said. Sometimes, it’s seemingly small things, like a simple lack of acknowledgment from classmates. When she overhears others on campus seeking to minimize racial issues, claiming “This isn’t Sewanee,” Stricklen tells herself: “It’s not about who we think we are. It’s about who we’re going to be.”

Stricklen is a research assistant for the <a href="https://new.sewanee.edu/roberson-project/">Roberson Project on Slavery, Race and Reconciliation</a>, named for Houston Bryan Roberson, the first tenured African American professor at Sewanee. Launched in 2017, the project is a primary engine in the work of unearthing Sewanee’s history. It also sponsors forums such as a recent online discussion about how universities with historical ties to slavery might respond to the reparations movement.

“We have to reckon with our past,” Stricklen said. “There’s no hiding it.”

The facts, as the Roberson Project has documented, are clear. The cornerstone of the university was laid in October 1860, not long before the outbreak of Civil War. One of the university’s leading founders was Episcopal Bishop Leonidas Polk of Louisiana, an enslaver, who would become a Confederate general known as the “Fighting Bishop.” Polk’s portrait still hangs in the reception area of the Sewanee Inn.

“The University was the only institution of higher education designed from the start to represent, protect, and promote the South’s civilization of bondage; and launched expressly for the slaveholding society of the South,” Sewanee history professors Woody Register and the Rev. Benjamin King wrote in a <a href="https://new.sewanee.edu/roberson-project/learn-more/research-summary/">research summary </a>last year for the Roberson Project.

After the Civil War, Register and King wrote, Sewanee’s “identity as ‘a child of the Confederacy’ emerged in many ways: Those who held key leadership roles typically had been slave owners, defenders of slavery and secession, and Confederate military leaders; and some of the most consequential donors had been the owners or beneficiaries of some of the largest slavery-based plantations in the antebellum South.”

For a significant part of the 20th century, they wrote, “policies and practices on campus perpetuated Jim Crow, white supremacy, and mythologies about the honorable causes represented by the Confederacy.”

[Three JMU buildings once named for Confederates now honor African Americans]

In 1940, the historians wrote, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the university’s leadership fulfilled a pledge to build a campus memorial to a Confederate general, Edmund Kirby Smith. He was often celebrated for resisting surrender west of the Mississippi River as long as possible, and after the war he joined the faculty at Sewanee. The memorial stood in its prominent location on University Avenue until it was moved in 2017 to the university cemetery.

SEWANEE

The Confederate narrative is woven deeply into the backdrop of campus. In the soaring All Saints’ Chapel, a stained glass panel labeled “Reconciliation” until recently showed a bishop holding a Confederate battle flag next to another holding the U.S. flag. On University Avenue, a historical marker highlights a spot known as “Rebel’s Rest,” where, it was said, Bishop Polk resided before “the War Between the States.”

In September, the university’s board of regents issued <a href="https://new.sewanee.edu/news/university-takes-next-step-toward-equality-and-diversity/statement-by-the-board-of-regents/">a landmark statement</a> acknowledging that Sewanee “was long entangled with, and played a role in, slavery, racial segregation, and white supremacy.” The board also declared: “The University of the South categorically rejects its past veneration of the Confederacy and of the ‘Lost Cause.’ ”

[Caltech to rename campus buildings that had honored backers of eugenics]

The regents acknowledged that alumni with cherished memories of the school might see things differently. “Many will understandably say that they do not recognize their Sewanee in these words,” they wrote. “Others, however, will see the Sewanee of their experience captured all too clearly.”

Bishop Skirving, who is also a regent, said the university had been moving toward the statement but accelerated it last year amid <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/race-america/" title="www.washingtonpost.com">racial justice demonstrations</a> that swept the nation after George Floyd, a Black man, was killed in Minneapolis while in police custody. The statement stopped short of an apology or expression of regret, but Skirving said he would not rule out “the possibility of more explicit apologies or other language like that as we move forward.”

On March 29, the university removed the stained glass panel with the Confederate emblem. “There’s an urgency to it,” said the Rev. Peter Gray, the university chaplain. “It’s obviously a symbol that doesn’t belong in a space that is supposed to be a space of welcome.” Both flags in the panel will be replaced with landscape imagery, he said. The panel will be labeled “Reunification.”

By June, the university plans to establish a committee to further review building names and symbols around the campus and recommend changes. Brigety also wants to diversify faculty and staff, ensure that the university teaches its full and unvarnished history, and develop a truth and reconciliation program that would be a model for the South.

Bishop Robert C. Wright, the first African American to lead the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, said the atmosphere of the Confederacy hung so thick over Sewanee — the plaques, the building names, the portraits — when he visited it several years ago that he quietly resolved not to return until things changed. His diocese is one of 28 linked to the governance of the university.

A staunch supporter of Brigety, Wright said he now thinks the university has taken important steps forward, and he will gladly visit as soon as the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">coronavirus</a> pandemic permits.

Disturbed at what happened to Brigety, Wright said: “I’m looking for opportunities with other colleagues to join with one voice and say this has no place at Sewanee.” To be a trailblazer, Wright said, involves some hardship. “That goes with the territory,” he said. “But you know, it’s 2021.”

Several students said they were horrified to hear of the abuse Brigety endured. “I cried, and so did my mom,” said Zoë Mihalas, 18, a White freshman from Brevard, N.C.

“Enough is enough,” said Sam Everette, 22, a White senior from Mountain Brook, Ala., who played running back on the football team. “I was so disappointed that happened. It was really saddening to hear the vice chancellor was going through that.”

Everette also said he was glad to learn that the regents had renounced the Confederacy but somewhat incredulous that it took so long. “When it happened, I was like, ‘Wait. They haven’t done this yet?’ ”

By his own account, Brigety has taken flak as vice chancellor for various reasons. He imposed significant restrictions on student movement to establish a public health “bubble”  allowing the campus to operate in the fall and spring. Many students and their families chafed at those limits.

Early in the school year, others were suspicious of his enforcement of a zero-tolerance rule against drugs on campus, and critics alleged that he was also too zealous in attempts to curb student drinking. “Everything Sewanee stands for is at stake here,” one critic <a href="https://twitter.com/BustedByBrigety/status/1296547272751288332" title="twitter.com">wrote on Twitter</a> last August. “Don’t let @ReubenBrigety turn what we all loved into his personal police state.”

Brigety said he quickly adjusted after the uproar, and issues related to drugs and alcohol are now under review.

Whether those or other flash points fueled the animosity of the vandals that disturbed his family’s house is unclear.

“It’s not my job to figure out what these people meant,” Brigety said. But he pointed out that “generations of Black families have been terrorized under cover of darkness.” And he insisted that he would not stand for it.

Before he interviewed for the job here, Brigety said, he grilled the recruiter who contacted him on behalf of Sewanee. He wanted to be sure that the university knew what it was getting if it hired him. He would not be a spokesman for the Lost Cause.

“In a multicultural 2021, that won’t work,” Brigety said. “You can either embrace the Confederacy, or embrace the future, but you can’t do both.”

Education Writers Association 2016 national award for beat reporting, large newsrooms

Stanford University, bachelor's degree in English

Nick Anderson covers higher education and other education topics for The Washington Post. He has been a writer and editor at The Post since 2005.