In the South, colleges grapple with historical markers; Silent Sam falls at UNC

Shadé Shepard recently attended an orientation session addressing the slave-owner connections of her new college, Sewanee. Also known as the University of the South, the liberal-arts school in the Tennessee mountains was conceived by slave owners who didn’t want their sons going North for an education, and many ex-Confederates taught there after the Civil War. “I appreciated them being blunt about it,” said Ms. Shepard, an 18-year-old African-American first-year student from Washington, D.C. Life on the predominantly white campus “will definitely take some adjusting,” she said, though so far, people have been welcoming. The toppling of a Confederate statue by protesters on Monday at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the latest skirmish in an intense debate over the future of such monuments and imagery on southern campuses. Institutions from Virginia to Mississippi are trying to come to terms with statues, markers and building names linked to their Confederate past, without alienating alumni and donors.

While Sewanee removed Confederate banners from the All Saints’ Chapel and moved a general’s monument to a cemetery, the campus still has stones commemorating Confederate officers and a stained-glass window bearing the Confederate Seal in the chapel. “We are all wrestling with this in one way or another,” said John M. McCardell Jr., vice chancellor at Sewanee. He said he has to walk a fine line between acknowledging the school’s history while no longer paying homage to “the Confederate shadow that looms over our institution.”

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