OUR MISSION
The Kennerly School was torn down in 2010 and is now a grassy field.
That “grassy field” will soon be home to the SEWANEE PRAISES monument.
In 1960, this blank space at the corner of what is now Palmetto and Magnolia Avenues was anything but empty. It was an animated and cherished place in the lives of Sewanee's Black St. Mark's neighborhood — the home of the Episcopal St. Mark's Mission Church, the Belmont "social club," and the two-room Kennerly School (grades 1-8).
After the University of the South formally abandoned segregation, the church and social club were not maintained, fell into disrepair, and were demolished by the early 1970s. The school building was later repurposed as an outpost of Franklin County's Head Start program and was torn down in 2010.
OUR GOAL is to design and construct a commemorative "outdoor classroom" on the site of the segregated Kennerly School, built in 1949 and demolished in 2010.
Photo of William Kennerly,
founder of the Kennerly School in 1949.
Our Mission and Vision is to recognize, honor, and preserve the history of Sewanee's Black St. Mark's community and its century-long commitment to educate their children for full personhood and citizenship rights.
In doing so, this project will help arrest the erasure of local African American history and memory from the Sewanee landscape by partnering with the people rooted in that Black community and enlisting their creative resources and time-tested resilience to build a new monument that revives and sustains their memories and experiences — first for the benefit of their descendants and then of all others who pass through our rural college town, today and in the future.