The Beloved Community

Abstract

The Beloved Community Reuben E. Brigety II (bio) The distinction of my being the first African American vice-chancellor of the University of the South is at once utterly irrelevant and of profound importance. My race (or gender, or age, or any other identifying characteristic that defines me) is immaterial to my ability to perform my duties as vice-chancellor. COVID, for example, does not care that I am Black. Over the last year, all that mattered was my ability to lead our community through the difficult challenges of maintaining an in-person educational experience in the midst of a global pandemic of biblical proportions. The same is true with regard to the tasks that lie ahead. Ensuring competent administration, managing our University’s finances, strengthening our academic programs, articulating a vision for our future, bolstering our collective commitment to live out our shared values — these are all tasks that belong to every vice-chancellor, and I am no different in that regard. As my predecessors have done, I will devote myself fully to meeting them for the benefit of our University and for future generations of Sewanee students. [End Page 716] On the other hand, the fact that I am the first Black (indeed, the first non-white male) vice-chancellor is of profound importance. As the greatest of Southern writers, William Faulkner, once wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In other words, the past continues to define our present, even in ways that we do not realize or do not care to admit. As the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation of the University of the South has pointed out, one of the animating reasons for the founding of our University in 1856 was to demonstrate that a slaveholding society could be learned, humane, and Christian. Our founders gathered huge financial pledges for the University from the most powerful slaveholding plantation owners of their day. Our founders were either apologists for, or active participants in, the battle to establish and sustain the Confederate States of America, whose mission could not have been clearer: to break from the Union in order to preserve the institution of slavery and the ideology of white supremacy that underlay it. The articles of secession of most of the states in rebellion made that clear, as did CSA Vice President Alexander Stephens in his famous “Cornerstone Speech” delivered in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861: [The Confederacy’s] foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. For nearly a century after the second founding of our University in 1868, our University continued to embody this foundational principle that “the Negro is not equal to the white man” by its [End Page 717] stubborn refusal to admit African Americans as students. Our first African American graduates from the School of Theology, Joseph Green and William O’Neal, were awarded their degrees in 1965. Nathaniel Owens was the first African American to earn a bachelor’s degree from the College of Arts and Sciences in 1970 — a year after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and just three years before my birth. From a more personal perspective, it is certain that the University I now have the privilege to lead would not have admitted my father, Dr. Reuben Brigety Sr., on account of his race. He graduated from Morehouse College in 1965 and became the first African American to graduate from the University of Florida School of Medicine in 1970, the same year that Nathaniel Owens graduated from Sewanee. As one of my predecessors, Dr. Edward McCrady, the longest-serving vice-chancellor in the history of our University, wrote in an open letter to the community in March 1962 (when my father was a freshman at Morehouse): The chances of our ever having any Negro faculty members are too remote for me to worry about. In...