Irene Boehm, Sports Editor
Driving an ESPN Senior Writer and New York Times bestselling author around Sewanee in my mud-covered Bronco was not on my 2026 bingo card. However, last Monday, I had the opportunity to do just that. Swog set a perfect Sewanee scene for my interview with Wright Thompson, who visited Sewanee last week to discuss his book about the cruel murder of Emmet Till: The Barn, The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. I invited Thompson to meet me at the football field for the interview, to share a slice of Sewanee sports history, figuring he’d want to see the oldest stadium in the South.
Cold drizzle quickly made it clear that it was in our best interest to conduct the interview indoors, which meant the football field press box: a comfortable spot for two sports-obsessed writers. Once seated, Thompson and I connected quickly on account of our Southern boarding school backgrounds. This led straight into a discussion on Southern roots, culture and history.
“If the University of the South isn’t capable of honoring both a dead Confederate soldier buried on the campus, and the history of all the Black Tennesseans who got rolled under the wheel of this place,” Thompson told me, “if you can’t do both, earnestly, with love in your heart, then not only is there no future for the University of the South, there is no future for the South.”
“And honestly, there’s something beautiful about that,” he continued. “The idea that Sewanee is supposed to not be proud to be in the South is insane… I mean, it’s the University of the South, and so you would want a place like this to be at the very forefront of figuring out how we live together…. Right?”
His words echoed off the walls of the press box. I had never considered before the power Sewanee has to embody the proper balance between historical progress and cultural pride.
“And what about Sewanee students?” I added. “How do you interpret the power college students have to promote change at Southern universities?” Thompson was quick to mention Ellen Witten, who was a senior at Rhodes College when she wrote a thesis on the Emmett Till case. Ellen Whitten is the granddaughter of John Whitten Jr., the lawyer who defended the killers of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. In 2024, she donated a collection of her grandfather’s previously secret papers, including the damning notes exposing the killer’s stories as lies, to Florida State University. Ellen’s willingness to explore hard truths about her own family helped Thompson’s own search for facts about the murder and its erasure from Mississippi history.
“Ellen adores her grandfather. and talks about him in a beautiful, loving way, but also tells the truth. It’s what Patterson Hood from the Drive-By Truckers called the duality of the Southern thing, which is that not only can two things, two opposing things be true, they almost always are.”
After a wonderful 30-minute conversation in the ladybug-infested press box, I had one last place I wanted to take Thompson. We discussed Nike Jordans and Ford trucks as we walked to my car. As I pulled out of the gravel lot behind the field, Thompson pointed out how many Broncos, 4Runners and Jeeps he had seen on campus. “And each has a driver stereotype accompanying it,” he said. This made me chuckle. Deciding not to “dox” myself in my white Bronco, I swiftly turned to discussing recent historical changes on campus.
I drove past the EQB monument, the island at the intersection of University and Texas avenue. I described the monument’s transformation from Confederate icon to a symbol of Sewanee’s commitment to inclusivity, which resulted from the 2018 relocation of the memorial to Confederate General Edmund Kirby-Smith. In 1865, Kirby-Smith was the last Confederate general to surrender to Union Troops. In the war’s aftermath, he became a biology professor at Sewanee, where he lived until his death in 1893. More than 30 years later, the United Daughters of the Confederacy asked for permission to honor Kirby-Smith on Sewanee’s section of what was then called the Dixie Highway. In 1940, a pillar bearing his likeness was erected at the intersection of Texas and University avenues and dedicated by the then Vice Chancellor Alexander Guerry. In 2018, that memorial was relocated to Kirby-Smith’s grave in his family’s plot in the Sewanee Cemetery, and a new EQB plaque was installed by then-Vice Chancellor John McCardell. The monument now includes the declaration that it is intended to be “a fitting reminder to the Sewanee community—a more diverse and inclusive one than any of the founders could have envisioned—to carry on its work of imagining and reimagining a great university.”
I turned right on University, then left on Georgia, pulling into the Georgia lot across from Stirlings. We parked and walked towards the narrow path winding into the University cemetery. I led Thompson to the Kirby-Smith family section and pointed out the relocated Kirby-Smith Memorial, mounted on identical stone as the pillar where it had once anchored the Sewanee’s main street.
The wind created a woodsy ambiance that made silence comfortable as I watched Thompson read. “Donated by the Daughters of the Confederacy”.
We carefully stepped out of the stone-lined family section, and I talked about Sewanee’s Roberson Project on Slavery, Race and Reconciliation as I led Thompson towards our final stop. Launched in July 2017, The Roberson Project’s mission is “to gather and give a more complete historical account of this university, the town of Sewanee, and all its people — one that sheds light on how slavery and its legacies have marked our history and that acknowledges the contributions and sacrifices of all who have shaped Sewanee’s past and present.”
I explained how the Roberson Project team recently restored a fractured gravestone “bearing only the inscription ‘Our Mammy’” along with a death date in 1879. Last year, the project determined the grave belonged to Mahala Ward, a black nurse and caregiver for the white Kirby-Smith family. It is the only grave of a black community member located in what was the “whites only” section of the University Cemetery. Last fall, The Roberson Project brought a headstone craftsman to the Mountain to rebuild the headstone, which now stands upright and is supported by metal sheathing.
We approached that grave. I felt the same mix of anger and comfort that welled up when I first saw it. Thompson stared at the stone, and we stood in silence. I sensed that Thompson felt remorse for the decades that solitary grave had lain in pieces, unidentified, but also his appreciation for the work the Roberson Project had done to restore both the stone and Ward’s identity as a member of Sewanee’s community. I could only imagine the profound understanding Thompson holds in moments like this, after years spent uncovering the cruel truths of Emmett Till’s story. I feel privileged to have shared some of the important work being done to tell the full history of The University of the South.
I drove Thompson back to the football field where another Bronco, this one green, waited for him.
On Tuesday evening, I attended Thompson’s final event on the Mountain: his book reading at Convocation Hall. I was lucky to be seated with Lee Hancock, another journalist, Sewanee alum (C ’81), and current advisor to The Sewanee Purple. When School of Letters director Justin Taylor introduced the writer, he acknowledged Hancock’s help in bringing Thompson to Sewanee. Like Thompson, Hancock has roots in the Deep South and has experienced defining moments in recent Southern history.
“One of my earliest memories was of the riots and what followed during the integration of Ole Miss. It’s probably stuck with me because my dad had gone to campus to teach law classes, and my mom was worried sick. We could hear the pop of tear gas canisters through our open windows, even though we were more than a mile away. Afterward. I remember my father getting mad when National Guardsmen sent to Oxford to restore order stopped us at checkpoints when Daddy drove us around town,” she told me. “I learned pretty early how places bear the weight of what happens in them and how it gets just heavier when it’s passed down in silence.”
Thompson stepped to the podium, cutting a decidedly different figure in his hunter-orange half-zip, trucker jacket and bright yellow Nikes than the multiple bishops and other Sewanee grandees gazing down from the oil portraits on Convocation’s walls. “It’s amazing what people will do for free pizza,” he began, prompting laughter from the audience (pizza was offered at the event). As chuckles died down, he began reading. He alternated the book’s harrowing scenes with personal anecdotes, many of which served as evidence of the strings that connect all of us in the South, for better or worse.
“In fact, I found out that one of the Ole Miss students who shot up the sign commemorating Till is the grandson of the woman who made the cotton gin that weighed Till’s body down in the river,” he told us, adding that the bullet-riddled metal sign marking the place where Till’s battered body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River is now in the Smithsonian and its replacement is bulletproof.
We were also treated to stories from Thompson’s time spent with inspiring figures such as Rev. Wheeler Parker, Till’s cousin and best friend, who was only 16 when he witnessed Till’s kidnapping.
“I have always had an incredibly difficult relationship with the idea of God. I have always really struggled with that. And then I met Reverend Parker,” Thompson told the hushed crowd. “He is so full of grace and love and forgiveness, and honestly, I spent so much time around him that it fundamentally changed my own belief in God.”
His admission of how his Episcopal childhood and adult doubt morphed into belief was sparked by an expression of gratitude from a Sewanee resident whose family has been part of the black community here for generations. She spoke softly, but the shakiness of her words carried the heavy emotions behind 63 years of experiencing Sewanee through the lens of hidden black history.
“I want to thank you for having this conversation. I was born and raised in Sewanee. I was born in the hospital in 1963,” she said. “My mother told us stories of picking cotton, but I stayed here because I love this place.”
For me, this testimony was extraordinary. She was vulnerable, and her words meant more knowing that she works in University Health Services. Though her family endured discrimination that continued into her own lifetime, she stayed here and is a vital part of healthcare accessibility on campus. “I think prayer is what we need,” she told Thompson.
The room was silent. Thompson paused before responding. “This book exists to me as a prayer that we might one day be united as a South…that we might all find a way to have a unified tribe. I think this is such a critical moment for that,” he said. “There’s only one place called The University of the South; it feels incumbent on a place like this to exhibit what it means to be Southern. If there is going to be a South, let it start here, let it start at the University of the South.”
Whether you were a student there for extra credit, a professor or a townsperson whose family endured the most disappointing times in Sewanee’s past, the sense was palpable that we’d just heard a calling. It connected all of us and all of Sewanee, including all the dour portraits and everyone who ever learned, worked, and lived here, but weren’t given a place on that historic building’s walls.
The University of the South has the power to tell history in its fullest form; it is up to all of us who love this place to seek out the truth of the past and tell it fully to build a sustainable future for the South.