University of Virginia - African American Presence


Luther P. Jackson (1892-1950)

Enslaved and free laborers and craftsmen together shaped the landscape and constructed the buildings that transformed Thomas Jefferson’s visions of an academical village into reality. University policy forbade students from bringing enslaved servants with them, but each scholar was assigned to a hotel for meals and support services that depended heavily upon slave labor. Although Virginia law tried to prevent people of color from obtaining an education, some managed anyway. Isabella Gibbons, for example, owned by Professor Francis H. Smith, taught her children to read and later instructed others at a Freedmen’s Bureau school. A few faculty members or relatives taught Sunday school, and at least one daughter gave individual instruction.

After the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery, people of color continued to play the same support roles at the university. In 1870, despite concerted opposition, Virginia law mandated separate schools for white and black students. The law took a century to overturn.

In the twentieth century, people of color intensified efforts to segregate higher education. In 1935, Virginia Union University professor Alice Jackson applied to graduate school at UVa and was denied admission. The state legislature, worried about an NAACP-backed lawsuit, offered to pay out-of-state tuition for graduate education for black students. After World War II the university began inviting black lecturers such as historian Dr. Luther Porter Jackson, who delivered a conference paper in 1949 entitled, “Virginia and Civil Rights.”

Stimulated by national challenges to Plessy v. Fergusen, the University admitted its first black student, Gregory Swanson, to its law school in 1950. Others followed. In 1955, the year following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, black undergraduate students were admitted for the first time. Undergraduate women had to wait until 1970.

Today, the University of Virginia enjoys the highest African American graduation rate of any public university. The Office of African-American Affairs, based in a building named to honor Luther P. Jackson, supports their success.

Resources

University of Virginia. "The First Generation: Thirty Years of the Office of African-American Affairs at the University of Virginia," by Ervin L. Jordan.

Schulman, Gayle M. “Slaves at the University of Virginia.” Available as a .pdf file

Atima Omara-Alwala, Trailblazing Against Tradition: Desegregation at the University of Virginia 1955-75.