The new funds helped Alice Jackson make her way to Columbia University in New York City, where she completed the master’s degree that she was barred from earning in her native state. The Virginia General Assembly responded to Jackson’s challenge to segregation by enacting a new law that would assist her, and other black Virginians, in going out-of-state to take courses for which there was no in-state equivalent to the courses available to white Virginians. Her application to the University of Virginia did not lead to her admission there, nor did it lead to litigation against her exclusion, yet it had a considerable impact on how Jim Crow operated in Virginia. The university would not admit her-nor would the state have permitted it to-and the lawyers for the NAACP decided not to press her case in the courts. In 1935, she was rejected on the basis of her racial identity. Before 1920, she would have been barred on the basis of her gender. In 1935 she applied for graduate admission to the master’s program in French at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Letter from Alice Jackson to the University of Virginia Rector and Board of VisitorsĪlice Jackson’s fight for admission into a public graduate program epitomized the era of higher education during the generation before the beginnings of desegregation-an era when black citizens launched efforts, albeit unsuccessful ones, to whittle away at black exclusion. When change came, it came first in those graduate and professional programs. Categorical exclusion from a wide range of programs, especially graduate and professional curricula, remained the rule. While segregated black access to higher education in the South was a tremendous advance over absolute black exclusion, black access in practice under “separate but equal” in no way brought equal access. In the 1920s, Chinese native Cato Lee not only lived on campus at VPI but also represented his school on the track team and the tennis team, and Art Matsu, whose father was Japanese, starred on the varsity football team at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. Virginia schools at this time are therefore better understood as “non-black” rather than “all-white.” Chinese cadets enrolled at Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington as early as 1904, and already by then Latino students from Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina had enrolled at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI) in Blacksburg. Asians and Latinos, by contrast, began to gain access to such schools long before World War II. Both before Plessy and for long afterwards, African Americans were categorically excluded from “white” public institutions of higher education. Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” public accommodations for blacks and whites were constitutional. Admittance into programs did not mean an immediate end to unfair and unequal treatment on campus, but by 1972 black students were able to enroll in Virginia in any curriculum and also live and eat in campus facilities.Ĭhinese student at Virginia Military Institute In 1935 Alice Jackson failed to win admission to a graduate program at the University of Virginia, but Gregory Swanson, with the help of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a ruling from a federal court, gained admission to the university’s law school in 1950. But during the 1950s and 1960s, the first black students entered various graduate programs at the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary, then undergraduate engineering programs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the University of Virginia, and finally general undergraduate programs at all historically white colleges and universities. Educational opportunities for blacks were vastly inferior to whites, and segregation in higher education was entrenched in Virginia through World War II (1941–1945). But the terminology of “separate but equal” eventually also created an opening for African Americans to demand educational opportunities and facilities equal to those available to whites. This ruling encouraged the Jim Crow era of legalized discrimination against blacks in the south. Ferguson, the court established a sturdy legal basis for segregation. Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” public accommodations for blacks and whites were constitutional in the 1896 case of Plessy v. The desegregation of higher education in Virginia was the result of a long legal and social process that began after the American Civil War (1861–1865) and did not end before the 1970s.
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