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UVa Library Press Releases
Papers of Civil Rights Pioneer Who Was Denied Admission Come Home to University of Virginia Library
So far as your rejecting my application
because I am a Negro is concerned, I will discuss
that further with you when you have itemized the
“other good and sufficient reasons”
upon which it was rejected.
--Alice Jackson, in a letter to the University’s
Board of Visitors, 1934
By 1934, the University of Virginia had been accepting female students to its graduate programs for nearly 15 years. Still recovering from the backlash that came with this policy (and its affront to views on the proper education of a “Southern gentleman”), the Board of Visitors received an application from Alice Carlotta Jackson, a 22-year-old Richmond native. Her application and the decision it prompted changed the state’s history.
Alice Jackson was the first African American to
apply to a Virginia graduate school. She received
a letter from the U.Va. board that rejected her
on the basis of race as well as “other good
and sufficient reasons.” She wrote back, asking
for detail so she could address those mysterious
reasons, and her letter touched off a passionate
and public debate that led to the passage of a law
that paid black Virginians to attend graduate school
out of state. That historic correspondence, and
60 boxes of related papers, photographs and other
documents pertaining to her later distinguished
career as an educator, were recently given by her
family to the U.Va. Library.
“There is a certain poetic justice”
that the papers will have a permanent home at U.Va.,
her son, Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Julian
T. Houston, said of the family’s decision
to donate them to U.Va. “It enables her to
achieve in death that which she sought but was denied
in life.”
Jackson, who became Alice Jackson Stuart with a
later marriage, went on to study at Columbia University
and became an influential college teacher at historically
black colleges for some five decades. She died in
2001, at the age of 88.
When her U.Va. application was rejected, her challenge
was taken up by the NAACP, and one of her lawyers
was Thurgood Marshall, later to become the first
African-American Supreme Court
justice. To resolve the case, the Virginia General
Assembly established a special tuition supplement
for African Americans to attend schools outside
of Virginia. While the law was eventually overturned
by the U.S. Supreme Court, its impact stayed with
Stuart the rest of her life.
“That experience was a defining moment in
my mother’s life,” Judge Houston said.
“It taught her the importance of standing
up for her beliefs, even when she knew that, merely
because of the color of her skin, she would not
succeed.” “[She] was a wonderful mother
and teacher and a person of great courage, and she
deserves to have her papers preserved under the
best conditions possible,” he said.
Stuart earned an English degree from historically
black Virginia Union University in 1934. After a
year of further study at Smith College in Massachusetts,
she returned to Richmond and became an instructor
at Virginia Union at the time of her U.Va. application.
The collection “will be of great value not
only to scholars studying Southern civil rights
and education issues, but to all Virginians,”
said University Librarian Karin Wittenborg. “The
Jackson family has deep roots in Virginia and a
long history of contributions to the state. We are
thrilled and honored by the family’s decision
to donate this important collection.”
The Library’s Director of Special Collections,
Michael Plunkett, said that the papers will immediately
enhance the research of undergraduate and graduate
students at the University’s Carter G. Woodson
Institute for Afro-American and African Studies.
Students are already working on an extensive Web
archive of Stuart's career. Jackson’s papers
add considerably to an already extensive archive
on civil rights and African-American history collections
at U.Va.
In 1990 the Virginia General Assembly passed a resolution
honoring Alice Jackson Stuart for her courageous
act in the 1930s.
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LINKS:
For a digital version of this release and images
to go with a news story: http://www.lib.virginia.edu/press/press_releases.html
For the Carter Woodson Institute’s online
project about Alice Stuart Jackson: http://www.virginia.edu/woodson/projects/kenan/jackson/jackson.html
