Gregory H. Swanson and the Integration of the University of Virginia School of Law
On September 15, 1950, Gregory H. Swanson enrolled in the LLM (master of laws) program at the University of Virginia School of Law. A graduate of Howard University Law School and a practicing Virginia attorney, his credentials had earned him unanimous approval for acceptance by the Law School’s graduate committee. When the University’s Board of Visitors (BOV) subsequently denied Swanson’s admission based on his race, he sued the University in federal court under the Fourteenth Amendment and won his right to enroll. Swanson attended the Law School during the 1950–51 academic year as the first Black student to integrate the University of Virginia and its Law School and to enroll on an integrated basis at any previously white law school in the former Confederacy. With an LLM degree, he hoped to teach. A native Virginian, Swanson believed that his admission to his state university would be “a triumph in the struggle to break down segregation and discrimination or to bring about equalization in education facilities.” Swanson’s attendance at UVA was transformative for the Law School, its student body, and its curriculum. His presence as a Black man in a previously all-white institution challenged the idea of a justly “separate but equal” society that had been taught in the Law School’s curriculum since the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case and had deep connections to the Law School’s founding principles. When Thomas Jefferson founded UVA more than a century earlier, he had not conceived of Swanson, or any other Black American, as a student. Jefferson’s ambitious goal, as David T. Konig has described in this volume, was to educate students for leadership and service to the new democracy he had helped establish. Within twenty years of the University’s founding, Jefferson expected that UVA alumni would constitute a majority in the Virginia legislature and carry the school’s doctrines to other states, thus leavening “the whole mass.” But Jefferson’s intentions for who would study at his university and lead his nation were narrow. The university he built was exclusively for white men, and it taught legal justifications for slavery. After emancipation, Plessy’s separate but equal principle further justified and entrenched this practice of racial exclusion.