This story was reported and written by VPM News.
Five panels along the U.S. Civil Rights Trail were unveiled Tuesday at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg.
They tell the stories of some of the first Black women to attend the university, including the “Big Five” — a group of Black female students from the 1960s.
Kaye Savage, the first Black residential student to attend the university beginning in 1962, is mentioned on one of the panels. She recalled an awkward interview with the university’s provost that she and her parents were required to attend before the school would offer her admission.
“After talking for a few minutes and having tea, and being kind of superficially polite, I just let the provost know that a decision was not his to make,” Savage told VPM News on Tuesday. “I was a state student; I was finishing one of their high schools with honors.”
“Unless he wanted a lawsuit, I didn't think there was going to be a ‘no’ in my future,” she added.
As the only Black student in her high school class, Savage said, she’d previously been spit on by classmates; the microaggressions she felt from her peers at UMW were subtler. However, she said some staff members were welcoming.
“I got a lot of support from the people who worked in the dining room, who did the landscaping on the campus,” Savage said. “They were like, ‘Are you all right? Do you need anything? How can we help you?’”
But Savage felt isolated as one of the only Black students at UMW, so she transferred to Howard University in Washington, D.C., after her sophomore year. She said during her final year in Fredericksburg, two other Black students were admitted to the university.
Six years before she was admitted to UMW — and two years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling — Gladys White Jordan became the first Black student to apply for admission to the university. Despite her mother working as a housekeeper for then-president Grellet Simpson, Jordan was denied admission.
Frank White, Jordan’s brother, said Tuesday that while Simpson wanted to admit her, he told the family, “It's not up to me. We are under the University of Virginia. And any application would have to be sent to the University of Virginia.”
The Fredericksburg stop was added to the U.S. Civil Rights Trail in February, following a joint effort by Chris Williams, assistant director at UMW’s James Farmer Multicultural Center, and Victoria Matthews, tourism sales manager for the city of Fredericksburg.
“We tell George Washington’s story very, very well. We tell the Fredericksburg battlefields Civil War story very, very well,” Matthews said this week. “We do not tell — or did not tell — our Black history story very well.”
One of the new panels includes a depiction of UMW history professor James Farmer, who orchestrated the 1961 Freedom Rides aimed at desegregating bus travel. The Freedom Riders’ first stop was in Fredericksburg.
Williams was one of three students who got to go with Farmer to Washington when the professor was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, a year before he passed away. Williams was a James Farmer Scholar as a middle school student in Spotsylvania County and was also part of the Upward Bound program — inspired by another civil rights leader, C.T. Vivian.
“I feel like I'm a byproduct of two very influential civil rights icons,” Williams said. “Through their efforts and through their work, they created an opportunity for me to expand my educational access and opportunities.”
Steve Hanna, a UMW professor who helped create the online map detailing stops on Fredericksburg’s Civil Rights Trail, said about one-third of the markers in the city dedicated to telling Black history have been put up since 2020.
But he added there’s still a lot of work to do: Of about 340 historical markers across the city, 57 detail Black history. The stories of Jordan and Savage are now among the six historical markers in Fredericksburg that focus on Black women.
“Black history is American history,” Hanna said. “It’s part of our story, it’s all of our story.”
Disclosure: Christopher Williams is a member of VPM’s Community Advisory Board.
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