"In 1949, Gregory Hayes Swanson took his first step toward integrating the University of Virginia and becoming a civil rights hero with a radical act: applying to a graduate program. The Law School initially accepted the 25-year-old attorney’s application, but the official response by the University of Virginia Board of Visitors in July 1950 was to the contrary: “The applicant is a colored man. The Constitution and the laws of the State of Virginia provide that white and colored shall not be taught in the same schools.” Swanson, a Virginia native from Danville, was already practicing in Martinsville, Virginia. Having obtained his law degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C., he needed a master’s in law to be eligible for a prospective teaching job. He had no other choice but to apply to UVA if he wanted to pursue the advanced degree in his home state, where it would be less expensive to attend. No Virginia university offered graduate training to black law students. So he sued. Famed civil rights attorneys Thurgood Marshall, Oliver Hill, Martin A. Martin and Spottswood Robinson of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund assisted Swanson in the lawsuit, which played out in federal court in Charlottesville on Sept. 5, 1950. His admission to UVA, were it to happen, would be “a triumph in the struggle to break down segregation and discrimination,” he said in a personal correspondence. After a 30-minute trial and deliberation, a three-judge panel decided Gregory Hayes Swanson v. the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia in Swanson’s favor. He registered for his law classes 10 days after the decision, in time for the start of the school year."