"Swanson said in the Post article that he had known “there might be reactions, no matter how covert, to my admission, but I felt I was adequately prepared to meet them. There was no incident, however. I was well received and courteously treated.” But in an Oct. 5, 1950, letter to one of his Howard friends, Swanson revealed that he also felt uneasy. “I have not been able to detect any perceptible indications of hostility or bias; it is one of those things in the under-current. You can’t put your finger on it, but you know that it is there.” When Swanson applied to UVA, graduate-level desegregation was on the horizon. The 1948 Supreme Court case Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma established that states had to provide black college students with access to schools of equal quality, or admit them to schools designated for whites. After the decision, plaintiff Ada Sipuel, a black prospective graduate law student, was admitted to Oklahoma’s law school because the state did not already have such a program available for African-Americans. Since Virginia had the state’s only graduate legal program, Darden and Law Dean F.D.G Ribble ’21 began planning for a qualified applicant like Swanson shortly after Sipuel, according to Professor J. Gordon Hylton ’77, an expert on the Law School’s history. Two other cases involving race in graduate education, Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Board of Regents, were pending at the Supreme Court when Swanson’s application came to the attention of University leadership. UVA waited for decisions in those cases — both of which were decided in June 1950 in favor of the African-American plaintiffs. Despite these decisions, the University took the public position that it could not admit Swanson because of his race and denied his application. In the midst of a financial crisis, school officials feared that integrating proactively would lead to a backlash from lawmakers who held the purse strings, and that white students might enroll elsewhere. So the University would only admit Swanson through a court order, Hylton said. The University’s lawyers, Charles Venable “Ven” Minor ’25 and Virginia Attorney General J. Lindsay Almond Jr. ’23, maintained the position as the case progressed that the court ruling be limited to graduate students. Spottswood Robinson, Swanson’s principal lawyer, originally pushed for the entire University to be integrated, Hylton said. Though that didn’t happen, Swanson was still the first student known to break the color line at a college in a former Confederate state."