William & Mary's first black residential students matriculated in 1967. Karen Ely, Janet Brown, and Lynn Briley - all women - lived together in the newly renovated basement of Jefferson Hall. Since then, African American representation at the university has increased to approximately seven percent of William and Mary’s undergraduate student body as of 2017.
In 2011, the three women were honored for the first time by the Hulon Willis Alumni Association during Homecoming Weekend. That same year the three were commemorated with a plaque which was placed in the basement of Jefferson Hall. Today the plaque can be found on the first floor of Jefferson.
Throughout the 2017-18 academic year, William & Mary commemorated 50 Years of African Americans in Residence with events around campus. During the 2017 Homecoming Parade, the Karen, Lynn and Janet served as the Grand Marshals. The same weekend, the women were presented with engraved bricks at William & Mary's Alumni House.
Janet Brown Stafer’s account of her experience as one of the three women who lived in Jefferson Hall can be found in Special Collection's oral history collection; “Historically, the responsibility for keeping men within the moral boundaries has somehow rested with women, by keeping the women in their place out of sight in the dorm locked away, was that helping to keep the men within their social moral boundaries? We were bearing that burden instead of putting the responsibility where it belonged with the men.”
]]>Jefferson Hall, constructed between 1920 and 1921, was built as a women’s dormitory and today houses co-ed undergraduate upperclassman located on Old Campus. The dorm is named for Thomas Jefferson, class of 1762.
The dormitory opened in September 1921 and contained a gymnasium, pool, parlors and apartments for the director of women and for female teachers and rooms for 125 female students. The gymnasium was used for functions such as dances and basketball games and was available to both men and women from 1922 to 1925 while Blow Hall was being built. The iron gates from the Capitol Building in Richmond, erected in front of Jefferson Hall facing Jamestown Road, were given by the D.A.R. as a memorial to Kate Waller Barrett and dedicated on April 30, 1926.
The first African-American co-eds in residence at William & Mary lived in the basement of Jefferson Hall in 1965. Jefferson Hall underwent renovations in the late 1970s to add more dorm rooms and was destroyed by fire on January 20, 1983, but the outer walls remained standing. The residence hall officially reopened on January 27, 1985, and was fully occupied by undergraduate students.
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