Alice Jackson Stuart

In August 1935, Alice Jackson, a twenty-two-year-old English graduate from Richmond, applied to study for a master's degree at the University of Virginia. No Black woman had ever applied to the university's graduate school, and Virginia's segregation laws barred her. The university rejected her application without explaining why. Her rejection, backed by the threat of a lawsuit from the NAACP, became an early test case in the long legal campaign against segregated higher education in the South.

She was born on June 2, 1913, in Richmond, Virginia, in the early morning, according to the time kept in astrological files. Her father was a pharmacist, and her brother, James E. Jackson, later became a leading figure in the American Communist Party. Her Sun is in Gemini, with Mercury and Saturn also in Gemini, all in the twelfth house. Gemini is the sign of language and learning, and Jackson studied and later taught English. The twelfth house concerns hidden struggles and the work of institutions that operate out of sight, and Saturn there describes obstacles that must be faced quietly and with endurance.

Gemini is also her rising sign, with Pluto in the last degree of Gemini in the first house. Pluto in the first house describes a person whose life becomes an instrument of change, often without seeking it.

Uranus, retrograde in Aquarius, sits in her ninth house, the area of universities, higher education and law. Uranus is the planet of sudden breakthroughs and challenges to the established order, and in the ninth house it describes someone whose story disrupts the institutions of learning. Her application forced Virginia to respond. Within months, the state created graduate programs for Black students at Virginia State College, and in 1936 it passed the Dovell Act, which paid tuition for qualified Black students to study outside the state rather than admit them to white universities. It was a half-measure, but it was a concession to pressure that she had started.

Her Moon is in Taurus in the eleventh house of groups and causes, with Venus in Taurus and Mars in Aries also there. The eleventh house describes alliances and movements, and Jackson's case drew support from the NAACP and from student activists who publicized her rejection.

She went on to earn her master's degree in English at Columbia University in 1937 and spent her career as a teacher, at Bethune-Cookman College and in high schools. Jupiter, retrograde in Capricorn, in her eighth house, describes long-term rewards that come slowly.

She died on June 13, 2001, at eighty-eight, a week after her grandson graduated from Harvard. In 2012 the Library of Virginia honored her as one of its Virginia Women in History. The Gemini planets made her a woman of letters; the Uranus in her ninth house made her a pioneer.