Professor Mark Hansen researches the untold story of Cora Belle Jackson, AB 1896, UChicago’s first Black graduate.

The University of Chicago student body was racially integrated on the very first day of classes in 1892, but just barely. Its first cohort included a single Black student, Cora Belle Jackson. When she graduated in October 1896, she became the University’s first Black alumna (or alumnus). So it says in the FAQs on the University’s website. So it was noted in the exhibition Integrating the Life of the Mind: African Americans at the University of Chicago, which was presented in what is now the Regenstein Library’s Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center from 2008 to 2009. Cora Jackson’s enrollment and graduation are the entirety of the information the University has previously given about her—and nearly the entirety of the information it ever compiled about her. Of the path that brought her to the University of Chicago and of the life she led afterward, there has been hardly a word.

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