Amelia Isaacs ’26 has won the Gregory H. Swanson Award, given in honor of the first Black student to attend the University of Virginia.
Dean Leslie Kendrick ’06 will present the award to Isaacs on Wednesday at 4 p.m. in Caplin Pavilion at an event celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Former UVA Rector George Keith Martin (College ’75), a Law School lecturer, will deliver the keynote address.
Already a practicing attorney in Virginia, Gregory Hayes Swanson applied to the Law School to pursue an LL.M. degree in 1949. While his admission was supported by the school’s faculty, it was opposed by the University’s Board of Visitors. However, after winning a federal lawsuit, Swanson enrolled at UVA Law in the fall of 1950, making history in the process.
To commemorate his legacy, each year the Law School honors a student or students who demonstrate the qualities that Swanson embodied, including courage, perseverance and a commitment to justice.
For Isaacs, perseverance was required early in life. Growing up in Miami, her parents divorced when she was young. A few years later, her mother began experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia, and one of her sisters would later be diagnosed as well, leading to a childhood that could be “isolating” at times, she said.
“I had, from a young age, to learn how to basically do everything by myself,” Isaacs said.
After her mother’s diagnosis, she was taken in by an aunt. While these early years were very challenging, Isaacs said they also forged within her a desire to help children whose life experiences also left them dealing with a sense of hopelessness
“I’ve known what it’s felt like to be alone and what loneliness and lack of supervision can drive a young person to do,” Isaacs said. “I want to be someone who can help those kids, help them get themselves out of a situation that they don’t need to be in, a situation that no child should ever be in.”
Isaacs graduated from Florida State University in 2019 with a degree in political science. When she began researching law schools, she realized UVA offered the environment she was looking for.
“UVA was a very unique place that provided me not only with opportunity, but it also provided me with community,” Isaacs said, adding that she appreciated the “individualized” attention students receive and the smaller classroom settings.
“When I got in, it was a no-brainer. If I could go back 1,000 times, I wouldn’t change it once,” she said.
