Timeline highlights ‘Black Firsts’ at JMU

They are students, professors, employees, administrators and members of the Board of Visitors. They’re also Greek Life chapters, campus organizations, alumni groups, academic buildings, a study abroad program, a poetry center, and even a university holiday.

They’re JMU’s “Black Firsts,” pioneers and initiatives that paved the way for future generations of Dukes, and they’re an important part of our story.

JMU alumna Megan Mederios (’17, ’21M), a key contributor to the digital timeline Black Firsts at James Madison University, shared project insights with members of the university community during a Feb. 25 webinar as part of Black History Month. The event was hosted by the Charlottesville Dukes Alumni Chapter.

The Black Firsts timeline was created by undergraduate students Zaria Heyward (’20) and Qyaira Colbert (’20) for the Fall 2019 course “Black Studies and Black Spaces” under the African, African American, and Diaspora Studies (AAAD) minor. The torch was then passed to Mederios, a graduate assistant at The Cohen Center for the Humanities with an interest in digital projects.

“My job was to analyze where the project stood and kind of polish it up into a final look — make sure all of the images were consistent, fact-check all of the information, edit some of the writing so that it all fit, make it look beautiful and make it accessible,” Mederios said.

She said the project wasn’t without its share of challenges, starting with “What constitutes a first, and how do we verify that?” At a predominantly white institution like JMU, with a history of racial segregation, “there was not [always] a lot of open communication about people’s race and identity — for their own safety,” she said.

So, while Dr. Sheary Darcus Johnson (’70, ’74M) — for whom a building on campus was renamed in 2021 — is Madison’s first known Black graduate, she was not its first Black student, Mederios pointed out.

Other hurdles involved gathering information and maintaining image quality. “It was largely scrapbooks and other information in Special Collections,” she said, “but sometimes it was yearbooks, sometimes it was Breeze articles.”

Some of the timeline’s firsts, like Deborah Tompkins Johnson, the first Black woman to serve on the Board of Visitors (1988-94), are missing an image. “We had to decide, was it better to include it in the timeline without the photo, or to have the visual element?” Mederios said. “And almost always, we decided it was better to still include it.”

The current timeline ends with the naming of Harper Allen-Lee Hall in 2021 in honor of Doris Harper Allen and Robert Walker Lee, both longtime Madison employees and active members of the Harrisonburg-Rockingham County community.

Mederios said the project, which has received enthusiastic alumni support and engagement, has a need for continued donations and involvement.

“With more information and more people willing to donate their time to talk with AAAD students who might be interested in working on this project, it can expand and be so much more,” she said.