Cord Jefferson ’04 has won both an Emmy and Oscar. He has written for shows like “Master of None,” “The Good Place” and “Watchmen.” His directorial debut, “American Fiction,” was nominated for five Academy Awards and named a top 10 film of 2023 by the American Film Institute. Jefferson has also streaked across the Sunken Garden approximately 10 times.
A journalist and a filmmaker, Jefferson is no stranger to the entertainment scene. While serving as an editor for the entertainment blog Gawker, he wrote a column in 2013 satirizing “Black on Black” violence. That column would lead to him appearing on Chris Hayes’s “All In” on MSNBC, which helped propel his TV writing career.
Hailing from Tucson, Ariz., Jefferson arrived at the College nearly three decades after his father became the second Black student to graduate from the William and Mary Law School. Jefferson majored in sociology, which he says introduced him to new ways of thinking.
“I was just exposed to all these ideas that sort of really shaped how I view the world and shaped my politics and shaped my values,” Jefferson said. “I think it’s just, you know, when you’re that young, when you come to college, I think that one of the great things about college is that you can be really porous and just sort of take a lot of different ideas.”
Jefferson also touched upon his experience as a Black man at a predominantly-white institution.
“It was very white when I was here,” he said. “There was not a lot of diversity. And, you know, that was challenging. I never heard of lacrosse before I got here. And there’s all these dudes with swoopy hair carrying sticks with nets on the end. And I’m like, ‘What’s this?’ And it’s like, ‘It’s lacrosse, dude.’”
He also described his shock seeing the Confederate flag on display at the College.
“I remember getting into arguments with people about the Confederate flag when I went here because this was also the first time that I really spent a lot of time in the South,” Jefferson said. “I used to be right next door to a fraternity called Kappa Alpha and their sort of spiritual founder was Robert E. Lee. So they would be seen carrying Confederate flags and you’d have these kinds of parties where some dressed like Confederate soldiers. And I was like, okay, this is an interesting sort of thing that I had to sort of be around this.”
Reflecting on the current state of the College, Jefferson sees improvements in terms of the diversity of the student population and the extracurriculars offered. He especially noticed this when serving as the grand marshal at this year’s Homecoming parade.
“It was really nice to see in the parade, how it seems like there’s a tremendous amount of racial diversity,” Jefferson said. “It’s the fact that there’s two Bollywood dance groups and you had Black sororities and Black fraternities. I didn’t really feel like that this was a hyper diverse place when I went here. It’s nice to see that that is changing.”
While Jefferson believes his time here formed him as a person and a writer, he has yet to produce work directly based on the College.
“Everything that I write is so personal to me,” Jefferson said. “It’s so deeply personal and so I would say that in some ways it’s certainly inspired everything that I’ve done since I’ve been here.”
Despite that, Jefferson would be open to writing a movie set in a university setting similar to the College.
“I want to eventually do a movie about being a young person,” Jefferson said. “I think that I have thought about maybe trying to set it at a college campus similar to William and Mary. So I have a character that’s not here necessarily, but in a place like here.”
Jefferson is also aiming to help build up the College’s pipeline to the entertainment industry. He hopes to establish an infrastructure for sending grads to work in television and film that mirrors other schools.
“In entertainment, there’s so many people from Harvard, from the Harvard Lampoon, there’s so many people from like Yale,” Jefferson said “There’s all these people from East Coast schools who end up in entertainment. And I think that William and Mary has a bunch of really talented, wonderful people here. And I’d like to start building a pathway hopefully for an easier entry into show business.”
Despite his longstanding connection to the College, Jefferson never thought of himself as a good student. He once recalled his experiences at the College as a time of “getting in fights and cutting class.”
In particular, Jefferson remembers frequent fights with the football team.
“I was an angry kid,” he said. “I was an angry young man. I’m an angry old man now too, but I’ve learned to channel my anger in much healthier ways. But, I was just kind of rowdy. My friends were rowdy. There was a lot of fights with the football team.”
He considers it ironic that he was honored during this year’s homecoming football game when he did not have a good relationship with the team during his time at the College.
Still, Jefferson looks back fondly on the lasting memories he made at the College. One such memory took place during category-five hurricane Isabel. While all students were expected to evacuate, Jefferson and his friends decided to stay in Williamsburg.
“We rented a hotel room at the Days Inn I believe, and we bought a lot of beers. We brought a lot of DVDs to play on the DVD player, but we were idiots because within like two hours, the power went off. So we couldn’t watch DVDs, the beers all got warm, and so we’re sitting there and the entire school is empty, eating a cold pizza from Chanello’s wishing that we had actually got out of town instead of staying in,” Jefferson said.
Even with no power, Jefferson made the most out of the situation and decided to partake in one of his favorite activities — streaking across the Sunken Garden.
“The campus was empty, the hurricane was pouring down,” he said. “It was pouring down rain, it was windy. And we walked from the Days Inn through the storm to the Sunken Garden and streaked the Sunken Garden in the middle of Hurricane Isabel. There were like downed power lines — it was wildly unsafe getting there.”
Jefferson graduated with a 2.37 GPA and is a proud proponent of the saying “C’s get degrees.” Nevertheless, he wishes he had taken better advantage of his time at the College.
“My niece was going to college a few years back and she asked me, ‘what’s something you wish you knew before you went to college?’” he said. “And I said that never again in your life will you have four years where all you have to do is improve yourself. That’s all you need to focus on. All you need to focus on is reading books and talking to experts about things and having conversations with people who are also learning. Like it is four years of just becoming a better person. And I think that I squandered that in many ways.
He added that while he didn’t apply himself much, he was always a curious student. Jefferson considers himself fortunate that the College offered a liberal arts education where he could study a range of topics.
“I think it’s a shame when people go to college now and they sort of use it as like a white collar trade school almost where they’re like, ‘I’m going to be an accountant or I’m going to be a finance guy, so I don’t care about learning other stuff,’” he said.
Jefferson attributes much of his continued curiosity to the College.
“It’s inspired in me a lifelong desire to learn. I look back at my time here as not wasted, but I think that I did not use it to the best of my ability. And, I regret that because I think that this is a tremendous school and you get a great education here if you’re willing to apply yourself,” he said.
