Black History Month Spotlight: Jasmine Burton

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — She grew up in the Los Angeles area, so Jasmine Burton was well-acquainted with picturesque settings when she arrived at the University of Virginia for her official visit. Even so, her first look at Grounds left Burton spellbound.

“It was the most beautiful place I’d ever been to,” she recalled. “It was so green. It was vibrant.”

Her visit fell on Homecomings weekend in the fall of 2012, and Burton, one of California’s top young volleyball players, attended a football game at Scott Stadium.

“So it was just a perfect time to be there, and I remember I fell in love,” she said. “I committed maybe four days after my official visit. I had just never seen a place like it. It was so beautiful and diverse and green, and everyone seemed happy.”

She’d toured schools in California, including UCLA and Cal-Berkeley, “but it just felt like I would be going to my backyard,” Burton said. “I the idea of going across the country, trying something new, figuring out something in a place I’d never been before.”

More than a decade later, she’s still on the East Coast. Burton earned a bachelor’s degree from UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy in 2017 and a law degree from Howard University in 2020. She’s now a director at The Raben Group, a public affairs and strategic communications firm in Washington, D.C.

Away from the office, she’s a stand-up comedian who performs five nights a week at clubs in D.C. She takes Sundays and Monday off from comedy, “mostly because I like to go to church on Sundays and then rest and not use my brain as much,” said Burton, who lives near the Navy Yard in Washington. “And then Monday is the start of my work week, so I usually like to just dedicate that solely to work.”

Otherwise, though, she’s in perpetual motion. Or so it would appear.

“You know what’s so funny?” Burton said. “Everyone assumes I’m extremely busy, which is true, but I somehow still manage to get eight hours of sleep. And I think the sneaky thing in my life that has made all of this possible is the time-management skills I got from playing volleyball.

“When you’re playing a sport, especially at the collegiate level, you have to go to class, then you have to study, and then you have to go to practice, then you have to go out of town for weekends at a time. And so you really have to be able to execute in the small amounts of time and small amounts of hours that you have. And so for me, it finally feels like 24 hours is actually a lot of time. I work from 9 to 5, 9 to 6. I get a little dinner. I go perform from 8 to 9.30 and I’m home by 10, usually asleep by 11. So I get my eight hours every night, which is nice.”

Burton attended Louisville High, a Catholic all-girls school in Woodland Hills, Calif., and she said she was prepared in many ways for what she would experience as a minority student at UVA.

“Volleyball was and still is a predominantly white sport,” Burton said, “and I did go to predominantly white schools, so being in that environment never felt odd to me. I think what felt a little different, if I’m being candid, was that Charlottesville’s a lot different than Los Angeles.

“I had always been around white people, white women, white girls, and I never felt awkward or uncomfortable. I think Charlottesville was the first time I was very aware of my race, which was something that was very new for me. What I will say is my teammates played a huge role in making me feel comfortable. I’m discovering myself a little bit, I’m wanting to go to events thrown by Black sororities and fraternities, and my teammates would go with me. They were like, ‘Show us the life you live.’ So I was blessed to have teammates that kind of stayed with me on all walks of my life as I’m figuring myself out in Charlottesville, as I’m in this new environment around new people.”

Burton did not join a Greek organization at UVA, but she was part of Black Student Leaders in Policy. “It was a group founded in Batten, and it was just a way for Black students, because we were a small minority within Batten, to really get together and make sure we were reaching our full potential both in Batten and in the policy arena afterwards.”

As president of the Black Student Leaders in Policy, she participated in the Black Presidents Council. That brought together all of the Black students who were presidents of organizations at UVA, Burton said.

On the court, she starred as an outside hitter for the Wahoos, then coached by Dennis Hohenshelt. The ACC Freshman of the Year in 2013, Burton was a three-time all-conference section. She made the All-ACC third team in 2013 and the second team in 2014 and 2016. (Injuries marred her junior season.)

A former team captain, Burton ranks 12^th all-time at Virginia with 1,139 career kills. She still gets out and plays occasionally.

“I actually do a sand league every spring and summer,” Burton said. “So I still dabble a little bit, but I’m nowhere as good as I used to be. And sometimes I get really competitive and I have to remember that this is just a regular sand league.”

Burton went straight from UVA to law school. She’d explored the job market without finding anything that seriously interested her, and she knew that a law degree would expand her employment opportunities.

“There’s so many avenues you could go by going to law school,” Burton said, “and I loved that. And then, too, I wanted to know my rights. There were two places I always felt like I knew nothing: the doctor’s office and a courtroom. So I wasn’t going to med school, and I was like, I might as well try law school. And a lot of my friends were going as well. So I just wanted to learn more. I didn’t feel like I was done learning. I didn’t want to work yet. I still wanted to learn.”

At Howard, her fellow law students include former UVA track & field standout Peyton Chaney, who’s now a litigation associate in the D.C. area with a prestigious firm: Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom LLP and Affiliates.

“She was the year above me,” Burton said, “and it was so crazy seeing her there, because first of all Peyton is amazing. She is an example of anything you would want your kid to turn out to be. We’re still friends and we still speak and hang out to this day.”

Burton has been with The Raben Group since the fall of 2020. She works primarily with strategic planning, “so I don’t put my bar to use that much,” Burton said. “For some clients, I do give legal advice. I track cases, discuss the implications that certain decisions will have on people’s day-to-day lives.

“A lot of what we see right now is with [Donald] Trump’s executive orders, letting people know what implications that will have on them. Do you need to go into office? When will that start? Do you need to change your DEI positions? So a lot of that stuff is the only kind of legal work that I really do. Outside of that, it’s a lot of helping non-profits figure out their strategic direction in the next three to five years. A lot of these organizations have great missions and visions and then just need help executing and seeing what they can do within their financial constraints. And so that’s what I consult for, for lack of a better wording.”

Burton looks back fondly on her years at UVA.

“I think it was the true definition of what I believe college is like, which is that you’re learning so much about yourself and other people at the same time,” Burton said. “I lived in such a little bubble and silo when I was growing up. And so in college, I was able to learn more about myself, and I was able to learn more about the world. You’re able to see people from different walks of life.

“If anyone asked me if there’s a time in your life that you would go back to, every single answer would be UVA. I had the most fun ever. And outside of college, the part I loved the most was that my friends and I all lived in the same apartment complexes on Wertland Street. I miss being able to just walk to my friends’ house or after practice just going to my teammates’ house or us all meeting up at the same sandwich shop, because we all lived within 500 feet of each other. So I miss UVA a lot.”

She gets back to Grounds often and remains an ardent supporter of the Virginia volleyball program, whose head coach is now Shannon Wells.

“I know Shannon is probably sick of me,” Burton said, laughing. “I text her all the time. I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m in town again.’ I go to the spring games and I try to make it to at least one of the in-season games. They also come to D.C. a lot, and so I’m able to see them when they come to D.C.

“Shannon, even though she wasn’t my coach, has done an amazing job of making me feel like I’m a part of the program. It just brings back such fond memories going back for me. I love going back, and she’s always included me and let me sit in for practices. I was a member of the Batten Alumni Advisory Board, so I had to go back a lot for our quarterly meetings. So anytime I would [return to Charlottesville], I’d be like, ‘Hey, do you have a practice or anything I can go to?’ ”

Burton has yet to do stand-up in Charlottesville, but that will change this spring. She’s scheduled to perform at a Don’t Tell Comedy show on the night of April 25 at an area venue whose location will be announced that morning.

Her dream job? Burton didn’t hesitate before answering.

“I want to be a legal correspondent with my own show,” she said. “I think that’s why I started comedy. I want to blend all the worlds and take it to television. So hopefully in 10 years, I have a show similar to Jimmy Kimmel’s, but it’s the Jasmine Burton Show.”

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