Seventy years ago, on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that would change American life: It declared that school segregation was unconstitutional.
The first reaction from Virginia Gov. Thomas Stanley, a son of Henry County, was serene and understated: “This news today calls for cool heads, calm study and sound judgment. I’m sure the people of Virginia and our elected representatives can find the right solution.”
That sure turned out to be wrong.
Eventually, U.S. Sen. Harry Byrd Sr., the real ruler in Virginia in those days, had had enough of “calm study.” He demanded action, and it wasn’t complying with the Supreme Court order, either.
See also: “The architect of Massive Resistance always had opposition. Here’s who dared challenge him.”
“If we can organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order I think that in time the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South,” Byrd declared. With that single sentence, Virginia plunged into an era that we now capitalize as Massive Resistance, an era in which Virginia revoked one county’s right to elect its school board members (because that school board, in Arlington, had announced it would integrate its schools), and wound up closing schools outright in four localities (Charlottesville, Norfolk, Prince Edward County and Warren County). In Prince Edward County, the public schools stayed closed for five years.
For those who think this period was a long time ago, they’re right — and also wrong. Seven decades later, we’re still dealing with some of the aftereffects of that era. Virginia still maintains a scholarship fund for people who were denied education during that time. Last year, the General Assembly expanded eligibility to descendants of those students, on the grounds that because the Massive Resistance generation was denied education, their children started off in a different place in life than they might have if their parents had been able to go to school. The state committee that oversees the program will meet next week to determine the details but so far 50 students have applied. Even under the previous criteria, there are still three students attending college now through this fund — at Liberty University, Longwood University and Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke.
We’re also still processing the Massive Resistance era in other ways. The state attorney general now works out of an office building named for Barbara Johns, the 16-year-old Prince Edward student who led a walkout that later led to one of the lawsuits that was rolled into the Brown v. Board of Education case. That didn’t happen until seven years ago, though. Five years ago, the Roanoke courthouse was renamed for Oliver Hill, who grew up in Roanoke and later was one of the lead attorneys in that suit. Three years ago, the statue of the main Massive Resister, Byrd, was hauled away from Capitol Square. A statue to Johns is currently being sculpted to be one of Virginia’s two statues on Capitol Hill in Washington.
There’s currently an effort to name the federal courthouse in Roanoke after Reuben Lawson, a Roanoke attorney who led legal efforts to desegregate schools in Floyd County, Grayson County, Lynchburg, Pulaski County, Roanoke and Roanoke County. The fact that these things have come about in the last decade shows how it’s taken us all these years to gain some historical perspective on who was right and who was wrong.
For a state that loves its history, we’re awfully selective about what history we study. The Colonial era and the Revolutionary era — we’re big on that. The Civil War — we’re big on that, too. We’ve all learned a lot less about other formative eras in Virginia history. The civil rights era — which ran smack against the Massive Resistance era — is one of those, yet it’s the one closest to us in time.
For those who want to know that era better, I heartily recommend the book “We Face The Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow” by Margaret Edds, a former Richmond-based journalist with the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk.
The Brown v. Board ruling did not come out of nowhere. It was the culmination of years of patient — and often frustrating — lawyering that gradually chipped away at the legal foundations of segregation until the time was right to bring down the whole structure.
Edds writes about how through the 1940s and ’50s, Hill and Robinson filed lawsuit after lawsuit that challenged the unequal conditions in segregated schools across Virginia. In 1940, a legal team that included Hill and Thurgood Marshall — later the nation’s first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice — won a federal case in Norfolk that granted equal pay to Black teachers. In 1942, Hill filed a suit in Sussex County challenging the school system there, which provided 12th grade education to white students but only offered Black students an education beyond the seventh grade at a “training school,” with no transportation provided. The suit was dismissed, but the county did, at least, start providing transportation to the training school. Like I said, this lawyering was often frustrating.
In 1948, a college student from Botetourt County took his seat on a train in Covington, which wouldn’t have been noteworthy except for this: He was Black, and he refused to give up his seat to a white passenger. Norvel Lee, that Howard University student, was also an Olympic athlete, just home from the London games. Lee was arrested, convicted and fined. He appealed, with Martin A. Martin, another lawyer from Hill’s firm, representing him. (Martin grew up in Pittsylvania County, by the way.) To the astonishment of everyone, the Virginia Supreme Court threw out Lee’s conviction. The ruling was on technical grounds: The state couldn’t enforce its segregation laws on the train because it was an interstate route and therefore came under federal jurisdiction. Bit by bit, though, the laws upholding segregation were weakened.
In 1951, Hill and Robinson were on their way to Pulaski to look into a school-related lawsuit there when they made a stop in Farmville to check out the recent hubbub about a student walkout at the county’s segregated school. That Farmville case became Dorothy E. Davis, et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia, which eventually was one of five cases combined at the Supreme Court under the heading Brown v. Board of Education. Years later, Hill said he regretted that he didn’t list Johns’ name first on the lawsuit; instead, he listed the 117 plaintiffs alphabetically.
Just as the Brown decision didn’t happen on its own, neither did the end of that shameful Massive Resistance. Much like segregation, it, too, was undermined one day at a time.
One problem with history is that we often reduce events to shorthand — just as the Brown case was more than a case out of Topeka, Kansas, Massive Resistance was more than just Harry Byrd and his lieutenants in the Byrd Machine. It’s important to remember that not everyone in Virginia supported Massive Resistance. Here are some events we ought to know better, and the people who made them happen:
Arlington defies Massive Resistance and gets stripped out of power
Elizabeth Pfohl grew up in North Carolina and was dean at what was then Mary Baldwin College in Staunton when she married attorney Edmund Campbell in 1936 and moved to Arlington.
At the time, Arlington was the only locality in Virginia that was allowed to elect its school board. Elizabeth Campbell was elected to that school board, making her the first woman elected to a school board in the state. She chaired the school board when the Brown decision came down, and while Byrd insisted on Massive Resistance to the court’s ruling, Campbell and others on the Arlington board insisted on compliance with the decision. In 1956, she announced a timeline for integrating Arlington schools. The General Assembly’s response was to strip Arlington of its power to elect its school board. Hold that thought.
Virginia’s business community privately rebels against Massive Resistance
Stuart Saunders was president of the Roanoke-based Norfolk & Western Railway system. In December 1958, when Massive Resistance was at its height, he and other business leaders around the state met in Richmond with Gov. Lindsey Almond and delivered a message that the segregationist governor didn’t want to hear: Massive Resistance was bad for business.
Saunders went around the room to ask the 29 attendees to speak their minds. As he recounted later in an unpublished paper, “We made three points: (a) massive resistance was doomed to failure, (b) this program would produce untold harm to the Commonwealth and (c) it would seriously affect the economy and image of Virginia.”
Virginia’s business community might have been conservative, but it was conservative in a very different way than the Byrd Machine was. Virginia governors had been accustomed to the business community being in lockstep with their program. This was an unprecedented breach, and Almond did not take it kindly. “The governor delivered another fire and brimstone speech in which he dressed us down,” Saunders wrote. “He shook his finger at us and said he would never accept integration in the public schools of Virginia. The meeting broke up in that atmosphere. However, within a week we realized that we had accomplished more than we thought. In a few days, the governor showed moderation of his hard-nose advocacy of massive resistance. He has since acknowledged that this meeting was influential in changing his mind.”
Norfolk newspaper leads editorial attack on Massive Resistance
While most Virginia newspapers enthusiastically defended segregation, the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk was different. Its editor, Lenoir Chambers, thundered against Massive Resistance. “We cannot continue this way,” he wrote as 1959 began. “The state is bound by every obligation of governmental principle and human dignity and decency, and its own self-interest, to find a better policy than the one we live under.” A year later, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials.
Arlington and Norfolk parents challenge school shutdown in court — and win
Edmund Campbell was born in Lexington; his father had been the next-door neighbor to Robert E. Lee when the former Confederate general was president of what later became Washington & Lee University. Campbell graduated from law school there and eventually wound up in Arlington, where he was instrumental in securing the county the right to elect its school board. Later his future wife, Elizabeth Campbell, would get elected to that board.
As an attorney, Edmund Campbell represented Norfolk parents whose students had been locked out of classrooms by the school shutdown. Both a federal appeals court and the Virginia Supreme Court sided with parents in Arlington and Norfolk; Virginia’s school shutdown, at least in those localities, was overturned. On Feb. 2, 1959, Arlington and Norfolk became the first localities in Virginia to integrate their schools.
Today there’s a Campbell Elementary School in Arlington, named to honor both Edmund and Elizabeth.
Ailing Botetourt County legislator casts deciding vote for integration
While the courts allowed Arlington and Norfolk to integrate, the General Assembly needed to pass legislation to make that happen statewide. This was not easy, seeing as how the legislature was dominated by Byrd disciples. The debate over how far to take Massive Resistance had created a fissure in the Byrd Machine that never healed. The solution, such as it was, was to allow integration, but also to allow localities to fund tuition grants for students whose parents didn’t want them to attend integrated schools. (This is one reason “vouchers” are doubly controversial in Virginia today; whatever their modern intent, they remind many of this 1959 tuition grant plan that was set up to get around integration.)
The legislative leader of this program was state Sen. Mosby Perrow of Lynchburg, and the key fight was going to be in the state Senate. By now, Virginia was not acting with “cool heads, calm study and sound judgment.” Thousands of people crowded into Capital Square to voice their opposition to anything that weakened segregation. The vote in the Senate was going to be close, too close. Those on the moderate side were also short-handed, because state Sen. Stuart Carter of Botetourt County had recently undergone abdominal surgery and could not be present. Or so everyone thought. As Virginius Dabney writes in “Virginia: The New Dominion,” as the climactic vote began, Carter “was brought into the chamber on a stretcher.” He cast the deciding vote that integrated Virginia schools.
That was in 1959.
It still took those lawsuits by Reuben Lawson, starting in 1960, to integrate schools in six localities in western Virginia, and lawsuits by others elsewhere.
Not until 1964 did Prince Edward County finally reopen its schools, a decade after the Supreme Court’s decision first came down.
In this week’s newsletter: Early voting trends
I write a free weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out every Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. You can sign up for that or any of our other free newsletters on our newsletter page. Here’s some of what I deal with this week:
- Early voting trends across the state as the June 18 primaries approach.
- Voter registration this year is slower than in previous presidential years; why that’s probably bad news for Democrats.
