Title: Moton School, Prince
Edward County, Closed
Source: the Richmond
Times-Dispatch
More informationMassive Resistance was a policy adopted
in 1956 by Virginia's state government to block the desegregation of
public schools mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1954 ruling
in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
Kansas. Advocated by U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd Sr., a conservative Democrat and
former governor who coined the term, Massive Resistance reflected the racial
views and fears of Byrd's power base in Southside Virginia as well as the
senator's reflexive disdain for federal government intrusion into state affairs.
When schools were shut down in
Front Royal in
Warren County,
Charlottesville, and
Norfolk to prevent desegregation, the courts stepped in and overturned the
policy. In the end, Massive Resistance added more bitterness to race relations
already strained by the resentments engendered by the caste system and delayed
large-scale desegregation of Virginia's public schools for more than a decade.
Meanwhile, Virginia's defiance served as an example for the states of the Lower
South, and the legal vestiges of Massive Resistance lasted until early in the
1970s.
At the midpoint of the twentieth century, Virginia maintained a legally sanctioned racial caste system. Its premise was that African Americans, slightly more than a fifth of the state's population, were inferior to all whites. No legal ties of kinship could exist between white and black Virginians, and all public activities were regulated by strict racial segregation laws. In the crucial area of public education, segregation was especially disadvantageous to black students. The discrimination was egregious—school facilities, educational materials, teacher salaries, and transportation in the separate black system were markedly inferior to those provided white students. African American children under this regime were denied many of the opportunities for economic advancement provided by public school education, and such conditions distorted the educational development of all students.
Title: "Hi, We Want a New
School! Strike!"
Source: the Richmond
Times-Dispatch
More informationDenied public support, African
Americans were often forced to raise their own funds to build schools. So,
beginning in the mid-1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), led by attorneys such as Oliver W. Hill and Thurgood Marshall, launched
a legal campaign of "equalization," challenging the material inequalities
between black and white schools. In 1950, however, the national NAACP
decided to stop funding the equalization suits in Virginia and other states
in favor of attacking segregation on constitutional grounds. In April 1951,
a student-led
strike protesting the poor quality of the black Moton High School
in Prince Edward
County resulted in Virginia's first direct legal challenge to
school segregation,
Davis et al.
v. County School Board of Prince Edward County.
Virginia's argument in favor of segregation, made by Attorney General J. Lindsay Almond Jr., prevailed in the federal trial court, but the NAACP appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Davis case was grouped with three similar cases from other states under the heading of Brown v. Board of Education. Almond and the other lawyers representing Virginia made the most extensive counterargument to the NAACP's case, but it failed to persuade the justices. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued its unanimous ruling that racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional.
Title: Byrd, Harry F. Sr.
(Painting)
Source: the Virginia Historical
Society
More informationInitially, Almond and Governor Thomas B. Stanley issued
statements accepting the court's ruling, but it was Byrd's response, which
declared the ruling an unconstitutional attack on states' rights, that set
the tone for events to come. As head of the Byrd Organization, Virginia's dominant
Democratic Party machine, the U.S. senator was an overarching leader who
drew critical support from white voters in counties with large African
American populations. In the autumn of 1954, white community leaders and
local government officials from those areas formed a political pressure
group, Defenders
of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, to preserve racial
segregation. Relying on its influence with the Byrd Organization, the group
called for the use of all legal and political means to block enforcement of
the Brown decision.
Although Stanley first spoke of appointing a biracial commission, he chose thirty-two state legislators, all white men mostly from the area south of the James River, to recommend a response to school desegregation. The Supreme Court gave little guidance in its May 1955 enforcement ruling, Brown II—only the ambivalent direction to proceed with "all deliberate speed." The burden of desegregation rested on individual black plaintiffs who had to bring enforcement suits in federal district courts. The goal of the governor's commission—called the Gray Commission after its chairman, state senator Garland Gray—was to restrict desegregation and to ensure that whites who objected could avoid attending desegregated schools. Appearing in November 1955, the Gray Plan proposed selective repeal of the compulsory school attendance law, establishment of pupil placement criteria, and provision of state tuition grants to students leaving desegregated schools to attend private segregated ones. The Gray Plan's underlying premise, local option, would permit some desegregation, however.
Title: Oliver W. Hill Debates
Massive Resistance Policy
Source: the Richmond
Times-Dispatch
More informationBy the time the General Assembly met
in January 1956, key Byrd Organization figures were advocating a coordinated
effort to block any desegregation anywhere in Virginia. Leaders such as
Congressman William Munford
Tuck argued against local option; only a unified resistance, they
held, could prevent the "mixing of the races." When the Arlington County
School Board members, headed by Elizabeth Pfohl Campbell, announced a plan
of phased desegregation, the General Assembly reacted punitively, depriving
them of their special elective status. In a series of lengthy editorials,
James Jackson
Kilpatrick, editor of the
Richmond News
Leader, expounded on the idea, drawn from antebellum southern ideology, that
the state could "interpose" its power to stop implementation of federal
court rulings. Acting on this belief, the General Assembly adopted a
resolution of interposition. Late in February, with segregationist momentum
building, Byrd made a public call for a campaign of "massive resistance"
against Brown.
In August 1956, Governor Stanley took the next step in defiance when he convened a special session of the General Assembly to act on a package of Massive Resistance legislation. Supporters of the new plan, dubbed the Stanley Plan, argued that the question resolved into a simple either-or proposition: just as one was either white or black under the caste system, one supported either segregation or integration. There was no middle ground. Most of the state's major newspapers, with the exception of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and its editor Lenoir Chambers, backed the uncompromising stance of Massive Resistance. As a first line of defense, the Stanley Plan created a state Pupil Placement Board to block assignment of black students to white schools using racial criteria. Next, the Stanley Plan enacted what would become the three strategic components of Massive Resistance. First, the governor would close any school facing a federal desegregation order. Second, the state government would attack the NAACP's ability to bring suits and harass black parents willing to serve as plaintiffs. Third, supporters of the policy created the Commission on Constitutional Government. With James J. Kilpatrick as publications director, the commission defended segregation and states' rights in the court of public opinion. With Confederate flags waving in the galleries, the legislators passed the Massive Resistance plan, though a significant minority favored staying with the local option.
As several local desegregation suits worked their way through the federal courts in 1957 and 1958, Virginia elected a new governor in an atmosphere dominated by Massive Resistance. Two special committees of the General Assembly held hearings in each locality where there was a suit. Although the committees called the black plaintiffs to testify, few were intimidated into withdrawing from their cases. Making speeches fulminating against the federal judiciary, Almond won the 1957 Democratic gubernatorial nomination. His Republican opponent, state senator Theodore Roosevelt Dalton, rejected Massive Resistance in favor of a plan of restricted desegregation. A skilled communicator, Almond convinced white Virginians that they could have both continued segregation and stronger public schools. Almond won the governorship with 63.2 percent of the vote.
Title: With Good
Reason: "Massive
Resistance in Virginia"
Source: VFH Radio
More informationThe inevitable
collision of Massive Resistance with the federal courts came in September
1958. Federal district court judge John Paul ordered black students admitted
to Warren County High School in Front Royal, and to a high school and
elementary school in Charlottesville. In Norfolk, U.S. district court judge
Walter E. Hoffman issued a desegregation decree affecting six white schools.
Almond closed all nine schools, locking out nearly 13,000 students. For the
white majority, the terms of the debate changed: instead of segregation
versus integration, now it was desegregation versus closed public schools.
The attempt to substitute segregated private academies for the closed public
schools was totally inadequate in the face of Norfolk's ten thousand
displaced students, while in the smaller communities of Charlottesville and
Front Royal, a sharp fight among whites ensued, pitting pro–public school
parents against backers of the segregated private efforts. White parents in
Arlington, Norfolk, and other cities formed large public school committees
and joined together on December 6 to form the Virginia
Committee for Public Schools, which developed into the largest
citizen organization involved in the school matter.
In addition to the middle-class parents in the school committees, Almond began to hear more influential voices of dissent about the school closings. At a December 1958 dinner meeting in Richmond, twenty-nine of the state's leading businessmen told him that the crisis was adversely affecting Virginia's economy. Almond chose to wait until two cases challenging the closing laws were decided—one in the federal courts and the other in the state's highest court. Ruling on the same day, January 19, 1959, both courts found the closings unconstitutional. Almond made a fiery broadcast in reaction to the decisions and called a special session of the General Assembly. Supporters of Massive Resistance expected a defiant last stand, but Almond surprised them with a measure to repeal the closing laws and permit desegregation. Accordingly, on February 2, 1959, with national press coverage, seventeen black students in Norfolk and four in Arlington County peacefully enrolled in white schools.
Title: Governor Almond Signs
the "Little Rock" Bill
Source: the Richmond
Times-Dispatch
More informationTo formulate a new plan, Almond
appointed a legislative commission headed by state senator Mosby G. Perrow.
This commission contained a majority who backed Almond's acceptance of
limited desegregation in place of Massive Resistance. Their program, called
the Perrow Plan, left the burden of desegregation on black parents with its
"freedom of choice" concept, repealed the compulsory attendance law, and
relied on the Pupil Placement Board, using ostensibly nonracial criteria, to
keep desegregation to a minimum. At the April 1959 special session, Almond
declared that it was time for the General Assembly to retreat from Massive
Resistance and adopt the new plan. Over the strong protests of Massive
Resistance advocates, Almond's plan narrowly passed. An attempt by Massive
Resistance forces to defeat Almond's supporters in the Democratic primary
that summer failed.
Though Massive Resistance by the state government was over, Prince Edward County's school board chose to close all its public schools rather than desegregate in September 1959. Using state tuition grants, whites established a segregated private school, while black students lacked any educational facility in the county. Not until 1964 did a U.S. Supreme Court ruling finally reopen the public schools in Prince Edward County. In the state as a whole, school desegregation proceeded at a very slow pace for almost a decade after the state officially dropped Massive Resistance. Only after the 1968 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Green et al. v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia, overturned the "freedom of choice" plan did large-scale desegregation take place.
Title: With Good
Reason: "Massive
Resistance"
Source: VFH Radio
More informationMassive Resistance and
its aftermath left a deep and lasting negative imprint on Virginia's system
of public education and race relations in the second half of the twentieth
century. By delaying effective desegregation until late in the 1960s, during
which a decade and a half of extensive, racially segregated suburban
development had occurred, it permitted the perpetuation of mostly segregated
schools in the state's major metropolitan areas. In several rural counties,
it provided time for substantial numbers of white students to withdraw to
private, usually all-white, academies. The commitment to integrated public
schooling was delayed and, in many cases, undercut. One positive outgrowth
of the mobilization of parents against the school closings was the inclusion
in the 1971 revision of the Constitution of Virginia of one of the strongest
provisions on public education of any of the fifty states.
First published: July 11, 2008 | Last modified: June 29, 2011
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