Massive resistance
Massive resistance was a political strategy created by American politicians Harry F. Byrd and James M. Thomson aimed at getting Virginia officials to pass laws and policies preventing public school desegregation, particularly after Brown v. Board of Education. Many schools and an entire school system were shut down in 1958 and 1959 in attempts to block integration.
This lasted until the Virginia Supreme Court and a special three-judge panel of federal district judges from the Eastern District of Virginia, sitting at Norfolk, declared those policies unconstitutional. Although most of the laws created to implement massive resistance were overturned by state and federal courts within a year, some aspects of the campaign against integrated public schools continued in Virginia for many more years.
History
Byrd Organization
After Reconstruction ended in 1877 and the local Readjuster Party fell in the 1880s, Virginia's conservative Democrats actively worked to maintain legal and cultural racial segregation in Virginia through the Jim Crow laws. To complete white supremacy, after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, Virginia adopted a new constitution in 1902 effectively disenfranchising African Americans through restrictions on voter registration and also requiring racially segregated schools, among other features. In the early 20th century, Harry Flood Byrd, a Democrat who served as Virginia governor, led the Byrd Organization.Continuing a legacy of segregationist Democrats, from the mid-1920s until the late 1960s the Byrd Organization was a political machine that effectively controlled Virginia politics through a network of courthouse cliques of local constitutional officers in most of the state's counties. The Byrd Organization's greatest strength was in the rural areas of the state. It never gained a significant foothold in the independent cities, nor with the emerging suburban middle-class of Virginians after World War II. One of the Byrd Organization's most vocal, though moderate, long-term opponents proved to be Benjamin Muse, who served as a Democratic state senator from Petersburg, Virginia, then unsuccessfully ran for Governor as a Republican in 1941 and became a publisher and Washington Post columnist.
Using legal challenges, by the 1940s, black attorneys who included Thurgood Marshall, Oliver W. Hill, William H. Hastie, Spottswood W. Robinson III and Leon A. Ransom were gradually winning civil rights cases based upon federal constitutional challenges. Among these was the case of Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, which was initiated by students to protest poor conditions at R. R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia. Their case became part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. That decision overturned Plessy and declared that state laws that established separate public schools for black and white students denied black children equal educational opportunities and were inherently unequal. As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby paving the way for desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement.
Gray Commission
A little more than a month after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown, on June 26, 1954, Senator Byrd vowed to stop integration attempts in Virginia's schools. By the end of that summer, Governor Thomas B. Stanley, a member of the Byrd Organization, had appointed a Commission on Public Education, consisting of 32 white Democrats and chaired by Virginia Senator Garland "Peck" Gray of rural Sussex County. This became known as the Gray Commission. Before the commission issued its final report on November 11, 1955, the Supreme Court had responded to segregationists' delaying tactics by issuing the Brown II decision and directing federal district judges to implement desegregation "with all deliberate speed." The Gray Plan recommended that the General Assembly pass legislation and allow for amendment of the state constitution so as to repeal Virginia's compulsory school attendance law, to allow the Governor to close schools rather than allow their integration, to establish pupil assignment structures, and finally to provide vouchers to parents who chose to enroll their children in segregated private schools. Virginia voters approved the Gray Plan Amendment on January 9, 1956.Stanley Plan
On February 24, 1956, Byrd declared a campaign which became known as "massive resistance" to avoid implementing public school integration in Virginia. Leading the state's conservative Democrats, he proclaimed "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." Within a month, Senator Byrd and 100 other conservative Southern politicians signed what became known as the "Southern Manifesto", condemning the Supreme Court's decisions concerning racial integration in public places as violating states' rights.Before the next school year began, the NAACP filed lawsuits to end school segregation in Norfolk, Arlington, Charlottesville, and Newport News. To implement massive resistance, in 1956, the Byrd Organization-controlled Virginia General Assembly passed a series of laws known as the Stanley Plan, after Governor Thomas Bahnson Stanley. One of these laws, passed on September 21, 1956, forbade any integrated schools from receiving state funds, and authorized the governor to order closed any such school. Another of these laws established a three-member Pupil Placement Board that would determine which school a student would attend. The decisions of these Boards were based almost entirely on race. These laws also created tuition grant structures which could channel funds formerly allocated to closed schools to students so they could attend private, segregated schools of their choice. In practice, this caused the creation of "segregation academies".
On January 11, 1957, U.S. district judge Walter E. Hoffman, in consolidated cases concerning Norfolk's schools, declared the Pupil Placement Act unconstitutional. However, this decision was on appeal as the next school year started. Nonetheless, Virginians could see that President Eisenhower was willing to use the US military to enforce federal court orders to desegregate after he federalized the National Guard and sent the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce a similar decision after Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High School in Little Rock to prevent the attendance of the black students who became known as the Little Rock Nine. In November 1957, Virginians elected Attorney General J. Lindsay Almond, another member of the Byrd Organization, to succeed Stanley as governor.
Closed schools
Governor Almond took office on January 11, 1958, and soon matters had come to a head. Federal courts ordered public schools in Warren County, the cities of Charlottesville and Norfolk and Arlington County to integrate, but local and state officials appealed. Local authorities also tried delaying school openings that September. When they opened late in the month, Almond ordered various schools subject to federal court integration orders closed, including Warren County High School, two City of Charlottesville schools, and six schools in the City of Norfolk. Warren County and Charlottesville cobbled together education for their students with the help of churches and philanthropic organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee. The larger and poorer Norfolk school system had a harder time—one-third of its approximately 10,000 students did not attend any school. A group of families whose white children were locked out of the closed Norfolk schools also sued in federal court on the grounds that they were not being granted equal protection under the law, since they had no schools. Ironically, a Norfolk parochial school, Blessed Sacrament, had accepted its first black pupil in November 1953, even before Brown.Moderate white parents throughout Virginia that fall formed local committees to Preserve our Schools, as well as conducting letter writing and petition campaigns. When Almond refused to allow Norfolk's six previously all-white junior and senior high schools to open in September, that local parents' group was renamed the Norfolk Committee for Public Schools. In December 1958 various similar committees statewide combined under an umbrella organization called the Virginia Committee for Public Schools. Furthermore, 29 prominent businessmen met with Governor Almond in that same month and told him that massive resistance was hurting Virginia's economy. Almond responded by calling for a "Pilgrimage of Prayer" on January 1, 1959.
James v. Almond was heard in November 1958, and the three-judge panel of federal district judges gave their decision on January 19, 1959, Virginia's traditional holiday celebrating Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, declaring for the plaintiffs and ordering that the schools be opened. On the same day the Virginia Supreme Court issued Harrison v. Day and found that Governor Almond had violated the state constitution by closing schools, despite the other provision which had required segregation, and which was invalid after Brown. While the Virginia Supreme Court found that funneling local school funds through the new state agency violated another state constitutional provision, it condemned the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown decision as showing lack of judicial restraint and respect for the sovereign rights of the Commonwealth and allowed the tuition grant program to continue through local authorities. Shortly thereafter, Edward R. Murrow aired a national TV documentary titled The Lost Class of '59 that highlighted the Norfolk situation. Nonetheless, Norfolk's government, led by Mayor Duckworth, attempted to prevent the schools' reopening by financial maneuvering, until the same three-judge federal panel found again for the plaintiffs.