University of Virginia Library

THE RISE AND FALL OF MASSIVE RESISTANCE

By Gary Orfield

—ed.

The rapidly changing Virginia of the
mid-1960's was particularly striking when viewed
against the background of the bitter-end struggle
against the first steps toward integration in the late
1950's. It was a Virginia governor, a product of a
political organization that prided itself on
gentlemanly self-respecting southern conservatism,
who took the radical step of locking up school
buildings for 13,000 children in late 1958 to
forestall the contamination of token integration.

Virginia's initial reaction to the 1954 decision
had been calm. The governor called for peaceful
compliance. Opinion rapidly polarized, however,
as Negro leaders rejected attempts to find a
formula that would actually perpetuate the status
quo and as the militant black-belt segregationists
pressured Governor Thomas Stanley. The governor
responded by appointing a policy planning
commission, excluding representatives of the
state's urban "moderate-liberals" or of the
politically impotent Negroes, still kept from the
polls by the poll tax. Thus, while the border states
and even some parts of the old Confederacy set
about planning for integration, Virginians planned
their resistance. (Robbins L. Gates, The Making of
Massive Resistance).

A Statewide anti-integration group, the
Defenders of State Sovereignty, rapidly emerged as
a political power. Eschewing blatant racism in
favor of legalistic arguments, the Defenders called
on Virginians to preserve the sovereignty of the
cavalier commonwealth by striking from the state
constitution provisions requiring the maintenance

of public schools and forbidding state support of
private schools. These changes would open the
road for the creation of a publicly supported
system of white private schools, giving whites an
easy way to avoid integration and perhaps the
destruction of public education in Virginia.
(Gates) In six Southside counties local officials
underlined their willingness to abandon the public
schools by adopting school budgets on a
month-to-month basis, on the condition that the
schools remained totally segregated. (Gates) The
same attitude was echoed in the 1955 report of
the governor's Commission:

...the overwhelming majority of the people
of Virginia are not only opposed to
integration...but are firmly convinced that
integration...without due regard to the
conditions of the majority of the
people...would virtually destroy or seriously
impair the public system in many sections of
Virginia. (Gates)

The rising tide of segregationist sentiment was
greatly stimulated by the belligerent stand of
Prince Edward County. This Southside county,
with a majority of black students, was one of the
original districts involved in the 1954 Supreme
Court decision. Within hours of the Court's 1955
implementation decree the Prince Edward county
board voted to end financing for public schools
and set in motion a massive private-school
campaign as soon as integration began. (Benjamin
Muse, Virginia's Massive Resistance)

Recognizing diverse local conditions, the
Governor's commission recommended that each
locality be allowed to decide whether or not to
close its schools when integration took place. In
areas in which schools closed the commission
called for state tuition grants to help parents send
children to private schools. Under the plan, no
child could "be required to attend an integrated
school." (Gates) The report was widely approved,
and the necessary amendments to the state
constitution were adopted in a referendum in
January 1956. The state's severely limited
electorate endorsed the changes by a 2 to 1
margin. (Gates)

Nothing now seemed to stand in the way of a
program giving each community freedom to decide
whether to resist or comply with court-ordered
integration. This program, however, was to
dissolve in a deepening well of segregationist
feeling. James J. Kilpatrick, the young editor of
the influential Richmond News Leader, papered
the state with powerfully written editorials
advocating the legally absurd but emotionally
satisfying doctrine of interposition. His passionate
appeals, laced with historical argumentation,
discourses on the nature of the Constitution, and
even quotations from Jefferson, stirred the state's
profoundly conservative political leadership.
(Muse) The organization of Senator Byrd, built on
courthouse political machines and strongest in the
Southside, became a leading force in the growing
movement to force segregation even on those
communities willing to accept token integration.

When the Assembly convened the local option
plan was passed over, and much effort was spent in
forging an interposition resolution. Deciding that
the Supreme Court decision was actually an illegal
amendment to the Constitution, the Assembly
announced that Virginia had "never surrendered"
its power to maintain separate schools. (Muse) The
Assembly pledged:

...to take all appropriate measures, legally
and constitutionally available to us, to resist
this illegal encroachment upon our sovereign
powers and to urge upon our sister states...their
prompt and deliberate efforts to check this and
further encroachment by the Supreme Court...
upon the reserved powers of the states. (Muse)

Of the 140 legislators, only 10 opposed
interposition, most of them coming from the
Washington suburban area. (Gates)

Having resurrected an ancient and discredited
doctrine, the leaders of the Byrd Organization
proceeded to claim leadership in the entire South.
Senator Byrd called for uniting the southern states
in "massive resistance." In Washington the effort
ore fruit with the issuance of the "Southern
Manifesto," signed by approximately 80 per cent
of the members of Congress from the 11 southern
states.(Gates) The manifesto made resistance to
the Federal courts respectable across the South.

Massive Resistance proved to be political
salvation for the Byrd Organization. After
dominating state politics for three decades, the
"museum piece" political structure seemed to be
in trouble in the mid-1950's. Committed to honest
government by an aristocracy of Virginia
gentlemen, a government providing an absolute
minimum of public services, the Organization had
been threatened by a progressive Republican
candidate for governor in the 1953 election. In the
1954 legislative session, the organization had lost
control of the Assembly on a major issue for the
first time in years. (James Latimer, Virginia: A
Sense of the Past) Just when basic political change
seemed at hand the school issue emerged,
permitting the organization to use racial fears to
extend its clear domination of state politics for
another decade.

The issue was brought to a head by Federal
court decisions in the summer of 1956, which
ordered the admission of Negro students to some
schools in Charlottesville, where the University of
Virginia is located, and in Arlington, a prosperous
Washington suburb. The high probability that
these schools would be peacefully integrated and
the facade of total segregation throughout the
South would be breached was intolerable to
Virginia segregationists.

Governor Stanley called a special session of the
Assembly, a session devoted to creating the legal
framework of Massive Resistance. Rejecting local
option, the governor told the assembled legislators
that he could not "recommend any legislation, or
action, which accepts the principle of integration
of the races in the public schools." (Gates)

The nature of Virginia's response was settled
when Senator Byrd returned from a European trip.
At the large picnic that had become an annual
function at his Berryville orchard, Byrd announced
that Virginia must fight "with every ounce of
energy and capacity." (Latimer) "Let Virginia
surrender to this illegal demand," he told the
gathering of neighbors and Virginia politicians,
"and you'll find the ranks of the South broken...If
Virginia surrenders, the rest of the South will go
down too." (Muse)

With Byrd's decision to lead southern
resistance, Assembly approval of the Massive
Resistance program became inevitable. The
dominant attitude was expressed by a Southside
Congressmen: "We cannot allow Arlington or
Norfolk to integrate. If they won't stand with us, I
say make them stand." (Peltason, Fifty-Eight
Lonely Men) During its four-week session, the
Assembly enacted 23 laws designed to prevent
school integration and to harass the NAACP.

The legislative program was many-sided. Taking
advantage of the fact that Federal courts insist
that anyone claiming Federal rights must first
exhaust all procedures provided by state law to
obtain the rights involved, the Assembly created
complicated, difficult, and embarrassing
procedures for pupil transfer to discourage and
delay black parents. Hatred of the NAACP was
reflected in new laws setting up investigating
committees and requiring the group to register
with state authorities. (Muse)

The Governor's plan for withholding funds
from schools that integrated touched off the most
serious battle. State aid was 42 per cent of total
school expenditures in Virginia, and this change
would give the governor unprecedented power
over local school divisions. Over-riding objections
from the state board of education, Organization
stalwarts passed the bill. "Any integration,"
thundered State Senator Mills Godwin, Jr., "is the
key which opens the door to the inevitable
destruction of our free public schools. Integration,
however slight, anywhere in Virginia would be a
cancer eating at the very life blood of our public
school system." (Muse and Gates) Men who were
later to invoke the slogan of local control of the
schools in fighting desegregation requirements
showed slight concern about infringing on local
prerogatives to maintain segregation. Ironically,
Godwin was to be elected governor in 1965, just as
the school guidelines began to transform Virginia
education.

The school-closing plan passed only because of
over-representation in the Assembly of the rural
Byrd machine strongholds. Had the Washington
suburbs been fairly represented, an alliance of
northern Virginians, Republicans, and urban
representatives would probably have prevailed.
(Gates and Muse) The political voicelessness of
much of the Negro fifth of the Virginia population
helped to allow a reactionary political elite to use
the authority of the state government to impose
its views on a divided public.

After President Eisenhower's dispatch of
paratroopers to Little Rock in 1957, the Byrd
Organization resorted its unchallenged position in
state politics. Lindsay Almond, who had argued
the Virginia position before the Supreme Court
order, swept to victory over a moderate
Republican carrying almost two-thirds of the vote
in the gubernatorial contest. (Gates and Muse)
Almond's position was clear:

We will oppose with every faculty at our
command, and with every ounce of our energy,
the attempt to mix white and Negro races in
our classrooms. Let there be no
misunderstanding, no weasel words on this
point...We will not yield as long as a single
avenue of resistance remains unexplored.
(Gates and Muse)

The extreme position taken by Virginia
officials invited attack, and the NAACP answered
with the most ambitious program of school
litigation undertaken in any southern state. The
27,000-member Virginia chapter was the strongest
in the South, and Thurgood Marshall's NAACP
Legal Defense Fund was encouraged by the
existence of large areas of predominantly
moderate opinion to focus its energy on the
struggle to dismantle Massive Resistance. The
ensuing battle was short but intense. Because the
Assembly had made no pretense that it was doing
anything but attempting to frustrate execution of
the Supreme Court decision, the Legal Defense
Fund was in a strong legal position in the short
and intense court battle.

The only hope segregationists had was that
the ... district judges would refuse to take judicial
notice of the purpose and impact of the several
anti-integration laws, considering each law in
isolation and taking each at its face value.
Segregationists wanted the judges to assume, for
example, that the placement board would not
discriminate against Negroes, and that the threat
to close integrated schools was not designed to
keep them segregated . . . But with one exception,
the district judges were unwilling to ignore the
obvious purpose, design, and intentions of the
massive resistance laws. (Peltason).

Eventually, the vigor of the NAACP and the
sense of responsibility of the Virginians serving as
Federal district judges brought the ponderous
edifice of Massive Resistance tumbling down. In
the process, however, the NAACP was forced to
fight a protracted legal battle under harassment
from state authorities. Nevertheless, Legal Defense
Fund attorneys continued to win the decisive legal
encounters. As schools prepared to open in the fall
of 1958 the state had exhausted the possibilities
for delay, and school boards in three sections of
the state were under court order to desegregate.
(Muse, and Peltason). Governor Almond had
promised to close the schools rather than permit
integration, and now he faced the decision.

The day the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
rejected a final attempt to delay integration in
Warren County, the Governor took control of the
school and shut it down. A week later he closed
two schools in Charlottesville and then barred the
doors of all the high schools in Norfolk, the state's
largest city. (Southern School News, May 17.
1964). For a semester these schools remained
closed. In Norfolk, children of military personnel
stationed at the city's large bases were locked out
of schools that had been built with Federal
money, an action that generated a surge of
protests in Congress.

Philosophic statements about state sovereignty
and the attempt to find a "legal" way to avoid the
Supreme Court decision were fine with most white
Virginians, but closed schools were another thing.
With 13,000 children suddenly locked out of
public schools, and only a fraction of them able to
find places in private classrooms, opinion began to
change. By a small margin, the state PTA turned
against Massive Resistance, and the Committee to
Preserve Public Schools drew growing support in
the Washington suburbs. In Norfolk the school
closings were widely resented, and the city's
teachers refused to work in the segregationist

private schools. (Peltason).

Governor Almond was the captive of a
segregationist political organization trying to lead
a deeply divided state. Senate Byrd saw the issue
as Virginia's "greatest crisis since the war between
the states." Unless the Old Dominion stood firm,
the NAACP would "bring Virginia to its knees first
and then . . . march through the South singing
hallelujah." The battle was one to save the school
system and to "preserve the sovereignty of our
Commonwealth which is our most sacred
heritage." (Muse) Kilpatrick's Richmond News
Leader echoed the Senate and urged the rapid
establishment of private schools in threatened
communities across the state. (Muse)

Senator Byrd's stirring words were no longer
enough. The debate turned from one of
integration versus segregation to one of
maintaining public education versus closing the
schools. Moderates who would not support
integration began to coalesce in favor of keeping
schools open even if token integration was
required. The Virginia Education Association, the
white teachers' group, demanded a special session
of the Assembly to reopen the schools. In Norfolk,
for the first time in the South, white parents sued
state authorities, claiming that closing the city's
high schools while other Virginia schools remained
open violated the equal protection of the laws
clause of the U.S. Constitution. (Muse).

In January the years of struggle in the courts
came to a head. On January 19, Robert E. Lee's
birthday, decisions on crucial lawsuits were
handed down by both the state supreme court and
the Federal District court in Norfolk. The Virginia
high court held that School closing and
withholding of state education aid violated the
state's constitution, while the federal judge ruled
in favor of the Norfolk parents. (Muse). Virginia's
elaborate legal defenses against token integration
were smashed beyond repair.

The Governor remained under terrible pressure.
Although the legal structure of Massive Resistance
was in tatters, Senator Byrd advised Governor
Almond to interpose the sovereignty of the state
against the Federal court and force the Justice
Department to throw him in jail. Unless President
Eisenhower was willing to imprison a prominent
governor the year before a presidential election,
the Supreme Court decision would be a dead letter
in the South. If the governor were arrested, Byrd
promised heroism in the state and leadership of
the organization that had shaped Virginia politics
since the 1920's. (Washington Post, October 21,
1966). At first Almond seemed inclined to take
this course, telling a statewide radio audience that
he would "not yield to that which I know to be
wrong..." (Latimer).

In the end, however, Almond's respect for the
courts prevailed and he conceded defeat. In an
address to the Assembly he signaled Virginia's
submission:

It is not enough for gentlemen to cry unto you
and me, "Don't give up the ship!" "Stop them!"
"It must not happen" or "It can be prevented." If
any of them knows the way through the dark
maze of judicial aberration and constitutional
exploitation, I call upon them to shed the light for
which Virginia stands in dire need in this her dark
and agonizing hour. No fair minded person would
be so unreasonable as to seek to hold me
responsible for failure to exercise powers which
the state is powerless to bestow. (Muse)

Under Almond's leadership, the Assembly
rejected the segregationist proposal to close all
Virginia schools and repealed the most extreme of
the Massive Resistance laws. Reluctantly, and with
bitterness, the state leadership accepted token
integration. At the same time the Assembly made
certain that no white child would be forced to
attend an integrated school by repealing the state
compulsory attendance law and providing tuition
grants to finance private education. (Peltason).