Good Morning POU! This week we will look at the length’s racists went in order to prevent public school integration after the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court ruling.
Massive resistance was a strategy declared by U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia and his son Harry Jr.’s brother-in-law, James M. Thomson, who represented Alexandria in the Virginia General Assembly, to get the state’s white politicians to pass laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation, particularly after Brown v. Board of Education.
Harry F. Byrd Sr.
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.
In the early 20th century, Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966), a Democrat, former Governor of Virginia, and the state’s senior U.S. Senator after World War II, led what became known as 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.
Harold Boulware, Thurgood Marshall, and Spottswood Robinson III in 1953 conferring during Brown case
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 (legalized) 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.
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.
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 decision of these Boards was 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”.