Good Morning POU! We continue our look on how racists fought school integration. From Monday’s post, we continue with how school integration was fought in Virginia.
Governor James Lindsay 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 (Lane High School and Venable Elementary School), and six schools in the City of Norfolk. Warren County (Front Royal) 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.
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 3-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 3-judge federal panel found again for the plaintiffs.
Segregation Academies
Public schools in the Commonwealth’s western counties that lie outside the Black Belt, and have much smaller black populations, were integrated largely without incident in the early 1960s. By the fall of 1960, NAACP litigation had resulted in some desegregation in eleven localities, and the number of at least partially desegregated districts had slowly risen to 20 in the fall of 1961, 29 in the fall of 1962, and 55 (out of 130 school districts) in 1963. However, by 1963, only 3,700 black pupils or 1.6% of Virginia’s black student population attended integrated schools.
For example, Warren County High School re-opened as a de facto all-black school after no white students enrolled. Their parents had opted instead to send their children to the John S. Mosby Academy, one of many segregation academies — private schools opened throughout the state as part of the massive resistance plan.
Freedom of Choice plans
Multiple school systems replaced massive resistance with “Freedom of Choice” plans, under which schools allowed families and students to opt to attend the public schools of their choice. This way, schools were able to comply with court rulings against segregation, while remaining partially or fully segregated in practice.
In New Kent County, a black parent, Calvin Green, sued the county school system to implement a more effectual desegregation scheme. This resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County that freedom of choice plans were unconstitutional.
How the resistance still causes segregation today
Most segregation academies founded in Virginia during Massive Resistance are still thriving more than a half century later and some like Hampton Roads Academy, the Fuqua School, Nansemond-Suffolk Academy and Isle of Wight Academy continue to expand in the 21st century. Enrollment at Isle of Wight Academy now stands at approximately 650 students, the most ever enrolled at the school. In 2016 Nansemond Suffolk Academy opened a second campus, that includes an additional 22,000 square foot building for students in pre-kindergarten through grade 3. All of these schools had officially adopted non-discrimination policies and begun admitting non-white students by the end of the 1980s and like other private schools, are now eligible for federal education money through what are known as Title programs that flow through public school districts. However, few blacks can afford the high cost of tuition to send their children to these private schools. In some cases their association with “old money” and past discrimination still cause some tension in the community, especially among non-whites and students of the local public schools. Their racist past may cause black parents who can afford the tuition to be reluctant to enroll their children in these schools.
The abandonment of public schools by most whites in Virginia’s rural counties that lie within the Black Belt and white flight from inner cities to suburbs after the failure of “Massive Resistance” has ultimately led to increasingly racially and economically isolated public schools in Virginia. In total, as of 2016 there were 74,515 students in these isolated schools, including 17 percent of all black students in Virginia’s public schools and 8 percent of all Hispanic students. Many of these isolated schools are inner city schools in Richmond, Norfolk, Petersburg, Roanoke, and Newport News. In contrast, less than 1 percent of Virginia’s non-Hispanic white students attended these isolated schools.