Massive Resistance, Virginia Against Brown

On the seventeenth of May, nineteen fifty-four, the United States Supreme Court handed down Brown versus Board of Education and declared racially segregated public schools unconstitutional. Virginia's response was one of the most aggressive in the nation. Senator Harry F. Byrd Senior, the dominant figure in Virginia politics for three decades, issued a manifesto calling for what he termed massive resistance to the ruling. One hundred and one Southern members of Congress signed the document. In Virginia it became state policy.

In the fall of nineteen fifty-eight Governor J. Lindsay Almond ordered the closure of public schools in Warren County, Charlottesville, and Norfolk rather than allow any degree of integration. More than thirteen thousand students found their schools locked. Some families found private alternatives. Many did not, particularly Black families in Prince Edward County, where the schools stayed closed for a full five years, from nineteen fifty-nine to nineteen sixty-four, the longest school shutdown in American history conducted in the name of segregation.

The legal and social architecture of massive resistance eventually collapsed under sustained litigation, most of it organized by the NAACP and fought in federal courts. The Supreme Court struck down the school closures in nineteen fifty-nine. Prince Edward County's schools were finally reopened by federal order in nineteen sixty-four, a decade after Brown.

The origins of the legal challenge that became Brown are partly Virginian. One of the five cases the Supreme Court consolidated under that name was Davis versus County School Board of Prince Edward County, filed in nineteen fifty-one by sixteen-year-old Barbara Johns, a student at the all-Black Moton High School in Farmville, who led a student walkout to protest the school's overcrowded and decrepit conditions. Virginia's student sparked the case. Virginia's government then spent years fighting the verdict.