End of Massive Resistance
Kenneth R. "Ken" Plum
 
        The panel recently assembled at the state capitol had made history fifty years ago.  They had been the black teenagers who desegregated the public schools in Warren County, Charlottesville, Arlington County, Prince Edward County, and Norfolk City.  At the request of the Center on Politics at the University of Virginia they had come to Richmond fifty years later to talk about the human side of the policy known as massive resistance.
 
        Virginia was part of the cases decided by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 in which the court found that separate schools were inherently unequal.  Although the courts expected desegregation of the schools to take place with "all deliberate speed," it took Virginia more than a decade and dozens more court cases to fully desegregate its schools.  The dominant political force in the state during the period, the Byrd Machine, adopted a policy of massive resistance in an attempt to keep Virginia's schools segregated.  Based on the arguments put forth by John C. Calhoun in his theory of interposition, massive resistance was an attempt to thwart the directives of the courts to desegregate the schools.
 
        The program at the state capitol a couple of weeks ago celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the end of massive resistance.  While the legal and political history of the period is interesting, the Center for Politics program put a face on the integration struggle.  Obviously the panel members were successful men and women who had endured despite the struggles they had to face with having to attend school with the police present, to endure the "N word" and other heckling, and in the case of Prince Edward County, having their public schools close for five years.  These former students who are now mature adults were brave in breaking down color barriers, but just as brave were the parents who encouraged and supported them.
 
        Appropriately attending the program as a panelist was former Governor Linwood Holton.  In his Inauguration Speech in 1970, Governor Holton, the first Republican governor in Virginia since Reconstruction, declared massive resistance dead.  He dramatically demonstrated his sincerity to the cause by enrolling his daughter, Anne, who is now the First Lady of Virginia, and her siblings in the predominantly black public schools of Richmond.
 
        The then evening version of the Richmond Times Dispatch, the News Leader, "relentlessly championed Massive Resistance and the dubious constitutional arguments justifying its unworthy cause," an editorial appearing before the conference observed.  For their sordid role in this one of Virginia's darkest chapters, the editorial writers of the Richmond Times Dispatch expressed their regret.  All who study the history of the Commonwealth must feel the same regret and commit to never letting this kind of thing happen again.