Volume 10 Number 027

Massive Resistance - II

Lead: The reaction of the Virginia political establishment to the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools was called massive resistance. The plan was the inspiration of the Byrd Machine.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote from the Birmingham jail in 1963 that “privileged groups rarely give up their privileges voluntarily.” Perhaps nowhere has that best been demonstrated than Virginia in the 1950s. The news that the U.S. Supreme Court had unanimously declared segregated schools to be inherently unequal, therefore unconstitutional, was greeted throughout the white South with a combination of unbelief, fear, and defiance. To achieve unanimity on the Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren dealt with the constitutional question first and delayed the process of implementation. The South had time to comply or defy. Except for North Carolina, which devised a system of token and isolated desegregation, for the most part the South chose defiance. As it did in 1861, with equally lamentable results, Virginia led the way.

From the 1920s to the mid-1960s, power in the Commonwealth resided in the Organization, commonly known as the Byrd Machine, named for its key figure, U.S. Senator and former Governor Harry Flood Byrd, Sr. of Winchester. The Machine’s base of power was that band of counties south of the James River known as the Southside. Its business was agriculture, specifically tobacco cultivation. Its population was split pretty evenly between disenfranchised and poorly educated African Americans and lots of very nervous whites. The Byrd machine played on white fear of black progress. In return, Southside whites supported the Machine. Through artful design of legislative districts, the Southside controlled the Virginia General Assembly and from the Southside came the scheme known as massive resistance. Next time: schools at threat.

At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

Resources

Bartley, Numan V. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950’s. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.

Ely Jr., James W. The Crisis of Conservative Virginia: The Byrd Organization and the Politics of Massive Resistance. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1976.

Hamilton, John Alfred. “Prince Edward’s Massive Resistance.” Nieman Reports 53 (1999): 141-147.

Lassiter, Matthew D. and Andrew B. Lewis. The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

Mayer, Michael S. “Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy.” Journal of Southern History 68 (2002): 740-743.

Martin Jr., Waldo E. Brown v. Board of Education. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1998.

Morrow, Lance. “Prince Edward and the Past.” Time 134 (1989): 58-59.

Norton, Mary Beth, et al. A People and a Nation. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994.

Smith, J. Douglas. Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

“U.S. Constitution.” .

Wilhoit, Francis M. The Politics of Massive Resistance. New York, NY: George Braziller, 1973.

Wolters, Raymond. The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Copyright by Dan Roberts Enterprises, Inc.