Virginia's Civil Rights History.

Virginia's Civil Rights history has been a long one, and it continues to this very day. From the slave revolts to the modern era of social activism, black people have fought for civil rights. People of other colors and backgrounds have done the same too. In 1944, Irene Morgan refused to give up her seat on an interstate bus. She was was arrested in Middlesex County, Virginia. She was a courageous black woman. Virginia had segregation laws. Morgan appealed her case to the Supreme Court. By 1948, she won the case of Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia. The ruling stuck down segregation among interstate buses. Virginia continued to enforce interstate bus segregation, which violated the Supreme Court decision. In 1947, there was the Journey of Reconciliation movement. The movement had human beings who traveled into Virginia and other states of the Upper South to use civil disobedience against Virginia's defiance of the Supreme Court's ruling. There was another Supreme Court ruling involving Virginia. It was called Boynton v. Virginia. It desegregated interstate bus terminals. Morgan, Boynton, and the Journey of Reconciliation inspired the 1961 Freedom Rides that fought bus segregation in the Deep South. Along with the bus desegregation cases, Virginia was a contestant in the Supreme Court ruling that invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia. The Loving v. Virginia decision came about in 1967. Many schools, and even an entire school system, were shut down in 1958 and 1959 in attempts by the racist state government of Virginia to block integration, before both 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. The Byrd Organization of was one of most racist, sophisticated political movements in world history. Back in the day, conservative Democrats wanted to maintain legal and cultural racial segregation in Virginia. Harry Flood Byrd Sr. lived from 1887 to 1966. He was once Governor of Virginia and was a senior U.S. Senator after World War II. He was once a U.S. Senator after World War II. The Byrd Organization was a political machine that used rural areas to promote their agenda. They never had a strong political power in independent cities or suburban middle class areas.

Using legal challenges, by the 1940's, 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 actually initiated by students who stepped forward 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 which established separate public schools for black and white students denied black children equal educational opportunities and were inherently unequal. As a result, de jure 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. After the Brown v. Board decision, Byrd, then Senator, was angry. He vowed to stop integration in Virginian schools. So, Byrd and Governor Thomas B. Stanley, and Virginia Senator Garland Gray of rural Sussex County formed the Gray Commission.

The Gray plan wanted to delay segregation policies. It wanted to 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. So, Byrd used the Stanley Plan and the Southern Manifesto to promote the agenda against racial integration. By the late 1950's, 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 the "segregation academies."

It is no secret that the Virginian state government orchestrated the racist, systematic resistance to federal court orders that required the end of segregation. The state legislature even enacted a package of laws. They were called the Stanley plan. These laws wanted to evade racial integration in public schools. Prince Edward County even closed all of its public schools in an attempt to avoid racial integration. They relented in the face of U.S. Supreme Court rulings. The first black students attended the University of Virginia School of Law in 1950 and Virginia Tech in 1953. The massive resistance movement was a strategy declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia (along with his brother in law as the leader of the Virginia General Assembly named Democrat Delegate James M. Thomson of Alexandria, Virginia). The resistance plan was about uniting white politicians and leaders in Virginia to create new state laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation. This came after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954. People fought in the courts from 1957 to 1959. Attorney General James Lindsay Almond Jr. was part of the Byrd Organization to succeed Stanley.  Virginian authorities closed schools in Norfolk, Chalottesville, and Warren County instead of promoting integration. Many people called for Almond to reopen the schools. 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. After the federal and state court decisions of January 19, 1959 struck down the new Virginia mandatory closing law, Arlington integrated its Stratford Junior High School (now called H-B Woodlawn) on February 2, 1959, the same day as Norfolk integrated its schools. Later, Almond wanted limited desegregation and leaving the burden on black parents (in desiring "school choice"). 

Almond's legislative plan barely passed despite the Byrd Organization's opposition. This earned Senator Byrd's wrath, and after Almond's term expired, Byrd tried to block Almond's appointment as a federal judge by President John F. Kennedy, although Almond was confirmed and served on the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals from June 1963 until his death in 1986. Almond followed the Perrow Commission named after Mosby Perrow Jr. of Lynchburg. He would later be the President of the Virginia State Board of Education. Prince Edward County school still segregated in the 1960's and the 1970's. In 1986, the Prince Edward Academy accepted black students. It is now the Fuqua School. Public schools in the Commonwealth's western counties, where there were fewer blacks, were integrated largely without incident in the early 1960s. Charlottesville's Lane High School and Venable Elementary School both re-opened in February 1959. 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, only 3,700 black pupils or 1.6% attended school with whites even in 1963.  In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that massive resistance to integration was also illegal in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County. That decision laid the groundwork for desegregation busing plans that caused controversy in Virginia, but more famously in Boston. In Richmond, integration came about by 1970, while many whites used white flight to go into schools of different counties. In 1970, the Norfolk City Public Schools and several other Virginia communities were also subjected to busing schemes, also returning to more or less neighborhood school plans some years later.

In 1969, Virginians elected Republican A. Linwood Holton Jr., who had opposed massive resistance and labeled it "the state's pernicious anti-desegregation strategy," as governor. The following year, Gov. Holton placed his children (including future Virginia First Lady Anne Holton) in Richmond's mostly African-American public schools, to considerable publicity. He also increased the number of blacks and women employed in the state government and in 1973 created the Virginia Governor's Schools Program. Furthermore, when Virginia revised its state constitution in 1971, it included one of the strongest provisions concerning public education of any state in the country.

There are tons of civil rights heroes in Virginia. When Barbara Johns was a teenager, she led a strike at Morton High School in Farmville, Virginia to promote justice.  The Norfolk 17 were about 17 black American students who were admitted to Norfolk, Virginia public Schools on February 2, 1959. They came into Norview High School. Some of the Norfolk 17 earned doctorates. Some of their names were Alvarez Gonsouland and Andrew Heidelberg. Andrew Heidelberg was selected as to serve a two year term as a member of the Brown v. Board of Education Scholarship Awards Committee. He was selected by Governor Mark Warner in 2005. He served 2 additional conservuative term through 2011 by Governor Tim Kaine. He published his own book in 2006. The title of the book is "The Norfolk 17: A Personal Narrative on Desegregation in Norfolk, Virginia in 1958-1962" He wrote a screenplay in 2009. It was based on the book "The Colored Halfback." He passed away on July 6, 2015 at the age of 71. The Richmond 34 refers to a group of Virginia Union University students who participated in a nonviolent sit-in at the lunch counter of Thalhimers department store in downtown Richmond, Virginia. The event was one of many sit-ins to occur throughout the civil rights movement in the 1960's and was essential to helping desegregate the city of Richmond, Virginia. Evelyn Butts was a key person in causing a ban of the poll tax in Virginia and nationwide by the 1960's. Butts became involved in the civil rights movement in the 1950's. During her time as the Oakwood Civic League, she helped create the Rosemont Middle School in her neighborhood so that children wouldn't have to ride the bus to the segregated school.In 1960, she was involved in picketing the Be-Lo Supermarket for not employing black people in higher-level positions. She also protested against black people being told to sit in certain parts of the football stadium. Butts and her lawyer, Joseph A. Jordan Jr., sued the state of Virginia for requiring the poll tax, filing in November of 1963.  After Butts won the victory of eliminating the poll tax, she worked in politics until her passing in 1993. In 2017, Butts' daughter, Charlene Butts Ligon, published a book about her mother called "Fearless: How a Poor Virginia Seamstress Took on Jim Crow, Beat the Poll Tax and Changed Her City Forever." The New Journal and Guide called the book "thoughtful and information-filled."

On July 16, 2009, the Richmond Times-Dispatch apologized in an editorial for its role and the role of its parent company and its sister newspaper, The Richmond News Leader, in championing massive resistance to human rights, acknowledging that "the Times-Dispatch was complicit" in an "unworthy cause": "The record fills us with regret, which we have expressed before. Massive Resistance inflicted pain then. Memories remain painful. Editorial enthusiasm for a dreadful doctrine still affects attitudes toward the newspaper." In 1963, there were the events of Danville, Virginia. This was when on May 31, 1963 when representatives of many in the black community protested for their human rights. There was the Danville Christian Progressive Association. This assembly came into the municipal building. They wanted desegregated facilities, equal employment opportunities, representation in city government, and a biracial commission to evaluate racial progress.  On June 10, 1963, 60 high school students marched to the municipal building. The leaders were arrested, the children was assaulted with high pressure hoses, and many of their clothes were blown off. Cops used nightsticks to arrest many people. After students called their parents. The parents were unjustly arrested for "contributing to the delinquency of a minor." The Danville protesters fought and later the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 existed to promote freedom against Jim Crow tyranny. With the events of Charlottesville, Virginia of 2017, we have a long way to go. Yet, we came a long way from slavery and Jim Crow too. So, we have to continue to work in the cause of equality, freedom, and justice for all. In 2008, various actions of the Civil Rights Movement were commemorated by the Virginia's Civil Rights Memorial in Richmond, Virginia.


By Timothy