The Making of Massive Resistance: Virginia's Politics of Public School Desegregation, 1954-1956

I

VIRGINIA: ITS COUNTIES, CITIES, AND RACES

In its grand outlines the politics of the South revolves around the position of the Negro. It is at times interpreted as a politics of cotton, as a politics of free trade, as a politics of agrarian poverty, or as a politics of planter and plutocrat. Although such interpretations have a superficial validity, in the last analysis the major peculiarities of southern politics go back to the Negro. Whatever phase of the southern political process one seeks to understand, sooner or later the trail of inquiry leads to the Negro.¹—V. O. KEY, JR.

Virginia is very much a part of the South, and 22.2 per cent of its 1950 population was Negro. Although this state is only a toll-free bridge’s distance across the Potomac from the nation’s capital, one must remember that South is more than a geographical designation—a mere measurement of latitude. It is also, as many commentators have concluded, a state of mind.²

The existence of an anti-lynching statute in the Commonwealth’s laws does not make a caste system any less real. The fact that Virginians do not rally to the call of grand dragons of the Ku Klux Klan does not exclude them from membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Sons of the Confederacy, or Children of the Confederacy. And the observer who seeks to understand Virginians’ reactions must remember—as they do— that many of the Confederacy’s heroes were Virginia’s progeny, that its capital was Virginia’s capital, and that many of its military tests took place on Virginia’s soil. A traditional state of mind is propagated; a past is remembered, romanticized, and by some even worshipped. This may help to explain the intensity of reaction on the part of some Virginians.

This southern state of mind is unevenly distributed throughout Virginia, as is the state’s Negro population. There is a relation between the two, but a simple cause-effect relationship—a belief that the presence of southern orthodoxy varies directly with the presence of the Negro—is superficial in that it ignores other relevant factors that will be brought out during the course of this study. The uneven distribution of Virginia’s Negro population may be documented by the 1950 census and, by using this, outlines of the several Virginias alluded to in the introduction may be traced.³

1. Virginia’s Black Belt: Southside and Tidewater Counties

Incongruously-named Charles City County lies on the north bank of the James River between Williamsburg and Richmond. A population in 1950 of 3,514 Negroes, 890 whites, and 272 Indians gave Charles City the highest percentage of Negroes of any Virginia county.⁴ It is also the hub of a contiguous group of counties that forms the state’s black belt. South of the James, fanning out toward the Piedmont and along the North Carolina border, is an area known as the Southside. North to the Potomac and inland to the fall line lies Tidewater Virginia. On the other side of Chesapeake Bay are the two counties of the Eastern Shore. Within the delineated area are thirty-one counties in which Negroes comprise 40 per cent or more of the population.

FIGURE 1. Virginia’s Black Belt: Southside and Tidewater Counties.

An interesting phenomenon is that Virginia’s black belt would remain contiguous were the statistical dividing line raised to 50 per cent or lowered to 30. As a geographical area it would merely be enlarged or contracted without proximity among the counties being lost.

There are several reasons for choosing 40 per cent, rather than some other figure, as a dividing line. Perhaps most important is the fact that Virginians themselves regard the Southside and Tidewater as constituting the state’s black belt—an area in which any social change relative to the caste system would be most difficult. Secondly, Negroes outnumber whites in these thirty-one counties when the area is treated as a whole. Although it accounts for less than a third of Virginia’s Negro population, 51.7 per cent of those persons residing in these counties are Negroes. Thirdly, the area designated as black belt is homogeneous in several respects other than blackness. It is almost entirely rural rather than urban. Important cities lie on its periphery, but the county seats and other small towns remain the foci of day-to-day activity. Apart from the fringe cities, manufacturing is on a small scale, and agriculture, forestry, and fisheries predominate. While the state as a whole showed a population increase of 23.9 per cent from 1940 to 1950, black-belt population increased by only 1.1 per cent. Fourteen of the thirty-one counties actually showed a population decrease.

Romantically identified with tobacco (at one time but no longer the economic mainstay of Virginia), Smithfield hams, peanuts, and Chesapeake Bay oysters, the Southside and Tidewater constitute a chamber-of-commerce problem child. Diversified, large-scale manufacturing has settled elsewhere, and cities have drained off the most ambitious and competent of the area’s successive generations—Negro as well as white. With the present passing it by, the people of the area have emigrated or stayed on to live more and more in a worn-out past. A native son of the state has found himself compelled to describe Southside Virginia as a bleak country of red clay and scrub pine; of somnolent small towns; of marginal, worked-out farms; of much poverty, ignorance and prejudice.⁵

The status quo, possibly better described as status quo ante, has shaped the area’s ideologies. A rigid caste system is maintained, the traditional way of doing things is thought best, and alien persons as well as ideas are somewhat suspect.

In reference to colonial Virginia Clifford Dowdey has written: "In less than a century the planter class had emerged, forming a new and tight aristocracy which, in turn, formed the character of Virginia as an insulated, aristocratic republic. By 1701 a governor of wide experience in the Colonies observed the self-sufficient clannishness of Virginians, and said, ‘they begin to form a sort of aversion to others, calling them strangers’ "⁶

In many respects Southside and Tidewater, the center of colonial Virginia, have changed little since the early eighteenth century.

2. The Middle Ground

Albemarle Country, the population of which is 18.6 per cent Negro, represents the hub of a second group of counties. Together with thirty-four others it occupies a middle ground between the extremes of black-belt coastal plain and the comparatively Negro-less mountains and valleys west of the Blue Ridge. Here the term group is used rather than area. Although the center of the middle ground is in the Piedmont, several detached counties to the east and one in the west prevent it from being contiguous.

Counties with Negro population percentages of 10.1 to 40 have been assigned middle-ground status. Percentages range then all the way from Botetourt’s 10.1 per cent to Louisa’s 39.8. Again, however, a figure for the entire group is an important consideration. Twenty-three per cent of its population is Negro. This figure practically duplicates that for the entire state. Statistically, topographically, ideologically, and—as shown later—politically, this group of thirty-four counties represents Virginia’s mean. The group’s percentage of increase in population from 1940 to 1950 was exactly the same as the state figure—23.9 per cent.

Where sameness characterizes the Southside and—to a lesser degree —Tidewater, contrast is a feature of the Piedmont. Where the black belt stands somewhat apart from the cities, the middle ground embraces urban centers. The state chamber of commerce can point with pride to a beneficent climate, population growth (but with lebensraum left), an industrious people, and a diversified economy. Accents and origins mingle throughout Piedmont Virginia; provincialism is less marked than in the Southside. Agriculture and livestock production remain important, but manufacturing and construction have overtaken them in terms of numbers employed. Here there is a real market for professionals, executives, and skilled labor.

Dominant manufactures in the middle ground are furniture, fabrics, synthetic fibers, clothing, chemicals and allied products, and foodstuffs. In the south, at Stanleytown, Governor Thomas B.

FIGURE 2. The Middle Ground.

Stanley’s Stanley Furniture Company manufactures furniture. In the north, in and around Berryville, Senator Harry F. Byrd’s orchards and processing plants yield a valuable harvest of apples and derivative products.

The term Northern Virginia is ideologically, as well as geographically, suited to several counties immediately south of Washington. Wealthy northerners have immigrated into these counties, where they have built new estates or restored old ones. And somewhat the same thing has taken place in the hub county of Albemarle. Enjoying to the utmost Virginia’s low tax rates, these northerners breed fine horses, ride to the hounds, and live in a manner more closely approximating the old Virginia aristocratic ideal than many native Virginians could possibly afford.

In the middle ground many attitudes and ideologies meet. But, in a state characterized by political apathy, they do not necessarily clash violently. White attitudes toward caste run the gamut, and extremes are generally tolerated, if not respected. Negroes residing in middle-ground counties still live in a caste-structured society, but it is doubtful that many of them would care to trade places with their brethren in the black belt.

3. The White Belt: Mountains, Valleys, and Suburbia

Thirty-two Virginia counties have Negro population percentages of 10 per cent or less and constitute what, for purpose of contrast, will be called the white belt. With the exception of Arlington, Fairfax, and Henrico, these third-group counties lie west of the Blue Ridge, where southerners tend to depart from the stereotype. Their origins are dissimilar, many being descendants of Scotch and German settlers who entered Virginia from the North and by way of the valleys. Slaves, great plantations, and other symbols of antebellum South were practically nonexistent in this section of the state, and the Civil War was less their fight than it was that of the lowlanders. Cabell Phillips has written that even today, they are a different breed of Virginian—thrifty, relatively progressive, acknowledging the traditional Virginia mores, but lacking the deep emotional attachment that one finds in other sections of the state.⁷

As in the middle ground, this third group of counties experienced a substantial population growth during the forties, and industry has kept pace with population through expansion and diversification. To an economy similar to that of the middle ground, transmontane Virginia adds the important coal mining area located in a tier of counties bordering Kentucky and the southern tip of West Virginia. Western Virginia counties vary greatly in rural-urban distribution but, as a section, they are more urban than the other two groups.

Arlington County is about as rural as Rockefeller Center. Actually it and Fairfax County are part of the Washington metropolitan area, and their economy is closely tied to that of the capital. Both counties more than doubled in population during the forties as federal employees and others whose business was in Washington crossed the Potomac in search of housing. This is also part of northern Virginia, but the transplanted northerners, midwesterners, westerners, southerners, and foreigners living there are not to be confused with the fox-hunting northerners in Fauquier and Loudoun counties.

FIGURE 3. The White Belt: Mountains, Valleys, and Suburbia.

A distinction should be drawn between the counties cast in the role of Washington’s suburbs and Henrico. Metropolitan Washington spread out into an area that already contained the proud old city of Alexandria and the smaller city of Falls Church. By comparison Richmond spread out into the country. Places that had been little more than a filling station and a general store on the road to Richmond are now part of that city’s growing suburbs. Many of Henrico’s more recently acquired citizens simply moved out from Richmond; those who swelled the population of Arlington and Fairfax came from more cosmopolitan Washington and, indirectly, from everywhere. Statistics to the contrary notwithstanding, Henrico is less urban than both of the other suburban white-belt counties. And it is considerably more Virginian.

4. The Cities

Observers of southern politics have noted that Virginia’s independent cities are independent in more than name. The larger ones at least share those things that are common to cities and generally less common to rural areas: a constant flow in and out of business people, tourists, and students; the latest means of transportation and communication; varied entertainment and recreational facilities; a more fluid social structure than that which often characterizes small town and countryside. To a degree they retain their identification with the areas in which they are located and differing Negro population percentages are not unimportant. The facts of American business, however, dictate ties with important cities in other states, and this tends to dilute sectional influences. They do not fit so well into the categories of black belt, middle ground, and white belt as they do in the single category of cities.

Of the eleven states once united in the Confederacy only Florida, Texas, and Louisiana have higher urban population percentages. With other states of the rim South, Virginia is making the sometimes painful transition to an era when its sectional mores will have to be compromised if its urbanization is to continue and its per capita income increase. This transition will be accomplished more easily in some Virginia cities than others, and the factors that will contribute to the relative ease or difficulty of transition serve to differentiate one Virginia city from another as well as anything else.

In 1940 there were twenty-four independent cities. Three more had achieved this status by 1950, and the addition of five more by 1954 brought the total to thirty-two. By annexation Virginia’s one hundred counties were reduced to ninety-eight in the process. All this did little to change the position of Norfolk, Richmond, and Roanoke as the most important—as well as largest—cities. Respectively they continue to dominate Tidewater, mid-Virginia, and the mountains. None of them is a one-crop, or one-product, city.

Although Richmond remains the nominal and spiritual capital of the state, prodigious population growth and economic development in the Hampton Roads area threaten Richmond’s hegemony. A series of mergers and annexations has reduced the number of political subdivisions in the area, and more moves toward consolidation are planned. The Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, with fourteen thousand employees on its payroll, is the largest single, private employer in the state. On the other side of Hampton Roads the federal government employs thirteen thousand civilians at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.⁸ Known to generations of naval personnel, Norfolk is headquarters for the Atlantic Fleet and for SACLANT, the top naval command in NATO.

FIGURE 4. Virginia’s Independent Cities.

In the prevalence of cosmopolitan attitudes Norfolk is more closely akin to the Washington suburbs than to Richmond and to the cities inland. As one Norfolk resident said, The ocean has brought different people to Norfolk and also new ideas. A fair guess would be that less than a third of Norfolk’s population is native to the state.

Richmond is more dogmatically Virginian than either Norfolk or Roanoke. John Gunther has written that very few cities in America can compare with Richmond ... for concentration of historical allusion.⁹ In statuary, museums, shrines, and the city’s two daily newspapers, one is constantly reminded of what the state rightly considers to have been its Golden Age—that period between the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown and the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox.

The city still manufactures more cigarettes and other tobacco products than any other city in the world. Plants of du Pont, Allied Chemical and Dye, and Hercules Powder Company have turned Richmond and neighboring Hopewell into important producers of chemicals and allied products. And, more than any other Virginia city, it remains the merchandising and financial center for the state. Historical allusion has not necessarily stunted Richmond’s growth, but it has continued to determine its stately character.

Richmond’s 1950 population was 230,310 and that of Norfolk was 213, 513. After these two, the size of Virginia’s cities drops sharply, and a few of those remaining are no more than inflated towns. The third-ranking city of Roanoke, however, with a 1950 population of 91, 921, rates mention. It is not only the largest but easily the most important city west of the Blue Ridge. The Norfolk and Western Railroad provided original impetus for Roanoke’s growth, and railroads, together with railway express services, still accounted in 1950 for greater employment in the city than any other single industry group. To its original source of wealth have been added plants producing steel, textiles, clothing, wood products, rayon, and scientific instruments. Ideologically it reflects, to a fair degree, the attitudes of the white-belt counties.

Although relative Negro population percentages for Virginia’s cities tend to follow a pattern established by the counties, there are many discrepancies. Where Negroes are most numerous, they form a relatively complete community of their own within the city, where they can support doctors, lawyers, merchants, and others of their own race. Here they are most articulate, best organized, and least cowed by the doctrine of white supremacy. What may be no more than his own church for the rural Negro becomes a compact economic and social community for his urban counterpart. As a further indication of this there are reputable Negro newspapers in Norfolk, Richmond, and Roanoke.

5. Which Is Virginia?

Each Virginia could be expected to have different answers to these questions: How do we desegregate? Where do we do it? When do we do it? Therefore a statewide policy that accommodated all four Virginias would have to be based on compromise. If a policy based on only one uncompromising answer were imposed on the entire state, which Virginia could or would be the origin of that answer? In terms of political power, which—or what—is Virginia?

NOTES

1. V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), p. 5.

2. The most impressive work of this nature is W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941). Also see Virginia Moore, Virginia Is a State of Mind (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1943) and Cabell Phillips, Virginia—The State and the State of Mind, The New York Times Magazine, July 28, 1957.

3. Unless indicated otherwise, source for all Virginia population data is U.S. Bureau of the Census: U.S. Census of Population: 1950, Vol. II, Characteristics of the Population, Part 46, Virginia, Chap. B (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952).

N.B. The Negro population percentages given are actually non-white population percentages and include the less than .1 per cent of Virginia’s population who are Indian, Japanese, Chinese, etc.

4. In the case of Charles Ciy the percentage difference caused by counting all non-whites as Negroes is greater than in any other Virginia county—75.1 as opposed to 81. In whatever fashion one counts the Indians, Charles City still has the highest Negro population percentage of any Virginia county.

5. Phillips, Virginia, N.Y. Times Mag., p. 49.

6. Clifford Dowdey, The Great Plantation (New York: Rinehart, 1957), p 7.

7. Phillips, Virginia, N.Y. Times Mag., p. 49.

8. Source of data on number employed by specific business establishments is Research Department, Virginia State Chamber of Commerce, Directory of Virginia Manufacturing and Mining, 1957-1958 (Richmond: 1957).

9. John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), p. 711.

II

PARTISAN AND POLITICAL VIRGINIA

Few people vote in Virginia because of the poll tax, because many are satisfied with things as they are, because the apparent invincibility of the organization makes it seem useless for the dissatisfied to oppose it, because many have lost the habit of voting—and because the machine likes it that way.¹—BENJAMIN MUSE

Politics in the Commonwealth revolves around the state’s senior United States senator and partisan patriarch, Harry Flood Byrd. He is acknowledged leader of the organization, or dominant faction of Virginia’s Democratic party. Weakly arrayed against the organization are dissident Democrats—the antiorganization—and scarcely more than a hallful of Republican regulars. Following the Senator’s assumption of command in about 1925 (the date of his election as governor),² it has been a case of the organization against the field with few, and relatively minor, victories going to the latter.

Virginia’s electoral votes have been cast, on occasion, for the Republican national ticket, and several of the state’s congressional districts have elected Republicans to represent them in Washington. Within the state, however, one-partyism is still very much in evidence; Virginia has yet to elect a Republican governor, and the state legislature remains overwhelmingly Democratic in composition.

1. Senator Byrd and the Organization

Almost any Virginian who is articulate on political matters uses the term organization rather than machine, and many refer to the leader and his palace guard as statesmen rather than politicians. This aura of dignity and selfless intellect with which the dominant political power is clothed contributes directly to a low voter turnout and, indirectly, to the organization’s perpetuity. Many Virginians, it would seem, have rationalized an extreme form of deferential politics. A machine run by politicians would be something to be watched carefully and checked periodically. An organization manned by statesmen is, one is told, something different. A northern type of political competition is unnecessary where those in authority are all but incorruptible. This is the way many Virginians see it.³ Added to other factors, it means that only a small percentage of the potential electorate of the state take the trouble to vote.⁴

Actually the organization governs Virginia, and the organization is an oligarchy composed of about a thousand persons. Officeholders, who naturally have a vested interest in its welfare, form its core. The state constitution provides that a treasurer, sheriff, Commonwealth’s attorney, county clerk, and commissioner of the revenue shall be elected by the qualified voters of each county. Where Democratic, these so-called constitutional officers are generally numbered among the organization. Similar officials are prescribed for the independent cities, and these add another lot to the organization. Virginia’s 140-member General Assembly adds another hundred who may be considered organization men. Various members of the state judiciary, assorted bureaucrats, congressmen, and powerful personages make up the remainder. About one hundred of these, cutting across all groups, constitute an intermediate layer in the hierarchy. Above this, in truly rarefied atmosphere, is an inner circle of about ten and another small group of persons who are almost, but not quite, members of the palace guard. Senator Byrd’s benign presence smiles from on top.⁵

As Professor Key has pointed out, there is some degree of give-and-take within the oligarchy.⁶ Owing to this modicum of flexibility, a number of Young Turks may be included rather than excluded.⁷ An amorphous, comparatively liberal group, the role of the Young Turks appears to be that of moderating the organization somewhat without being able to attain leadership. However, the organization is primarily a body of southern conservatives who tend to agree. This fact leads to intraorganization contests centering around different personalities instead of alternative policies. Politics within the state is at times all but issueless. It is an old saying in the Commonwealth that every candidate for governor strongly endorses such controversial concepts as motherhood and highway safety.

Every fourth November, twelve months following national presidential elections, Virginians elect their governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general on a statewide ballot. Ever since the Byrd organization came into being the Democratic candidate for governor has been the organization’s candidate and has been elected. Quite naturally nomination that is tantamount to election is highly coveted and, even within a closely-knit organization, there is inevitably a contest. The way in which an aspirant to the governorship of