Virginia had become a defendant in one of the five cases folded into Brown v. Board of Education owing to the determination of one teenager who had had enough. Tired of taking classes in “tar paper shacks” in an overcrowded “hand-me-down” high school in Prince Edward County, one of the state’s former plantation communities, Barbara Rose Johns led a two-week-long strike by her fellow high school students—some 450 in all—to demand a better school. The niece of the Reverend Vernon Johns, the radical minister who later mentored the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Barbara Johns never consulted her Montgomery uncle about the strike she was planning.1
Instead, the studious girl with sparkling eyes and a luminous smile looked to her favorite teacher, Miss Inez Davenport. The students in Miss Davenport’s afternoon class regularly complained that “it wasn’t fair” that they attended classes in jury-rigged structures without indoor plumbing that passersby imagined to be chicken coops. Students contended with leaky roofs, woodstoves, rickety furnishings, and cast-off textbooks from white schools. The white students attended a new high school, replete with science labs, indoor plumbing, steam heat, and a well-stocked library and gym. One day in the fall of 1950, when her students were again bemoaning the miserable state of their school, Davenport shared with them a news article about some Massachusetts students who had gone on strike and won over an issue that concerned them. “If they could do that, so could you,” she said. Intrigued, Barbara stayed after class to ask whether her teacher really meant what she had said. Strikes were often in the news then, bringing American workers better wages and new powers. But Barbara had never imagined that students might strike, too.2
That afternoon exchange was the beginning of a secret student-teacher collaboration that shook Virginia’s Jim Crow system as nothing else had before. The black parents in the PTA had again and again visited the superintendent of schools and the school board in their quest for school improvements. A 1947 state Board of Education survey supported their case, finding Robert Russa Moton High School “inadequate,” especially with enrollments sure to rise now that the postwar baby boom was under way. The petitioners could at least get a hearing now, because thanks to a push by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for “equalization” of black and white schooling, southern officials knew that federal courts were beginning to look askance at their claims to provide “separate but equal” education.3
But winning upgrades was another matter, because Virginia’s poll tax made it hard for low-income parents to hold elected officials accountable for neglect of their children. Like many other southern states, Virginia required voters to pay a tax to participate in the political process, and it was one of the states that also made that tax cumulative, so that if, say, two elections had not featured candidates who interested you but the third one did, you would have to pay all three years’ taxes to vote. In areas like Prince Edward County, which had large numbers of impoverished black farmworkers, the poll tax had proven an effective way to keep them from influencing policy. So the parents had to beg. And county leaders were not persuaded that black students’ education merited raising more money.4
In self-justification, the officials “would always talk about the Negro tax contribution being so low,” only about one-tenth of the county’s total revenue from property taxes, said M. Boyd Jones, Moton’s principal. “They expected us to raise our incomes without improving education.”5 A better black high school would require either tax increases or a bond issue, neither of which white voters would support, because their children were well provided for in their own schools. Anyway, officials reasoned, why do more for “colored kids” capable only of work in the fields, kitchens, or factories?6 The white folks making these judgments sought no understanding of the kids whose futures they were so casually writing off.
Collective organization, including strikes, was how the disempowered became strong enough to right the balance against the elites who lorded over them in those days, as an avid reader like Barbara knew. So the seed planted by Miss Davenport grew. As a member of the chorus, the debating team, the drama club, and the student council, Barbara traveled the state and saw enough of other schools to believe it was worth a try. Miss Davenport’s vision was straightforward: “If the kids went on strike, the school board would get the message—these kids are serious; let’s build them a better school.” But she also knew that a strike could put her own and perhaps others’ jobs at risk—teachers had no union protection then against retaliatory firing—so she told Barbara that they could no longer be seen talking one-on-one. They must communicate in writing, through notes placed in a music book on Miss Davenport’s desk. It was all so unheard of and daring—and therefore dangerous in Jim Crow Virginia—that they destroyed the notes after reading them. Absolute secrecy was essential, Miss Davenport insisted from the outset, as was “orderly and respectful” conduct of the strike.7
Miss Davenport instructed Barbara to work slowly and carefully, by recruiting as co-organizers a few strong students who were already popular leaders and who came from respected Prince Edward families that could not be intimidated by employers. Barbara worked methodically, “like a Sidewinder missile locked on its target,” in the telling of her first recruit. John Stokes was class president, a top student, a member of the track and debate teams, and the elected statewide president of New Farmers of America, an organization that helped rural young black men develop their leadership abilities. John’s younger sister Carrie was president of Moton’s student council, created by the principal to enable the students to experience a kind of democracy denied them in real life. Even the local white newspaper recognized the Stokes family as “outstanding” people. The parents were educated, landowning farmers whose three older sons had served as noncommissioned officers in the Army and whose eldest daughter worked for the U.S. Marine Corps; they were also trusted advisers to the black farmers in their part of the county. Barbara summoned John and Carrie to a secret meeting out on the cinder-block bleachers by the school’s playing field.8
The three dubbed their plan the “Manhattan Project,” taking the code name of the World War II mission that produced the first atomic bomb. Emphasizing “character and leadership skills,” they recruited additional leaders to form “the core strike force” of twenty. The plan was straightforward: At an assembly, Barbara “would give a speech stating our dissatisfaction.” Carrying picket signs, as other strikers did, the students would then march into town so “people would hear us and see us and understand our difficulty.” Student pickets “just outside the high school grounds” would stop any potential strikebreakers from entering Moton.9
“We planned this thing to a gnat’s eyebrow,” John Stokes recalled.10 For six months, they prepared until “D-Day” arrived, on April 23, 1951. To protect the principal from being held responsible for the strike, a few students lured him away from campus just before 11 A.M. for a fictitious emergency, while the others called a school assembly. The strike committee took the stage. John Stokes led the students in the Lord’s Prayer. Teachers were exiled from the auditorium so they wouldn’t be fired for collaborating. The organizing committee arrayed behind her on the stage like a Greek chorus, Barbara delivered her speech. With controlled fire she laid out what every student knew—all the problems of their broken-down, overstuffed school, how they were denied resources that every high school student should have to promote learning, not just the white kids. Nothing would change, she told her rapt listeners, unless they joined together and demanded a new school facility.11
“Man, you talk about rocking,” Stokes would reminisce; amid all the clapping and stomping, “no one was seated.” The students rose and walked out en masse, some carrying picket signs made days earlier and hidden for this moment. Heads held high, they marched into town to see the white superintendent of schools. Speaking for the full committee that crowded into his office, Barbara told him that the students were living in “a modern world, and we would appreciate growing with it.” His threats of expulsion made no impression. His warning that the students’ parents would be jailed unless they desisted got more attention—until someone observed that the town jail was far too small to hold them all. “After that,” Stokes said, “there was no stopping us.”12
With the help of another local adult, the Reverend L. Francis Griffin, Barbara Johns and Carrie Stokes obtained contact information for the state NAACP.13 Two Richmond-based NAACP attorneys, Spottswood W. Robinson and Oliver Hill, agreed to come to Farmville to meet with the strikers and their parents. They told them that they would take on the case only if the plaintiffs would go beyond asking for equal facilities and contest segregation itself as inherently unequal. Although neither Johns nor Stokes knew this before they approached the lawyers, the NAACP had just come to an important decision. A team led by the brilliant Charles Hamilton Houston, the dean of Howard University School of Law, had moved beyond its earlier litigation strategy of demanding that separate schools be made truly equal. While they had won improved salaries for black teachers and new black schools in many counties, their campaign required endless one-off battles—with seventy-five school districts in Virginia alone. Taking on Jim Crow itself seemed a surer remedy, if harder to achieve.14
The lawyers also insisted on something else: backing for the strike from 95 percent of the black parents.15 With Reverend Griffin’s help, the students signed up parents throughout the far-flung rural county. Even farm tenants and wage laborers who stood to lose their livelihoods if their bosses retaliated signed on. No one was willing to see the new light in their children’s eyes extinguished.16
On May 3, the NAACP attorneys filed a petition with the Prince Edward County School Board to end separate and inferior education. That night, another mass meeting at First Baptist Church was “jam-packed.” Many adults spoke. But the voice that everyone remembered was that of Barbara Johns. “We are depending on you,” she told the assembled parents and grandparents, to tears and resounding applause. Reverend Griffin closed the meeting. “Anybody who would not back these children after they stepped out on a limb is not a man,” he said.17
And that was it: the strike was over. The 450 teenagers, who had maintained complete solidarity, with not a single student returning to school until they all agreed to, pledged to resume classes on Monday, May 7. That was the day their attorneys brought their lawsuit to federal court: Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, named for the ninth grader, Dorothy Davis, whose name headed the list of 117 students and 67 parents.18
The lawsuit astounded the white elite. Its members could not believe that “their” Negroes would show such ingratitude. After the filing of the lawsuit, they searched for scapegoats and took revenge. County officials refused to renew the principal’s contract. Blacklisted throughout the state, Principal Jones and his new wife, Inez Davenport Jones, the teacher who had secretly advised Barbara Johns, moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where they found new jobs and joined Reverend Vernon Johns’s congregation. Parents who signed on to the lawsuit and whose names were published in the Farmville Herald incurred economic retaliation. Even self-employed farmers, thought safe, could no longer find local buyers for their crops or secure bank loans to get them through to harvest time. What with the menace in the air, Robert and Violet Johns sent their daughter Barbara to live with her uncle Vernon’s family in Montgomery, where she could finish high school in safety. John Stokes’s family “kept five loaded guns ready” in case they were needed for self-defense; other black households stocked up on shotgun shells to be prepared if trouble came.19
In the end, no vigilante violence occurred. Virginia was not Georgia or Mississippi or Alabama, where politicians placated lawbreakers; this was a place where gentlemen ruled, and applauded themselves for well-managed race relations.20 But they would not concede. And the state court backed them, forcing the aggrieved to appeal.
When Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County reached the U.S. Supreme Court, as one of the five cases folded into Brown v. Board of Education, the state of Virginia intervened on behalf of the county school board and superintendent. “Virginia attacked the psychological evidence introduced by the NAACP,” noted the historian James H. Hershman Jr., “and countered with its own expert witnesses who contended that blacks were inferior in mental development.”21 The state attorney general brought in the Virginia-born chairman of Columbia University’s psychology department to be the “star witness” for the defense. Dr. Henry Garrett testified that segregation was simply “common sense,” and in the best interests of all students. Seeking to rebut the testimony of his former doctoral students Dr. Kenneth Clark and Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark, whose research supported the plaintiffs, Professor Garrett maintained that racial segregation could be stigma free.22 That argument, like the others, failed to persuade the court.
• • •
In May 1954, the justices announced their verdict in Brown v. Board of Education. Lost to all but the scholarly literature is the fact that most of Virginia’s white citizens were inclined to accept it. Hardly any liked it, but it was the unanimous decision of the highest court in the land, after all. More than a few knew, too, deep down, that the system had been grossly unfair; seeing the latest ruling as definitive, they took the end of segregation to be beyond their control. For a time, calm prevailed.23
But the state’s governing elite, which was led by the Byrd Organization and based in the former plantation, black-majority communities of the state’s Southside, like Prince Edward County, viewed the Supreme Court decision as but the latest and most shocking in a string of federal incursions on their right to rule, a string that had begun with the policies of the later New Deal. As important to them, segregation was bound up in a complex of institutions that sustained the rigid social order and culture they were determined to hold in place—what they liked to call “our way of life.”24
How could defenders of the old order fight Brown lawfully? Into the breach stepped a young Oklahoma-born journalist named James Jackson Kilpatrick, who recently had been promoted to editor of the Richmond News Leader, one of the state’s leading daily newspapers. His mentor at the paper, John Dana Wise, a learned conservative, was fond of quoting John Randolph of Roanoke, the scion of one of Virginia’s esteemed First Families, who had proclaimed, “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality.” Kilpatrick recalled of his first years at the paper that “every time I let a liberal impulse escape in print, [Wise] summoned me into his office” for a “line-by-line” takedown. The paper’s owners, as one contemporary noted, took as a given that society separated itself into “those who ride and those who are the donkeys to be ridden.”25
Kilpatrick wanted to be a rider. He had issued a startling suggestion when the students filed their lawsuit in 1951. It might soon be time, he announced, to “abandon tax-supported public education altogether.”26 In November 1955, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Brown II, the implementation decree, Kilpatrick followed that call to privatize education with a crusade against federal “dictation.”27 Kilpatrick began agitating in earnest on November 21, 1955; from then until January 1956, his daily column pounded home the case that no ground whatsoever should be ceded to a federal government trying to dictate how Virginia should conduct its affairs. His mallet was the constitutional theory developed by John C. Calhoun, the antebellum South Carolina U.S. senator who sought to conjure a militant south.
To protect his region’s distinctive political economy, anchored in the treatment of black people as property, Calhoun had argued that state governments had the right to refuse to abide by those federal laws that they found odious. He based his case on the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which specifies that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Fearing a rising national antislavery majority in the North and the West, Calhoun insisted that the authority for the U.S. Constitution came not from the American people collectively but from the states that consented to the Union. Therefore, he deduced, state leaders had the right to “interpose” their authority between their residents and Washington.28
Most Americans who thought about such matters at all assumed that the Union victory in the Civil War had settled the question. A national Union “of the people, by the people, and for the people” had defeated the planter class’s bid to insulate its power from the collective will of the majority from whom federal authority flowed. But as Kilpatrick looked for a respectable way to fight Brown, to lift the cause above “the sometimes sordid level of race,” Calhoun’s theory of states’ rights seemed his only option.29 The Washington Post came to call him the “apostle” of interposition, training the whole region in its intricacies.30
Working as many as fourteen hours a day, he composed one opinion piece after another for six weeks running to persuade fellow white southerners that they had a constitutional right to reject the federal mandate to end Jim Crow schools—and that honor required it. The imposing display of arcana served a purpose: to persuade readers that the “naked and arrogant declaration of nine men” in Brown constituted a “rape of the Constitution.” Kilpatrick’s passion, as much as his purpose, commanded attention. “When people bought the News Leader on the stand” during this period, “they would turn to the editorial page the first thing,” recalled a local newsman. “You had to see that with your own eyes to believe it.”31
What so alarmed Kilpatrick was that Virginia was about to accede not to the spirit of the decision, with a plan for genuinely integrating its schools, but to its letter, with token concessions. A commission appointed by the governor had accepted some of the proposals of the diehard segregationists—above all, tax-subsidized tuition grants. These vouchers, to use today’s language, would enable diehard white parents who could not stand the idea of integration to send their children to segregated private schools, something only the richest could do without such financial help. But the Gray Commission, named for its appointed chair, State Senator Garland Gray, was also recommending a local option: individual school districts faced with court orders would be able to decide for themselves whether to obey, albeit in a way limited by a state-controlled pupil placement plan designed to radically restrict desegregation in those communities willing to allow any.32
When the Arlington County School Board announced its plan to comply with the courts, a Kilpatrick ally demanded of fellow legislators that if some communities “won’t stand with us then I say make them”—by shutting down their schools if they planned to admit any black students.33
As Kilpatrick considered his next move, no one loomed larger in his calculations than Virginia’s senior U.S. senator, Harry Flood Byrd Sr. At sixty-eight, Byrd had lost some of his hair but none of the vigor that had made him one of the most formidable men in Washington—and the most powerful man back home, bar none. Those aspiring to influence in midcentury Virginia had to ask of any issue: What would Harry say? For Harry Byrd was the sun and the moon; those who found places in the firmament were there on the sufferance of the Byrd Organization, as participants referred to it (or the Byrd machine, to use the phrase critics preferred).
Senator Byrd was “an authentic aristocrat,” Time magazine observed. But as an ABC News investigative report in the 1950s revealed, he had become a very rich one in part by importing “cheap labor from the Caribbean” to work his land, despite “considerable local unemployment.” One federal official depicted aspects of the program “at worst as a modern counterpart to the slave trade, [and] at best as a system of indentured servants.” With no rights in America, the guest workers could be paid “$60 or less for a 60-hour week”—with transportation and other expenses deducted from their wages. Those from the Bahamas, like Senator Byrd’s workers, “suffer the worst exploitation of all.”34
But exploitation was a matter of perspective. For Byrd, a property rights enthusiast, this was just the free market at work: abundant labor sellers willing to contract for less pay with an employer who could thus maximize his operation’s profitability. Such imported workers were desirable to big growers precisely because their employment was not subject to irritating “federal standards of living or working conditions.” By midcentury Byrd had become “the world’s largest individual apple orchard owner.” He looked down upon his “200,000 trees in rows up to two miles long” from a white-columned mansion whose grandeur rivaled that of Mount Vernon and Monticello. Byrd saw himself as a free-enterprise success story, enabled by personal liberty backed by states’ rights protections from intrusive federal power.35
No single man has ever dominated a state so completely for so many years, albeit with studied courtliness. He presided as governor for most of the 1920s and as U.S. senator from 1933 until his retirement in 1965, acquiring a power that would have awed Calhoun. But Harry Byrd’s Organization bore no resemblance to the machines of northern cities, with their abundant services to attract the loyalties of motley low-income electorates. It was their veritable opposite: “the united establishment of Virginia,” one authority on Virginia politics has observed, over which “Byrd functioned as chairman.” Its aim was to insulate government from citizen pressure for public spending or other reform. It did that by punishing dissent. Because the Organization’s enforcers could be found in every county courthouse, if they put out “the word” on someone, that was enough to shutter a business or halt a career.36
Harry Byrd wielded his vast power to protect liberty—but as he understood it. He represented the state that had produced more of the Constitution’s framers than any other, and he was determined to enforce what he took to be their intentions. One liberal scold called the senator “a steadfast opponent of most of the twentieth century,” but Byrd wore his antiprogress politics as a badge of pride. A colleague said that as chair of the all-powerful Senate Finance Committee, Byrd “measured his success as a senator not by what he passed, but what he stopped from passing.” In his view, if liberty was to be preserved, the federal government should provide for the national defense and law enforcement, and little else.37
Because the Byrd Organization favored policies that were against the majority’s interests, it was preoccupied with manipulating the rules for voting and representation. Among its tried-and-true tools was a poll tax that effectively kept most whites as well as nearly all blacks away at election time. The black electorate had plummeted to one-seventh of its earlier strength after the 1902 constitutional provisions aimed at it, but the provisions took out others, too. “20 percent of the electorate rules—20 percent at the maximum,” railed a Richmond editor about white participation in city politics in the 1920s. “And it is called democracy!” Another key technique was malapportionment of the General Assembly to overrepresent more conservative rural residents and underrepresent more moderate city and suburban residents, a practice used since the Colonial Era. Indeed, “when the Virginia legislature voted in 1956 to close public schools rather than integrate,” explains the historian J. Douglas Smith, “the twenty-one senators who voted in favor of the action represented fewer Virginians than did the seventeen senators who opposed it.”38
For forty years, in fact, the Byrd Organization had to win only about 10 percent of the potential electorate to hold on to power. “Of all the American states, Virginia can lay claim to the most thorough control by an oligarchy,” the political scientist V. O. Key Jr. observed in his classic study of southern politics. Key went on to quip that, compared with Virginia, “Mississippi is a hotbed of democracy.”39
Virginia’s oligarchs maintained their control not with night rides but with carefully designed rules. They showed little tolerance for the vigilantism freely practiced in the Deep South. In fact, when Byrd was governor, the state effectively outlawed the Ku Klux Klan and all but ended lynching.40 The rulers understood, better than others, how clever legal rules could keep the state’s voter participation among the lowest in the nation relative to population, and its taxes among the lowest in the nation relative to wealth. Above all, the rules served to hold in check the collective power of those who might want their democracy to do more.41
A case in point: Virginia was among the first states in the nation to outlaw the closed shop—that is, to outlaw contracts that required union membership of employees. Months before a conservative Congress passed the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, called “the Slave Labor Act” by critics and passed over President Harry Truman’s veto, the state’s governor had signed a pioneering “right-to-work” law to weaken labor unions.42 If, in the face of this snare of shrewd restraints to keep them from influencing government, some citizens still managed to come together to seek change, the daily press could simply overlook it. That, too, was part of “the Virginia Way.” If collective action could not be wholly stopped, at least news of it could be buried.43
That was the system of liberty that so urgently needed defense, in the eyes of those who upheld it. Kilpatrick hit the mark in his campaign against compromise with Brown: the most powerful man in state history was elated. “I read carefully every one of your editorials,” Byrd said in praising his ally’s “brilliant” writing. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi likewise rejoiced, calling Byrd to exult that Kilpatrick’s “plan was gaining great popularity all through the South” in the run-up to Christmas of 1955. To ensure that no southern senators “compromise our convictions” by accepting Brown, Byrd invited Kilpatrick to Washington to strategize with a group of them about how his case could provide the “foundation stone” for “a united front of 11 states.” It was all but a second coming of Calhoun.44
Following Virginia’s example, by late 1956 the legislatures of eleven southern states had passed interposition and pro–massive resistance measures of their own—106, all told. Their representatives in Congress backed the militancy back home with a joint resolution that came to be known as the Southern Manifesto. “You would think today Calhoun was walking and speaking on the floor of the Senate,” commented a senator from Oregon about its reading. Every member of Congress from Virginia, and a total of 101 from the old Confederacy, signed the rebuke of the Supreme Court decision as an “unwarranted” deviation from the intentions of “the Founding Fathers.”45
In August, licensed by the interposition resolution to defy the federal government, a special session of the Virginia General Assembly convened to pass a suite of massive resistance measures—a “legislative hurricane,” as one dazed state senator called it. One feature eliminated local control of education; it compelled the governor to close and cut off funds to any school that planned to desegregate under federal court order. That meant white students would go without education if local officials conceded to the courts, because it was the white schools that faced lawsuits. Another law authorized tax-funded tuition grants to enable white parents to send their children to private schools to evade the Supreme Court ruling. As intended, this made viable the establishment of segregation academies. An additional seven laws set out to debilitate the NAACP so that it could no longer protest the injustices of the system. Indeed, the civil rights group lost one of every three members of the once thriving Virginia conference in a single year, owing to what an American Jewish Committee study found to be the South’s “most elaborate, systematic and sophisticated attempt to frustrate NAACP activity.”46
• • •
The rashness of it all worried Colgate Whitehead Darden Jr.47 He was a leading member of the state’s tight-knit white elite, anchored by the landed rich yet inclusive of corporate leaders. He had been elected to Congress and then backed as governor because he stood on the right side of every issue related to employers’ power, states’ rights, and racial segregation. He owed his appointment as president of the university to his old mentor Harry Byrd and others who stood to his right and were still well represented on the university’s Board of Visitors. Darden knew that they expected every decision he made to reflect that awareness. But the Columbia Law School– and Oxford University–trained attorney also knew that the massive resistance laws were doomed. Meanwhile, the forced shutdown of any school that desegregated would batter an already weak public school system and damage economic development in the state.48
The days were past, Darden could see, when emotional agitation, backed by rash appeals to Calhoun’s theories, could move the country. Virginia’s best chance to find its footing once again might just be the newcomer, James Buchanan.