What does modern school privatization owe to Virginia’s fight against desegregation? A little-known history traces how segregationists and emerging libertarian ideas converged around publicly funded private schools, creating a political and intellectual blueprint with consequences far beyond the 1950s.
In mid-nineteen fifties America, the existence of a nationwide system of mass public education was widely touted as a signal achievement. Just then, however, that system confronted a brewing storm; a legal challenge to its greatest flaw—the existence in 17 states of racially segregated schools that ensured and perpetuated a rank discrimination against African Americans. Scrambling to continue their dual education systems, white leaders in several southern states confronted serious questions: how to finance a public-private system; how to gain control of existing school resources; and, of equal importance, how to justify it all in an ostensibly non-racial way. The libertarian ideas and ideology of the Chicago School of economics, introduced in the midst of this debate, helped offer some answers and came to play a significant, if often behind-the-scenes, role. Espoused first by Milton Friedman, and, later, by James M. Buchanan, the libertarian argument emerged most consistently during Virginia’s long school desegregation crisis.[1] Because so many crucial details of that episode remain opaque, its story is worth another look. The following essay examines the first phase of the story.
In fall 1958, the governor of Virginia closed nine schools in three localities as part of the state’s Massive Resistance plan to block court-ordered public school desegregation. With limited success, segregationists in the affected communities sought to replace the closed public schools with private, segregated academies, using state tuition grants. After Virginia scrapped Massive Resistance and strengthened the tuition grant program, the local government of Prince Edward County refused to fund the operation of desegregated public schools. Using county funds and outside donations to supplement their resources, the Prince Edward segregationists launched a private school for white students while leaving African American students—over half the county’s children—without public schools for five years. Federal court rulings reopened the county’s public schools in 1964 and ended state tuition grants in 1969. Federal tax law eliminated Prince Edward Academy’s color bar, but over a half century later, the academy remains in operation. [2]
The impetus for creating private schools subsidized by public funds preceded Massive Resistance by several years. The concept emerged as the threat to segregated education appeared in the early nineteen fifties. Moreover, as the Prince Edward experience indicates, it persisted after the fall of Massive Resistance, fusing racial prejudices with an ideology of free market capitalism under a banner of “Freedom of Choice.” These ideas were hardly exclusive to Virginia; they were being debated in other Southern states, as well. After the 1959 legal defeat of Massive Resistance, Virginia pioneered in developing the ideology of privatization to preserve segregation, paired with denial of racial intent. Tracing the origin and development of the private school idea in the years before Massive Resistance helps clarify how it took root.[3]
Let’s begin by examining the private schools ideology before Massive Resistance. By 1951, the NAACP’s efforts striking at segregation in public education were raising concern in Virginia’s leadership circles.[4] The civil rights organization had launched a two pronged legal offensive in the 1930s to challenge segregation in graduate and professional schools and to equalize primary and secondary education. In the late 1940s, both efforts scored important victories in federal courts. Virginia was a principal target of the equalization campaign. Litigating issue by issue—teacher salaries, transportation, school facilities, curriculum offerings—the NAACP waged its struggle until it questioned segregated schools’ ability to afford equal education as a practical matter.[5]
The inflection point was reached in 1948 and 1950 when it appeared that federal judges might order desegregation in some county school systems in eastern and western Virginia due to their inability to equalize education. A school official’s comments in King George County, one of the systems in the litigation, offer a window into the thinking of white officials—and a portent of the future. T. Benton Gayle, county school superintendent, predicted that if segregated schooling was abolished, “All the white people who could afford to do so would send their children to private institutions.” The public schools, he foresaw, would be attended “primarily by ‘poor whites’ and Negroes.” The judges stopped short of ordering desegregation, but the possibility brought forth the first threat to close the public schools rather than desegregate from Virginia Circuit Court Judge Leon M. Bazile.[6]
Those cases likely stimulated Virginia’s white leadership to contemplate alternatives should desegregation be ordered. If not, the NAACP’s 1950 tactical shift from equalization to constitutional challenge of segregation certainly did. The first case in the state making such a direct attack arose from an April 1951 student strike at the Black high school in Prince Edward County. After the case was filed in May, journalist Ben Muse noted in an early June Washington Post column that, “In some quarters, thought is even being given to the possibility of leasing public school properties to some form of parents’ cooperatives as a device , if necessary, for prolonging segregation.” [7]
On a parallel track, the challenge to segregation in the Virginia system of State Parks became entwined with the school case and offered the first example of the state’s privatization scheme. During the 1930s and 1940s, Virginia had developed eight parks for whites and none for African Americans. Threat of a federal lawsuit on “separate but equal” grounds in 1947 led the state government to open one, separate park for blacks. In June 1951, four leaders of the Norfolk NAACP filed a federal suit after being denied admittance to the nearby Seashore State Park. The governor, John S. Battle, responded that the state was making a sincere effort to provide equal facilities. He warned that a court ruling desegregating the parks “might result in the abandonment of the park program in Virginia.” Later in the summer, reports followed that state Attorney General J. Lindsay Almond was examining the legality of creating a leasing arrangement with a private contractor that would preserve the park’s color line. Officials of the parks agency were reported as believing they “could lease the parks for private operation without obtaining any action from the General Assembly.” The federal judge hearing the case postponed action on it pending a ruling in a similar case in Maryland and on the school desegregation cases then before the U.S. Supreme Court.[8]
In the 1952 General Assembly session, three bills in two packages dealt with the possible use of privatization as a defense against desegregation. The fate of the first two bills offered by state Senator Charles T. Moses of Appomattox County revealed elite division over the details, not the goals, of using state subsidized private education to evade court rulings. Moses’ bills would have allowed counties to contract with private, non-profit groups to operate “free” schools for whites that would receive public support. At the same time, the public schools would remain in operation. The arrangement would permit, he believed, a segregated system to endure. In quietly killing the legislation, the chairman of the Senate committee to which they were referred said his members felt that the actions called for were “premature.” Moreover, they felt “the bills would not cover adequately the situation they were designed to meet” and they had concerns about their constitutionality [probably over support for religious schools]. The third bill granting the governor authority to lease public parks to private contractors, by contrast, passed easily.[9]
Discussion of private segregated schools supported by state grants did not surface in public forums in 1953, nor was there any attempt at park leasing. All action was held in abeyance while the Supreme Court heard the school cases. State leaders hoped their surge in spending on school equalization would lead the Court to grant them a reprieve on desegregation. In his argument to the Justices, Attorney General Almond warned that white Virginians would drop their support of public schools should segregation end, though he did not mention any shift of public funds to private education.[10] In a public speech, Almond went into greater detail and, perhaps foreshadowing his later actions as governor, expressed doubt about the ability to shift to a private system. In the event of a desegregation decree, Almond predicted, the public school system “would wither and die.” “Any substitute would have to run the gamut of a long and debilitating period of adjustment, trial and error.” In the end the children whose parents could not afford private education would suffer—“The poor whites and the Negroes would be the appalling victims.”[11]
In the spring of 1954, the private school idea reappeared briefly in print. The title of an April column in The Washington Post by Benjamin Muse anticipating the coming school decision expressed more the writer’s hope than a realistic assessment—“Virginia Has Lost Alarm at Racial Ruling.” In keeping with that thinking, Muse said, “Schemes for abandoning state-operation of public schools, and subsidizing in some manner segregated private schools, never got very far in Virginia.” Though he did add that, “The launching of many segregated private schools, in spite of the onerous cost to parents, is widely predicted.” The following month Muse was concerned enough to seek an opinion from the attorney general regarding the leasing of public schools to private organizations. Almond replied that local school boards could lease schools to private organizations only if the buildings were not required to provide public education. Muse saw in the opinion more of a restrain on the privatization plan than did the segregationists.[12]
Written less than a month after the Brown decision, a letter from a prominent Norfolk attorney to a state senator, for example, outlined an elaborate plan, one of several he had heard or read about, to use leasing, private organizations, public funds, and parental choice to preserve segregation. Replying to the senator’s request for details, George Gray, a constitutional lawyer, said the plan “least subject to [legal] attack is one by which the State subsidizes each individual child. Each child, white or negro, receives the same amount for his schooling at a school of his parents choice, and the money is paid directly to the school.” The schools wouldn’t be open to all, “Of course, the child has to be acceptable to the school.” It would be a major shift, “This plan requires that the State go out of the school business as it exists today, but I see no legal difficulty in the State leasing existing school facilities to non-profit corporations which will run the schools subject to conditions and requirements imposed by the State.” The system could grow. “As for future school facilities the State can continue its building program and lease the buildings as they are completed, or pay sufficient subsidies for the non-profit corporation running the schools to erect new facilities when they are needed.”[13]
Virginia’s governmental leaders—its governor, attorney general, and other officials—as well as its press reacted with restraint after the May 1954 Brown I decision. Senator Byrd, the state’s dominant political leader, denounced the Court ruling as a constitutional outrage but threatened no specific acts to defy it. Unlike South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi, Virginia had not made public plans to defy and evade a desegregation ruling. Its demographic and political facts may have accounted for that course of action. African Americans (slightly over 20%) comprised a smaller proportion of Virginia’s population than in those states. A growing urban population was beginning to challenge Senator Byrd’s rurally oriented political machine. Perhaps its leaders thought it best not to bring such a polarizing issue into the political arena. At any rate, in the immediate aftermath of the desegregation decision, Virginia had no public plan to deal with it.
The state’s uncertain direction regarding desegregation began to shift as militant segregationists organized in the political vacuum among white Virginians. Legislators from the Southside Fourth Congressional District met scarcely a month after Brown to declare their unalterable opposition to it and their intention to use every means to circumvent it. In October, local officials and leaders from throughout the Southside region formed the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, a segregationist pressure group closely allied with the Byrd Organization. The Defenders (as they became known) chose as their legal counsel Collins Denny Jr., a Richmond constitutional lawyer who had battled legal challenges to segregation since the 1930s and had legal and political contacts across the South.[14]
After indicating that he would appoint a biracial panel to address the desegregation matter, Virginia Governor Thomas B. Stanley in late August finally assigned the task to a commission consisting of thirty-two legislators. The black belt counties in the eastern and Southside regions of the state predominated—nineteen of the thirty-two represented jurisdictions with Black populations greater than the statewide percentage. They were all male, all white, and all, except for two Republicans, aligned with the Byrd Organization. The members selected state Senator Garland Gray, of majority Black Surry County, as chairman. In mid-November, the Gray Commission, as it came to be called, held a large public hearing in Richmond at which a spectrum of views white and Black were aired but the majority opposed desegregation and demanded a choice of which sort of school their children would attend. One of the four main themes expressed called for creation of a publicly funded private segregated system. Early in 1955, David J. Mays, a prominent Richmond lawyer and Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer, was hired as the Commission’s chief counsel.[15]
In spring 1955, an essay by a University of Chicago economist advocating state subsidy, like tuition grants, for private education appeared in a collection of economics essays. The extent to which the early debate in the South influenced Milton Friedman’s essay on “The Role of Government in Education” is not clear other than from a fleeting acknowledgement of its existence in a vague footnote, but evidence from the public record indicates his work had a shaping effect a few months later on the 1955 Virginia referendum debate.[16] At the same time, the Gray Commission was undertaking its legal research. Collins Denny Jr., of the Defenders, and the commission’s counsel David Mays were discussing ways of evading desegregation. Denny tried to persuade the Commission of the need for a special General Assembly session to initiate state constitutional changes to enable that end. The Gray panel, however, declined any move until after the Supreme Court’s upcoming implementation decree.[17]
During these months the actions and resulting court rulings that would settle the issue of state leasing of property to preserve segregation began to unfold in the Seashore State Park case. With the case still pending, the state government moved in February 1955 to lease the park to a private operator who would maintain the color line. The black plaintiffs turned to the federal district court for an injunction barring the state’s action. Walter E. Hoffman, the new federal judge presiding over the case, made his concern evident at the March hearing. Questioning Henry T. Wickham, special assistant to the Virginia attorney general, Hoffman asked: “If the State of Virginia has authority to lease a state park, would it not be possible for a municipal corporation to lease its public schools to a private individual?” When Wickham replied that it could, the judge responded “That’s the very thing that bothers me.”[18] Hoffman granted a temporary injunction and after a hearing in late spring issued his ruling in early July. Virginia could not, he ruled, lease its property to private owners for the purpose of retaining segregation. The state could not discriminate by race in its public parks and the same rules applied in its leases. Making threats to close the state’s park system, Attorney General Almond appealed Hoffman’s decision to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The higher court upheld the district court’s decision. A petition for appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected in October 1956. In a forerunner of what it would do with schools, the state closed Seashore Park from 1955 to 1963.[19] But the technique of leasing public schools to private operators to maintain segregation was foreclosed.
When it came at the end of May 1955, the Brown II implementation order with its reliance on individual suits in federal district courts and vague guideline of “all deliberate speed” offered the chance for a gradual end of school segregation. Though a few local school boards quietly began preparing to comply, the most visible reaction in Virginia came from those who refused to accept any desegregation. In early June, Judge Leon Bazile, who had earlier threatened to close schools rather than desegregate them, issued a decision on school bonds that gained state and national attention. In a ruling that roiled the municipal bond market, Bazile declared that public school bonds voted on for segregated schools could not be used to construct desegregated ones.
He did not, however, stop there. In his lengthy, sweeping opinion, the former assistant attorney general of Virginia argued that the U.S. Supreme Court by throwing out the segregation provision of the Virginia Constitution had in fact negated the document’s entire education title. Virginia had no obligation to maintain “public free schools.” Bazile’s legal logic remained a key part of the state’s defense of Massive Resistance until 1959. [20]
The point—that localities were free to make whatever arrangement they wished-- was quickly seized upon. Collins Denny Jr., announcing the Defenders’ “Plan for Virginia,” made admiring reference to Bazile’s ruling. But the Defenders wanted additional guarantees: changes to the state constitution’s education article (a process that would require a state referendum) to help create and operate private schools subsidized by state tuition grants. They also threatened to deny funds to any desegregated schools and advocated an end to the compulsory school attendance law.[21]
In Prince Edward County, whose suit was Virginia’s part of the Brown decision, the county’s board of supervisors refused to vote on the coming year’s school budget, declaring that they would not fund desegregated schools. Robert Crawford, state president of the Defenders, announced a plan to raise $200,000 to support private education in the county. Four neighboring counties voted to fund their schools on a month-to-month basis as did Prince Edward after the state announced it planned to continue segregation until 1956. By August, the Prince Edward Educational Foundation, the non-profit set up to support private schooling, held $190,000 in pledges toward its goal. At a heated public meeting James Bash, principal of the county’s white high school, raised questions about the feasibility and wisdom of the private school plan and offered his resignation.[22]
Speakers at a September meeting in Norfolk floated ideas that would later crystalize in the “school choice movement.” Sponsored by the Norfolk chapter of the Defenders, the meeting drew a full capacity audience of 1,850 people and featured a panel including Defenders legal advisors Collins Denny and Judge J. Segar Gravatt. The keynote speaker was Waldemar E. Debnam, an author, radio commentator, and member of the Raleigh, North Carolina City Council. Debnam proposed that when the public schools were ordered desegregated that they be left open and white parents would have the choice of sending their children to publicly subsidized “private” segregated schools or to the desegregated public schools. He guessed that those parents choosing the latter would only fill a phone booth. It was, he said, a “let-the-people-choose program in keeping with every principle of liberty on which this nation was founded.”[23]
Within the Gray Commission debates took place between those who wished to prevent any desegregation and those who would allow local option. In regard to tuition grants, the most pressing issue was whether the potential grants violated a provision (section 141) of the Virginia Constitution forbidding payments for schooling in institutions not owned by the state. Early in September, the state initiated a test case involving grants to war orphans and teachers to get a ruling on the constitutionality of the practice. If it were unconstitutional, the Gray Commission would have to seek passage of an amendment to permit tuition grants. Following a late September meeting, the commission indicated that its coming report (delayed until after the November election) would recommend changes in the compulsory attendance law to allow white parents the choice not to send their children to a desegregated school; appropriation of state funds for nonsectarian private schools; and clarifying local control over school buildings that would allow for the sale to “private educational corporations.” There was no more discussion of the leasing option.[24]
Influential voices outside of the Gray Commission predicted a future in which publicly subsidized private education would preserve segregation and the racial caste system. Collins Denny was quoted as saying “that the public school system as we know it will be dead by the end of the current term.” Speaking to a Henrico County audience, he declared “There is not a chinamen’s chance of public schools staying alive; we must evolve a new system.” To achieve that goal would require a wholesale change in the state constitution. Such an amendment would need ratification in a state referendum, which would need a vote of white solidarity to carry. In a state where 31 counties had Black populations below 10%, breaking the color line in any of them could well threaten the needed support. Therefore Denny opposed even the slightest, gradual desegregation anywhere declaring, “I would not add to the possibility and to the trend that over the long reaches of time we would be turned into a mulatto people.” Sharing the podium with Congressman William M. Tuck before a mass meeting attended by 2300 people in Halifax County, Denny called the threat to Virginia the most “dire emergency in 200 years.” Tuck pledged to defend “the pure Anglo-Saxon blood that courses through the innocent veins of our helpless children.” Outside the black belt, especially in areas like Northern Virginia, officials began to warn of the threat to public education. The chairman of the Arlington County School Board declared at a meeting on September 15th that the problem they faced was “the preservation of our public school systems,” not integration.[25]
Just after the state election, on 7 November 1955, Virginia’s Supreme Court made its ruling in the case testing tuition grants. The grants, it found, were in violation of the state constitution.[26] An amendment was needed. Adoption of such an amendment as quickly as the circumstances required could only be done by a constitutional convention. To initiate the process, which required the legislature to call for a referendum on the convention, the Gray Commission recommended that the governor schedule a special session of the General Assembly for late November.
In addition to calling for the actions necessary to amend the state constitution to permit creation of a tuition grant program, the Gray Commission recommended a pupil assignment plan and a modification of the compulsory attendance law. The pupil assignment idea was similar to plans being discussed in North Carolina and other states, but the tuition grant concept was heralded as an innovation. David Mays was quoted in The New York Times describing the grants as “pioneering in the field.” Richard L. Strout, correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, called tuition grants a “new device” the Gray Commission had “invented.” “If adopted in Virginia,” Strout predicted, “similar developments are expected in other southern states.” The report specified that the grants would go to non-sectarian private schools, but it was silent on the details of how the schools would be set up. One commissioner told the press that legal rules would keep unused public schools from being available quickly for private use. After turning aside proposed amendments, the special session passed, with only a few dissenting votes, a referendum question narrowly restricted to allowing tuition grants. [27]
Because the Gray Plan’s approach did not include a constitutional change allowing private acquisition of school resources and permitted desegregation in some localities, hardline segregationists were not content with it. But they strongly supported tuition grants as a key pillar of the plan they envisioned. Writing of the tuition grant proposal, James J. Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News Leader, told his readers, “It offers the only prospective means by which thousands of children may hope for an educational opportunity within the framework of the South’s traditional society.” White moderates who favored local option, on the other hand, found the pupil assignment and attendance law aspects congenial but divided over tuition grants. A portion of them, mostly those from Northern Virginia and the Hampton Roads cities, saw the grants as threats to the public schools. For most others, especially those aligned with the Byrd Organization, the grants were a “safety-valve” for whites in the black belt counties and they felt assured that public schools would be maintained. An intense six-week campaign ensued culminating in a 9 January 1956 referendum. The Byrd Organization mobilized its formidable resources in support of the constitutional amendment. Opponents of the grants drew upon scattered support from civic groups, liberal ministers, organized labor, and the Black community. [28]
Much of the concern inspired by the tuition grant plan focused on the fate of public education in the more than two dozen Virginia counties where African American children formed a majority of the school population. Would those local governments refuse to appropriate school funds, as Prince Edward County had threatened to do, and use tuition grants for the education of most white students? If so, the damage to public education was obvious. Moreover, under the state constitution (section 129) the state would have to step in to operate the public schools, transferring the costs of doing so to taxpayers in other regions of the state. In the special session, Northern Virginia legislators had tried but failed to make payment of the grants conditional upon maintenance of a public school system. The state’s legal officials were vague on the issue. Attorney General Almond spoke of creating a regional public school system in the affected areas. Henry Wickham, who was serving under Mays as a counsel to the Gray Commission, said that the state could fulfill its constitutional obligation simply by providing its ordinary share of school funds, presaging an argument the state would later make after Prince Edward closed its public schools.[29]
The debate was particularly intense and public support for the grants wavering in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., the state’s Tenth Congressional District. Throughout the Christmas season of 1955, speakers debated the pros and cons of tuition grants at numerous forums. James J. Kilpatrick defended the grants at an early forum in Falls Church. The opponents had distorted the scope of the grants, he explained, the program would not “be broad enough to cause abandonment of the state’s public school system.” The reason for opposition to the Brown decision was “because Virginians had great reverence for the Constitution, resented compulsion and had a long tradition of a dual society.” But the Richmond editor could not resist bringing in race: “those outside the South did not realize the wide disparities in moral, sexual and health backgrounds of the two races.” Kilpatrick, in fact, represented the perfect fusion of segregationist and libertarian beliefs. Commenting in 1958 on the rising number of public swimming pools and other recreational facilities in southern cities converting to private clubs to avoid desegregation, he said, “Wholly apart from the integration issue, this is a marvelously healthy trend [not relying on public financing]”. [30]
When prominent Republican state Senator Ted Dalton from western Virginia charged that tuition grants would be found unconstitutional, he was answered by state Senator Charles Fenwick of Arlington. A Byrd Organization Democrat and a key member of the Gray Commission, Fenwick said that both Attorney General Almond and David Mays had assured him that the nonsectarian grants were constitutional. The state would not be setting up a private school system, he said. The grants would be made not to the schools but to the parents. It was a plan similar to the GI Bill’s educational benefits, just “more constitutional.” The opponents responded that the GI Bill’s constitutionality had not been tested because of its widespread popular support. Interestingly, the argument and points made by Fenwick closely tracked the case made in Milton Friedman’s earlier essay right down to the GI Bill analogy.[31] Arguments making similar points and using the GI Bill analogy had been appearing in the Letters to the Editor column of The Washington Post since mid-October. To make the point more explicitly, a letter writer a few weeks after the vote recommended “examination of Friedman’s proposal.” Emerson P. Schmidt, a Virginia resident and the director of economic research at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote: “Entirely apart from any question of segregation, Prof. Milton Friedman, a noted scholar of the University of Chicago, developed a plan for public financing of education without necessarily having public administration of education.” Schmidt goes on to quote Friedman’s idea of government paying “vouchers” to parents for “purchasing educational services from an approved institution of their own choice.” He has recourse to the GI Bill analogy and adds a strong call for privatization: “In these days of increasing intervention by government in our affairs we should never overlook an opportunity to expand private effort wherever it can do the job.” [32]
In the referendum, Virginians, restricted by the poll tax and registration requirements, turned out at a rate of only 23% of the voting age population.[33] The margin of support for the constitutional change was two to one. In the contested Tenth District, the “no” vote against calling the convention won by over 6000 votes. Delegates were quickly selected for the early March constitutional convention. With almost no dissent—except from a delegate from Northern Virginia—the convention adopted the amendment allowing the use of state funds for private education. The next step required the General Assembly to pass a statute to provide the grants. Despite not yet being enacted into law, columnist Benjamin Muse noted that it was already known “in other Southern states as the ‘Virginia Plan.’” Muse observed that the idea did not originate in Virginia, but without question it had received its fullest consideration and development in the Old Dominion.[34]
[1] Nancy MacLean, “How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education,” Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper No. 161, September 1, 2021; https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-milton-friedman-aided-and-abetted-segregationists-in-his-quest-to-privatize-public-education; Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking: New York, 2017), 45-101.
[2] The story unfolds in, A little child shall lead them, eds. Brian J. Daugherity and Brian Grogan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019). Virginia was one of four states and the District of Columbia involved in the school desegregation cases.
[3] Anthony Lewis, “School Ruling In Prince Edward,” The New York Times, 6 December 1964, E10, notes that tuition grants preceded Massive Resistance. Steve Suitts in Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement (Montgomery, AL: New South Press, 2020) provides a survey of the subject that is particularly strong in its advocacy for public education. Though Suitts gives some coverage to events in Virginia, his main focus is the Deep South, and he pinpoints the origin of tuition grants as Alabama. Scholars studying mass ideas have for good reason, however, long been wary of attributing origins to a single fount.
[4] Former Governor Linwood Holton recalled how his father-in-law, a prominent Roanoke lawyer and Democratic party leader, followed the Supreme Court’s race education decisions in the early 1950s with alarm, “A Former Governor’s Reflections on Massive Resistance In Virginia,” 49 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 15 (1992).
[5] For the story of the NAACP attorneys and their campaign see: Peter Wallenstein, Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts, and Change in Twentieth-Century Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 83-113; Brian J. Daugherity, Keep On, Keeping On: The NAACP and the Implementation of Brown v. Board of Education in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016); Margaret Edds, We Face the Dawn (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018).
[6] C. Emerson Smith, “King George County ‘Equalizes’” in New South, December 1948; “Gloucester Seeks New Trial In School Equalization Case,” 11 Aug. 1948, B1; Murray Marder, “Va. Facing Negro School Showdown This Week,” 5 Sept. 1948, A1; “Judge May Close King George School,” 3 Nov. 1948, 21; “White School Cuts Courses To ‘Equalize,’” 5 Nov. 1948, 1; “King George Voters Approve $150,000 School Bond Issue,” 7 Nov. 1948, M1; “Court Orders School Equality,” 21 Nov. 1950, 6, all in The Washington Post. Marvin Caplin, “Virginia Schools: A Study in Frustration,” The Crisis, 58 (Jan. 1951), 5 (quote 63). NAACP attorney Oliver Hill recalled that when he suggested to Federal Judge Alfred Barksdale that desegregation was the only way to achieve equality in the western Virginia county of Pulaski, the judge pounded his desk shouting vehemently “I won’t do it, I won’t do it,” Hill interview, 5 Oct. 1976.
[7] Benjamin Muse, “Abrupt Halt of Segregation Feared,” The Washington Post, 3 June 1951, B6. During the month of June 1951, the NAACP filed suits challenging segregation in public schools, state parks, and public meetings, “Negro Suit in Virginia,” NYT, 4 July 1951, 11; Hill interview.
[8] “Virginia Park Plan in Peril, Battle Says,” 29 June 1951, 13; “Parks Lease Considered By Virginia,” 16 Aug. 1951, 21, in WP; William E. O’Brien, “State Parks And Jim Crow In The Decade Before Brown v. Board of Education,” The Geographical Review, 102 (April 2012): 172-175.
[9] James H. Hershman Jr., “A Rumbling in the Museum: The Opponents of Virginia’s Massive Resistance,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1978), 28-29; “Race Ruling Would Bring Va. Session,” 16 Jan. 1952, B1, “Run-Off Vote Bill Adopted By Va. House,” (quote) 1 Feb. 1952, B2, from the WP; Peter R. Henriques, “John S. Battle: Last Governor of the Quiet Years,” in The Governors of Virginia, 1860-1978, ed. Edward Younger and James Tice Moore (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1982), 327. South Carolina’s legislature passed a statute in 1951 allowing the sale or lease of public school property to private parties, Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance, Race and Politics During the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 45.
[10] Brown v. Board: The Landmark Oral Argument Before The Supreme Court, ed. Leon Friedman (New York: The New Press, 2004), 99.
[11] “Almond Calls School Policy ‘Justifiable,’” WP, (quote) 22 Nov. 1952, 15.
[12] Benjamin Muse, “Virginia Has Lost Alarm at Racial Ruling,” (quote)25 April 1954, B1, “School Boards Bear Race Law Burden,” 16 May 1954, B2. In WP,
[13] George H. Gray to Edward L. Breeden, 11 June 1954, Edward Lebaeus Breeden Papers, Special Collections, University of Virginia.
[14] Benjamin Muse, “4th District Is Integration Problem,” WP, 27 June 1954, B2; Muse, Virginia’s Massive Resistance (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1961), 9. Collins Denny had joined with his father, a Southern Methodist bishop, in bringing a suit to block reunification in the 1930s of the Northern and Southern churches due to fear the race line would be violated. For details of the case, brought on behalf of South Carolina laymen, see: Purcell v. Summers, 34 F. Supp. 421; cert denied, 317 U.S. 640. He actively supported the States’ Rights Party in the 1948 election. For an example of Denny’s South-wide involvement in segregation advocacy, see “Segregation Groups Form Confederation,” WP, 24 Oct. 1955, 3.
[15] Hershman, “Rumbling in the Museum,” pp. 101-145; “Majority Critical of Integration At Parley,” WP, 14 Nov. 1954, 17; J. Rupert Picott, “Desegregation of Public Education in Virginia—One Year Afterward,” Journal of Negro Education, 24 (1955) 362; Race, Reason, and Massive Resistance: The Diary of David J. Mays, 1954-1959, ed. James R. Sweeney (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2008).
[16] Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” in Economics and the Public Interest, ed. Robert A. Solo (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955). The points most resembling those made in the referendum campaign can be found on pp. 130,134 (GI Bill), 144. See “The Business Bookshelf,” NYT, 28 Feb. 1955, 83, for an early, brief review of the book. Friedman acknowledges that his ideas for public financing of private schools are being used in the South as a device to preserve segregation (p 131, n.2). For fuller coverage of Friedman’s role see, MacLean, “How Milton Friedman Exploits White Supremacy.”
[17] Sweeney, Race, Reason, and Massive Resistance, pp. 38, 41.
[18] “U.S. Court Curbs Bias In Virginia,” (quote) NYT, 13 March 1955, 83.
[19] Tate v. Department of Conservation, 133 F. Supp. 53 (1955); Department of Conservation v. Tate, 231 F.2d 615 (1956); cert denied, 352 U.S.838; O’Brien, “State Parks and Jim Crow,” 175-176; see the WP, “Virginia Brief Filed in Park Bias Action,” 25 May 1955, 25, “Virginia Urged To Quit Parks,” 10 July 1955, A12, “Virginia Loses State Park Case,” 9 Oct. 1956, 1, “Harrison Sees Reopening of Park Long Shut by Segregation Dispute,” 26 July 1962, A19 (the Park did not fully reopen until the summer of 1963).
[20] “Virginia Court Bars Bonds For Nonsegregated Schools,” NYT, 3 June 1955, 1, excerpts from the opinion were printed on 10; James H. Hershman Jr., “Public School Bonds and Virginia’s Massive Resistance,” Journal of Negro Education, 52 (1983): 400-401; Bazile presented his ideas to Mays, see Sweeney, Race, Reason, and Massive Resistance, p. 57. Bazile had a remarkable career defending Virginia’s racial caste system: it started with his defense, as the state’s assistant attorney general, of the 1924 Racial Integrity Act and concluded with his ruling against interracial marriage overturned in the case of Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
[21] “A Plan for Virginia,” J. Segar Gravatt Papers, box 1, Special Collections, University of Virginia. Collins Denny is listed as Counsel. The reference to the Hanover Bonds case is on page 5. Bazile is termed “the great constitutional student who sits on the Bench before which Patrick Henry was accustomed to appear.” South Carolina held a referendum 1952 on removing the public school requirement from its constitution. It carried by a two to one majority, losing only in five upcountry counties with small Black populations, New South, February 1953. Denny with his South Carolina contacts had to be well aware of that fact.
[22] From the WP: Jeanne Rogers, “Va. County Balks Over Integration,” 2 June 1955, 1; Richard L. Lyons, “4 Tobacco Belt Counties Join Integration Protest,” 5 June 1955, A1; Jean White, “Segregation Until 1956 Asked in Va.,” 11 June 1955, 1; Benjamin Muse, “Schools or Parks, the Status is Quo,” 28 Aug. 1955, E2, and “Virginia Decides to Act on Segregation,” 18 Sept. 1955, E1. Interview with James Bash, 15 April 1972.
[23] “Segregation Group Hears Commentator,” WP, 1 October 1955, 25; “Integration Views Given By Debnam,” (quote) Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 30 September 1955, 46. My thanks to James R. Sweeney for his assistance in gaining this information.
[24] Robert E. Baker, “Gray Board Agrees On Segregation Plans,” WP, 1 Oct. 1955, 1; Sweeney, Race, Reason, and Massive Resistance, pp. 63-72.
[25] Benjamin Muse, “Budget May Take Some Preserving,” (first quote) WP, 6 Nov. 1955, E2 ;( second and third quotes) Southern School News, vol. 11, no. 4 (Oct. 1955), 6 ;( fourth and fifth quotes) “Integration Assailed at Va. Meeting,” WP, 26 Oct. 1955, 18; “Saving Public Schools Seen Issue,” WP, 16 Sept. 1955, 31.
[26] Almond v. Day, 197 Va. 419 (1955).
[27] “Virginians Offer Integration Bar,” (Mays quote) 13 Nov. 1955, 63; Robert E. Baker, “Pupil Grants to Avoid Integration Urged in Va.,” WP, 13 Nov. 1955 (the Post carried the text of the Gray Report); Richard L. Strout, “Storms Threaten Public Schools?” (second and third quotes) Christian Science Monitor, 21 Nov. 1955, 3. No plan for transferring school property to non-profit organizations was included in the referendum question.
[28] Hershman, “Rumbling in the Museum,” pp. 114-142, Kilpatrick quote p.118.
[29] Josephine Ripley, “Virginia Dissents,” CSM, 8 Dec. 1955, 28; Robert E. Baker, “State Must Replace School Services Lost Under Gray Proposal,” WP, 11 Dec. 1955, B1.
[30] “’Smoke Screen’ Of Report’s Foes Is Assailed by Richmond Editor,” WP, 13 Dec. 1955, 17; James J. Kilpatrick, “School Integration—Four Years After,” Human Events, 12 May, 1958, 60.
[31] “Legality of Gray Plan Causes Sharp Dispute,” WP, 22 Dec. 1955, 25.
[32] See for example the letters in WP from: Harley M. Williams, “Virginia School Proposal,” 18 Oct. 1955, E4, “The Gray Proposals: Pro and Con,” 18 Dec. 1955, E4; Stephen P. Taylor and Natalie B. Taylor, “Aid to Private Schools,” 9 Dec. 1955, 18; Samuel E. McCrary, “Challenge to Virginia,” 12 Dec. 1955, 10. Schmidt’s letter is: “School Administration,” 29 Jan. 1956, E4.
[33] Source: Walter Dean Burnham, ed. by Thomas Ferguson and Louis Ferteger, Voting in American Elections: the Shaping of the American Political Universe since 1788 (Bethesda: Academica Press, 2010). On voter suppression in Virginia, see Kimberly S. Johnson, “From Politics to Protest: African American Voting in Virginia in the Pre-Civil Rights Movement Era, 1940-1954,” Studies in American Political Development,” 31 (October 2017), 222-223.
[34] Benjamin Muse, “Why Virginia Took on the Court,” (quote) 11 March 1956, E1. See also, Clarence Dean, “Virginia,” NYT, 13 March 1956, 22. When tuition grants were incorporated into the Massive Resistance legislation they were limited to payment for students displaced from closed public schools to attend schools in other jurisdictions or non-sectarian private schooling, Acts of Assembly, 1956 Extra Session, ch. 68, p.69. They would be re-enacted on a more general, ostensibly non-racial basis in the 1959 and 1960 General Assembly sessions.