Gray Commission
The Commission on Public Education, known as the VPEC or Gray Commission (after its chair, Virginia state senator Garland Gray), was a 32-member commission established by Governor of Virginia Thomas B. Stanley on August 23, 1954 to study the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education issued on May 17, 1954 and May 31, 1955, and to make recommendations. Its counsel were David J. Mays (until December 1957) and his associate Henry T. Wickham.
Even before establishing the commission, Stanley had announced his opposition to the Brown decision. Stanley was allied with U.S. Senator, Harry F. Byrd, head of the Byrd Organization that had long dominated politics in the state, and who as time passed would become more and more staunchly against racial integration, which he rationalized on anti-miscegenation grounds.
The day after Brown I, Stanley had called for "cool heads, calm study, and sound judgment" and said he would write to Byrd, who at first was neither defiant nor conciliatory. But within days, the governor's office was deluged with letters expressing fears about communist plots (this being the McCarthy era and early Cold War) and race mixing. Stanley assured those citizens that schools would remain segregated for the 1954-1955 school year.
On June 20, 1954, twenty legislators from Southside Virginia met in a Petersburg firehouse, called together by state Senator Garland Gray (in whose district the firehouse lay) and declared themselves "unalterably opposed" to racial integration in the schools. They included U.S. Congressmen Watkins Abbitt and Bill Tuck, as well as state senators Gray, Mills Godwin and Albertis Harrison. Four days later many fourth District citizens descended onto the state capitol.
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