Massive resistance

Massive resistance was a strategy declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr. of Virginia along with his brother-in-law as the leader in the Virginia General Assembly, Democrat Delegate James M. Thomson of Alexandria, to unite white politicians and leaders in Virginia in a campaign of new state laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation, particularly after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. Many schools, and even an entire school system, were shut down in 1958 and 1959 in attempts to block integration, before both the Virginia Supreme Court and a special three-judge panel of Federal District judges from the Eastern District of Virginia, sitting at Norfolk, declared those policies unconstitutional.

Although most of the laws created to implement massive resistance were overturned by state and federal courts within a year, some aspects of the campaign against integrated public schools continued in Virginia for many more years.

After Reconstruction ended following the 1876 Presidential election and the Readjuster Party fell in the 1880s, and continuing into the 1960s, Virginia's conservative Democrats actively worked to maintain legal and cultural racial segregation in Virginia through the Jim Crow laws. To complete white supremacy, after the U.S. Supreme court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Virginia adopted a new constitution in 1902 effectively disfranchising African Americans through restrictions on voter registration and also requiring racially segregated schools, among other features.

In the early 20th century, Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966), a Democrat, former Governor of Virginia, and the state's senior U.S. Senator after World War II, led what became known as the Byrd Organization. Continuing a legacy of segregationist Democrats, from the mid-1920s until the late 1960s, the Byrd Organization was a political machine which effectively controlled Virginia politics through a network of courthouse cliques of local constitutional officers in most of the state's counties. The Byrd Organization's greatest strength was in the rural areas of the state. It never gained a significant foothold in the independent cities, nor with the emerging suburban middle-class of Virginians after World War II. One of the Byrd Organization's most vocal, though moderate, long-term opponents proved to be Benjamin Muse, who grew up in North Carolina, served as a Democratic state senator from Petersburg, Virginia, then unsuccessfully ran for Governor as a Republican in 1940, served in the U.S. Army, moved to Manassas, Virginia and became a publisher and Washington Post columnist.

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