Traditional racial attitudes were certainly a factor in the creation of massive resistance. Age-old customs and attitudes that had been legalized for half a century were challenged by the Brown decision of 1954. The loudest voices defending the overturned separate-but-equal policy came from the Southside, where the black percentage of the population was highest and where fears of race mixing were strongest. But it also appears that Senator Harry Byrd and other Organization leaders perceived race as an issue with which to maintain their political domination in the state. Race and politics were reinforcing elements in Organization thinking because black emancipation, particularly through increased political participation, would threaten machine hegemony as well as race control. Predictably, then, Organization leaders fought changes in the poll tax or any civil rights legislation that promised to improve black voting opportunities. The Supreme Court’s school decision was perceived as another step in dismantling the entire Jim Crow system, including electoral control; it would have to be obstructed. A resolve to preserve the “Virginia Way” of managed race relations, along with political profit and racial conviction, dictated Byrd’s response to desegregation.
Further Reading
James W. Ely Jr., The Crisis of Conservative Virginia: The Byrd Organization and the Politics of Massive Resistance.
J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy, 2002, UNC Press
This Vignette Provided By
Ronald Heinemann, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: The History of Virginia, 1607-2007
