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Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

May 17, 2004

Virginia since Brown

By Preston Bryant
ROANOKE.COM COLUMNIST

Fifty years ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in Brown v. Board of Education. It was a decision that would strike down the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson-based “separate but equal” doctrine that underpinned the segregated treatment of blacks from whites in America’s public schools.

As historic as that May 17, 1954, decision was, that which took so many by surprise was that it was a unanimous one among the justices – a fact that, when announced that day, caused an audible gasp in the courtroom. That gasp set in motion a nation-changing force that has continued for a half century.

Brown was a compilation of five cases folded into it. One of those was Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, which emanated from the school system that had relegated its black students at the overcrowded Robert R. Moton High School – it was built for about 200 students and had more than twice that – to overflow tarpaper shacks that were oven-like when enveloped by Virginia’s heat and humidity.

The Davis case was sparked after Barbara Johns, a 16-year-old Moton student, led some 450 of her black schoolmates in an April, 1951, walkout protest of the school’s conditions. The students marched to the homes of school board members.

The county school board refused to improve Moton’s conditions. So Johns and her cohorts protested for two weeks. In short order, they enlisted the help of Oliver W. Hill, a Richmond attorney affiliated with the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Hardly a month after Johns’ walkout, Hill filed the Davis lawsuit on behalf of 117 Moton students, including the young Dorothy Davis, for which it was named.

It’d be exactly three years after Davis was filed before its related Brown decision would be handed down. Virginia’s ruling Byrd Machine would howl and openly rebel against – or massively resist – the high court’s ruling that would deny states the right to racially segregate and still claim as equal their own public schools.

Gov. Thomas B. Stanley, a Byrd Democrat who’d been sworn into office just four months before the unanimous Brown decision was announced, set in place a commission comprised of all white lawmakers to formulate the state’s response to the court’s ruling. The commission initially struck an odd sort of position, where it’d permit segregation to continue if based on non-racial criteria, but in the event of integration, it’d also recommend provisions be made for private-school tuition grants for parents who’d want to keep their kids sitting and learning among their own kind.

This, of course, was too “moderate” an approach and was eventually panned by hard-line segregationists. Preferred was Massive Resistance, which would be carried out in earnest by Stanley’s successor, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond, who a few years earlier had helped organize Virginia’s legal defense in the Brown case. A contemptuous Prince Edward County would close down its public schools in 1959 for five years.

It was during this time that extraordinary steps would be taken. Private schools would open for the county’s white kids. Black kids would receive no local schooling at all. If they wanted an education, they’d have to go elsewhere. Some simply went without an education.

It’d take a lawsuit filed by L. Francis Griffin, a black Farmville preacher, to force the county’s schools open again. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in May, 1964, in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County that the county’s school closings in defiance of the Brown decision could not stand.

In Virginia, the Brown decision would not set well with many. It’d be continuously fought for the rest of the 20th century and, believe it or not, into the next. There were more than 60 lawsuits filed over several decades in Virginia after the ’54 court ruling.

One of those suits, and perhaps the longest lasting, was Brewer v. City of Norfolk School Board, a 1963 busing case. Brewer would be litigated in stop-and-go fashion until the early 1980s. And then for two more decades anti-integrationists would continue fighting its pro-integration outcome. Finally, in 2001 – that’s right, 2001 – the federal courts said enough was enough.

Remarkably, one Virginian, Henry L. Marsh, III, would be at the center of those 60-plus post-Brown cases. Marsh, a Richmond civil rights activist and attorney, would go on to be his city’s first black mayor and today represents Richmond in the state senate. Marsh was the man who took up the Brewer case and would stick with it until its end nearly 40 years later.

Marsh’s stick-to-itiveness comes naturally. He’s an Oliver Hill protégé, and his legal career has been spent at the Richmond firm Hill founded.

Much of this history is being commemorated by the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Memorial Commission, established by the Virginia General Assembly in 1992 to preserve the civil rights leader’s memory and advance the ideals of his philosophy and work. The commission formed a steering committee last year to coordinate in 2004 a year’s worth of community and statewide events celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision.

Since the Davis case was filed in ’51 and decided as part of Brown three years later, Virginia has proven that its redemptive powers are greater than its less noble ones. The state has acknowledged the wrong-headedness of Massive Resistance and some legislators are working to establish a scholarship fund for students denied an education when their schools were closed in defiance of Brown.

What history continues to teach us is that looking back is a good thing, especially when it helps you look ahead. Such is the case with this week’s Brown celebrations, where commemorating the hard battles won will help us focus on the unfortunate many that still must be fought.

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