Virginia Gives Way

"No one could be more sensitive than I to the tensions of the moment. Only God knows the surge of emotion within me striving for mastery. Only my love for Virginia and the pillar of the Almighty sustain me in this hour.''

So, with deep emotion, spoke Virginia's Governor J. (for James) Lindsay Almond Jr. last week to a special session of the Virginia General Assembly in Richmond. His duty, as he saw it, was a sad one. Faced with U.S. and Virginia Supreme Court orders (TIME, Feb. 2) to integrate four Negroes into white public schools in Arlington County (pop. 277,400) and 17 in Norfolk (pop. 294,300), Almond had either to propose new forms of resistance, which would surely be judged unconstitutional, or to comply. Almond's decision, imposed by his lawyer's mind on his Southern politician's emotions: accept the inevitable and the lawful, with good grace.

"There are those who insist that I should seek authority from the General Assembly to padlock and police any school threatened with the imminence of integration,' said he. "The assembly cannot confer such authority . . . The police power cannot be asserted to thwart or override the decree of a court of competent jurisdiction, state or federal . . . No fair-minded person would be so unreasonable as to seek to hold me responsible for failure to exercise the powers which the state is powerless to bestow."

Fire or Token? The impact of Almond's decision spread fast and spread hard through the South. Virginia, the traditional leader, had originally provided in its massive-resistance laws--in its authorization for the Governor and/or assembly to seize control of the schools from local districts, to close schools, to withhold school funds, etc.--a promising pattern of lawful resistance to the Supreme Court's basic 1954-55 decisions. Now Virginia was setting what amounted to a new pattern of limited or token integration, which had already been pioneered in North Carolina. Desperately, the Virginia General Assembly's extremists, led by Senator Harry Byrd's mouthpiece, House Speaker E. Blackburn Moore fought for more time by putting up last-minute stop-integration dodges. Example: because of the Chicago school fire, the state should be empowered to close schools until certified safe by a state fire marshal.

But Lindsay Almond, sitting alone and writing in his lawbook-lined study for almost two days, had made his decision, and he stood by it. Almond quietly lined up Byrd-organization moderates and others, quietly defied the Byrd leadership, warned the extremists that he would have to veto any slapdash measures designed to thwart the courts.

Dignity or Mob? Toward week's end Almond maneuvered through the assembly his own measures, designed to substitute passive for massive resistance.*They were : 1) repeal the state's compulsory-school-attendance law; 2) grant up to $250 a year to students who leave the integrated public schools for nonsectarian private schools; 3) provide up to ten-year prison sentences for those convicted of threatening to bomb schools, churches, other meeting places. Implicit was the promise that free, public integrated schools would be kept open. And the courts kept up parallel pressure when 1) U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren turned down the Arlington County school board's last plea for reprieve, and 2) U.S. District Judge Walter E. Hoffman blocked a Norfolk city council plan to cut off funds above the sixth grade, thereby ordered integration at Norfolk to proceed.

But for all the stately progress of the courts, for all the state government's dignified acceptance of the inevitable, for all Governor Almond's courage in risking a break with the Byrd machine, the outcome might still hinge on whether the extremists could stir up mob violence as token school integration got under way this week. "Things seem too quiet,'' mused one assemblyman in Richmond one day last week. "Either we're beginning a rosy dawn or we're in the eye of a hurricane."

*Quip of the week south of Mason-Dixon: "Massive's in the cold, cold ground."

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