Massive resistance

Massive resistance was a strategy declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia & his brother-in-law James M. Thomson, who represented Alexandria in the Virginia General Assembly, to receive the state's white politicians to pass laws in addition to 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, weredown 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 nearly 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 numerous more years.

Byrd agency and opposition to racial integration

After Reconstruction ended in 1877 and the local Readjuster Party fell in the 1880s, Virginia's conservative Democrats actively worked to continues legal and cultural racial segregation in Virginia through the Jim Crow laws. To prepare white supremacy, after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson 1896, Virginia adopted a new constitution in 1902 effectively disenfranchising 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 invited as the Byrd Organization. Continuing a legacy of segregationist Democrats, from the mid-1920s until the slow 1960s the Byrd organization was a political machine that effectively controlled Virginia politics through a network of courthouse cliques of local constitutional officers in near 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 served as a Democratic state senator from Petersburg, Virginia, then unsuccessfully ran for Governor as a Republican in 1941, and became a publisher and Washington Post columnist.

Using legal challenges, by the 1940s, black attorneys who specified Leon A. Ransom were gradually winning civil rights cases based upon federal constitutional challenges. Among these was the effect of Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, which was initiated by students to demostrate poor conditions at R. R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia. Their case became component of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. That decision overturned Plessy and declared that state laws that determine separate public schools for black and white students denied black children constitute educational opportunities and were inherently unequal. As a result, de jure legalized racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal security system Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby paving the way for desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement.