Dissertation Abstract: Andrew Lewis

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Written at the University of Virginia, 2000
Advisor: Paul Gaston
479 pages

This dissertation considers the education debates that emerged in Virginia in the 1940s as a context for understanding the massive resistance of the 1950s and the struggle in the 1960s to establish a modus vivendi on school desegregation. Covering the years between 1945 and 1954, the first half considers the broad-based education reform movement that emerged after the war and the progressive movement that linked changes in citizenship—most notably the interracial effort to eliminate the poll tax and a renewed emphasis on black and white electoral participation—with an expanded and improved educational system. The second half of the narrative follows the events of massive resistance—roughly the years from 1954 to 1960—with an eye toward how the reform politics of the 1940s shaped the desegregation crises of the 1950s.

At the end of World War II, Virginia's public schools were underfunded, understaffed, and horribly overcrowded. White political leaders did not think that school spending was as important as maintaining the state's traditions of low taxes and balanced budgets. For many Virginians, white and black, education became the issue that brought them into politics for the first time, often in implicit challenges to the ideas of the state's leaders. Virginia's leaders reacted to these challenges by accepting some reform to preserve their power.

After Brown, Virginia's conservative white leaders vowed to end public education rather than allow integration. Because of the debates of the 1940s, many white Virginians had come to see the school system as a fundamental community institution, one allowing citizens an equal stake in society. At the same time, African-American tactics and goals shifted in response to changes in white opinion. When state leaders closed some public schools in 1958 to prevent integration, many ordinary white parents opposed this decision. By 1960, moderates had forged a political consensus that accepted some desegregation to preserve public education. This pragmatic compromise forestalled a more comprehensive debate about equality, allowing both black and white Virginians to impose their own meanings on the crisis of massive resistance.

Author's Comments:

My dissertation, "Wandering in Two Worlds: Race, Citizenship, and Education in Virginia Since 1945," examines the debates among and between black and white Virginians over education as a means of understanding the shift in Virginia from a segregated to a suburban South. It considers what different actors thought an integrated society would look like and the carious ways in which the end of Jim Crow reshaped notions of citizenship and community in the South. While elaborating the dominant conservative ethos in Virginia at the end of World War II, my work is sensitive to the geographic, economic, and intellectual fissures that split Virginians along and within racial groups, paying particular attention to the broad middle-ground of white southerners ambivalent about the costs of absolute defiance but uneasy about the possibility of significant change in the racial order.

The enclosed chapter, "David Mays, The Gray Commission, and the Rise of Massive Resistance, 1954-1956," examines the debate among political elites about how to respond to the 1954 Supreme Court decision ending legalized school segregation. It considers who advocated for defiance, who counseled moderation, and who did nothing at all. The chapter breaks new ground by assessing critically this last group. Most studies of massive resistance have praised the moderate leadership of men such as David Mays, Colgate Darden, and Lewis Powell in forging the consensus that helped bring an end to outright defiance. Such interpretations neglect their political cowardice that allowed the passage of the massive resistance laws in the first place.

All three men understood that state and federal courts would eventually strike down the massive resistance laws, but once their advice was rejected in private they kept silent. They worried that opposing the Byrd Organization publicly would threaten their social standing and imperil their friendships. In short, they valued their own social standing over justice, with disastrous consequences for Virginia. Their actions are a reminder hat real leadership often requires hard and unpopular choices and that the folly of massive resistance could have been avoided if they had demonstrated such courage. It is also a reminder that even people who are not the putative leaders of a group or organization can display leadership (or the lack thereof) that can have an important influence on events.

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