Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka is one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in our nation’s history. The court’s unanimous decision declared racial segregation in public education to be unconstitutional in May 1954. Yet the struggle for racially integrated public education was far from over. Less familiar than the landmark decision is the organized movement to resist implementing integration in education. That resistance movement was not limited to racist hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. In fact the movement that became known as Massive Resistance was organized by elected officials at the federal, state, and local levels. Sixty six years ago this month in March 1956, US Senator Harry Byrd Sr. of Virginia led 101 congressmen to sign and support “The Southern Manifesto” that expressed their opposition to the Brown decision and their commitment to reversing it. Those congressmen represented the vast majority of the congressional delegation from the Southern states including the entire Virginia delegation. In addition to this effort on the federal level, eight Southern states including Virginia enacted their own resistance efforts. In Virginia this included denying state funding to any public school system that dared to implement integration as well as providing state tuition grants for white students to attend private segregated schools. Senator Byrd led the resistance movement at both the federal and state level.
Due to his long tenure as a powerful political leader in Virginia, a statue of Senator Byrd was erected in 1976 in Capitol Square in Richmond. Although it was much less famous than the statues of Confederate leaders along Richmond’s Monument Avenue, the Byrd statue also came to be seen as a symbol of government sponsored systemic racism. As part of the racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the Confederate monuments along Monument Avenue were removed to significant national attention. With much less fanfare, the statue of Harry Byrd, Sr. was removed in July 2021. The video posted below is from local Richmond news coverage. As you watch this brief report, pay special attention to the words of Delegate Jay Jones from Norfolk. He expresses what that statue represented to him as a Black man. Although the statue is gone, the struggle for racial equality in education continues. The recent debates and distortions about Critical Race Theory along with the ongoing de facto segregation of many public school systems due largely to economically based residential segregation remind us that there is still much work to do in my state of Virginia and the rest of our nation to implement both the letter and the spirit of Brown vs. Board.