The Law v. the Governor

On Robert E. Lee's birthday, a state holiday in Virginia, the capitol buildings in Richmond were locked; arriving for work soon after 8 o'clock, the seven judges of the state Supreme Court had to send for an attendant to open the doors. In their conference room, they leafed through a 22-page decision, made some changes in language before they put on their black robes and, at 10:25, filed through blue curtains into a crowded, expectant courtroom. Chief Justice John William Eggleston, 72, tersely announced his majority decision (5 to 2) overthrowing the Virginia legislature's "massive resistance" laws against school integration.

"The state must support such public free schools in the state as are necessary to an efficient system." said the court, "including those in which the pupils of both races are compelled to be enrolled and taught together, however unfortunate that situation may be." Basis: the Commonwealth of Virginia's 1902 constitution requires a system of free public schools, and that requirement stands even though the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down another constitutional section requiring segregation in those same schools.*

Cutting Edge. Ninety minutes later, a three-judge U.S. court, waiting in Norfolk for word of the state court's act, struck down the same resistance laws on the ground that they are in violation of the U.S. Constitution. So long as some public schools remain open at taxpayer expense, it ruled, "no one public school or grade may be closed to avoid the effect of the law of the land." The U.S. court voided Governor J. Lindsay Almond's September order closing the six Norfolk schools to which 17 Negro pupils had been assigned with 9,900 whites. Also affected: Almond-locked schools in Charlottesville (two schools. 1,735 pupils) and Warren County (one high school, 1,044 pupils).

The same panel of U.S. judges put a cutting edge on its decision four days later by 1) ordering Governor Almond to give control of the closed schools back to school districts, and 2) forbidding all other officials "who receive or have notice or knowledge of this order" to embark on "any evasive schemes or devices." One target for this broadened order: Norfolk's segregationist city council, which was scheming to cut off the funds for the local school board if it obeyed the law and allowed Negroes to attend.

At the same time that the federal court's order came down, a higher federal court sitting in Richmond, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, ground out a long-pending decision on the schools of a fourth Virginia city. It ordered Arlington, a ready-to-integrate suburb of Washington, to ignore Almond, go ahead and teach four Negro pupils in its 1,060-pupil Stratford Junior High School when the new term opens next week.

Lawyer or Outlaw? Governor Almond, who as a lawyer of some distinction has always doubted the constitutionality of his legal dodges, was suddenly confronted with a set of interlocking state and federal rulings. If he maintained public schools, and the highest state court had so ordered, he must integrate them as the federal court ordered. But Politician Almond blew off his mask of cool legality and took to the air waves like a latter-day Faubus.

"I will not yield to that which I know is wrong," cried he. "Abandonment of the principles involved anywhere is to forsake them everywhere." His lowest blow: "The livid stench of sadism, sex, immorality and juvenile pregnancy infesting the mixed schools of the District of Columbia and elsewhere." Washington schoolmen, whose delinquency problems are no worse than most big-city school systems', angrily lashed back at the myth created by four years of Dixie Congressmen's efforts to prove that integration does not work in the nation's capital.

President Eisenhower, concerned in press conference about 5,500 Navy children locked out or threatened at Norfolk, raised a question about the South that applied to Governor Almond: "Is the citizen, be he an official or be he a man that is working in civil life and outside the Government, ready to obey the laws of his state and his nation?"

* The Virginia Supreme Court's right to pass on the constitutionality of legislative acts the "judicial review" principle later adopted for the U.S. Supreme Court (Marbury v. Madison, 1803) by Chief Justice John Marshall of Virginia--was laid out in 1782 by Justice George Wythe with the new Court's very first decision: "If the whole legislature should attempt to overleap the bounds, prescribed to them by the people, I, pointing to the Constitution, will say to them, 'Here is the limit of your authority; and hither shall you go, but no further.' "

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