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Chapter 3: It Dies in the Norfolk Courts
Massive Resistance was conceived in the private conversations of old white Virginian gentlemen, who refused to acknowledge the social and racial revolution in the Commonwealth in the wake of a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the late 1940s and throughout 1950s. Molded behind the closed doors of the State house and private parlors, and codified in the 1956 General Assembly Special Session, Massive Resistance was a legal reality in December 1956 that had the support of a statewide voter referendum to change the Constitution. It appeared to white Southern segregationists, biracial moderates, and blacks in Virginia plus the other ten ex-Confederate states that the new laws were designed to keep the blacks out of non-black schools, thus keeping the 300 years of racial segregation in the South alive.Two hours east of Richmond, in the Federal Court located in Norfolk, Leola Pearl Beckett filed a petition under the Brown rulings to gain entrance to a non-black school, within the Norfolk City Public School system in 1956. Norfolk was dragging its feet on desegregation, keenly aware that it was under the watchful eye of the General Assembly and the Byrd Organization, who, combined, made sure that no black faces appeared in the yearbook next to their white children. Judge Walter E. Hoffman, who was presiding over the case in U.S. Eastern District Court, had no grounds for Beckett not to attend a school closer to her home and enjoined the School Board to accept her application. This placed the School Board in the position of either operating under Virginia law, or breaking the Commonwealth’s very explicit educational laws and complying with the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings in the Brown decisions. The School Board opted to fight the forced federal integration under the Beckett suit, and rely upon the 1956 Special Session legislation that beefed up the 1950 Virginia Code with a Pupil Placement Act, among others, that was an evasive scheme designed to block racial integration. After two year of legal maneuvering by both parties, Judge Hoffman finally forced the Norfolk School Board to begin desegregating by accepting applications from black applicants, who wanted to attend non-black schools. The School Board after initially rejecting all 151 applicants, accepted 17, and assigned them to six previously non-black high schools and junior high schools by September 1958. This action forced Virginia Governor Almond to close the six schools under direction of the recent Massive Resistance legislation, which touched off a legal battle in Norfolk in four decisive cases: Beckett v. School Board, James v. Almond, Harrison v. Day, and James v. Duckworth. All four of these cases originated in Norfolk’s U.S. Eastern District Court, and were argued before Judge Walter Hoffman (alone and as part of a three judge panel). Beckett would be the spark that ignited the push to integrate the Norfolk school system with all due haste, and for the next fifteen years surface and act as the driving force in trying to attain racial educational equality in Norfolk. James v. Almond was the case that broke the back of Massive Resisters as a large group of white Norfolkians took to the courts to fight for their children’s educational rights under the 1902 Virginia Constitution and white middle-class sense of educational mobility in the face of segregationist whims that threatened to destroy Norfolk’s free public education system, and the state’s duty to provide and protect for all citizens. James v. Duckworth represented the plaintiffs (Ellis James, others and the N.C.P.S.) in the James v. Almond case successful attempt to stop the Norfolk City Council, Norfolk School Board, and any other local city employees from using evasive schemes, such as controlling the budget, to close the six non-black schools opened by the three judge federal court, or to close any other future Norfolk public schools under the auspices of stopping or severely limiting racial integration with legislation or administrative measures.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction with Historiographical Essay
Chapter I – “An Introduction to Calculated Action”
Chapter II – “A Divided, Quiet Black Community”
Chapter III – “It Dies in the Norfolk Courts”
Epilogue
Bibliography
Vita
