VIRGINIA: Padlocked Schools

Under Virginia's "massive resistance" program, Governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr. last week ordered Norfolk's six high schools closed to keep 17 Negro children out of white classrooms. That brought the state's padlocked-schools total to nine (one in Front Royal, two in Almond's native town of Charlottesville). But it was a lot easier to close schools than to get them opened again without any integration. Eager as he was to find gimmicks of delay, Lawyer Almond frankly admitted that he considered a Faubus-type school-leasing plan too obviously illegal to be worth a try.

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