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Guerrilla War. It was perhaps Harry Byrd's closest approach to demagoguery. Virginia has nothing like the problem confronting other Southern states in desegregation. About 52% of the state's 3,759,000 citizens live in areas with less than a 10% Negro population; if the whites accepted school desegregation, their children would no more be inundated than white children in Chicago or Kansas City, Mo. Only 15% of Virginians dwell in communities of more than 40% Negro. When the Supreme Court handed down its school desegregation decision, Virginia reacted with calm reasonableness. Governor Thomas B. Stanley, a Byrd protégé, was widely applauded for his statement that he planned "no precipitate action," but would work for a program "in keeping with the edict of the court." A commission headed by State Senator Garland Gray produced a middle-road desegregation plan.
But to Virginia's cultists, the Gray plan had a fatal defect: it offered local option on desegregation, and the Washington suburb of Arlington, for one, announced that it would integrate. Urged on by the hard core of his political following, Harry Byrd decreed against Virginia's white children being thus mixed in school (although many of them play unaffectedly with Negro youngsters from babyhood). At Byrd's bidding, Governor Stanley called a special legislative session and presented it with 23 bills, setting up a "defense in depth" against desegregation. As passed by the legislature, the program ensured a decade-long guerrilla war against the Supreme Court: if one law were found unconstitutional, another would become effective; if it were found unconstitutional, another would take its place, etc. The key to the Stanley program: state funds are to be withheld from any school district that permits a Negro to sit with white children.
Disintegration of Order. Because of the civil-rights issue, the cautious processes of Virginia have become confused and troubled. Says Fletcher Dozier, grizzled Negro waiter in Norfolk's Commodore Maury Hotel: "I've lived here most of my life. I always liked the white people and I think they liked me. I wasn't called a nigger until I was 26 years old—and that was by a Canadian woman in Boston. But after a thing like this Supreme Court decision, you get to know who are your friends and who aren't. Now I see the way some fellow is acting, and I say to myself, 'There's a man I have to watch.' "
Harry Byrd's segregation program has met opposition even within his organization. Says Byrd-dogging Political Leader William Lee Prieur Jr. of industrial, Navy-base Norfolk: "After the program came out, I got the Norfolk legislators in here, and we agreed we just couldn't go along. I called Harry Byrd and I said, 'You're wrong on this. We can't support you.' He said, 'The people of Virginia will never accept desegregation. I'm going to resist this as long as I can.' " Says Norfolk's Democratic Mayor Fred Duckworth: "If we started to integrate, we'd have to give up our state aid, which is $2,000,000 a year, and 20% of the school's budget. But we also get $2,000,000 a year from the Federal Government to educate the children of Navy people. If they tell us to integrate and we don't, we lose their $2,000,000. So it's hell if we do and hell if we don't."