Virginia Enacts Massive Resistance Laws Authorizing School Closures to Prevent Integration

Following Senator Harry F. Byrd’s February 24, 1956 call for “massive resistance” to avoid implementing public school integration in Virginia, the Byrd Organization-controlled Virginia General Assembly passes a series of laws in September 1956 known as the Stanley Plan (after Governor Thomas Bahnson Stanley) to implement this resistance strategy.

The Stanley Plan consists of 13 laws designed to maintain racial segregation by authorizing the use of public funds to provide tuition grants and tax credits to white students attending private schools. Most significantly, the plan gives the governor the power to close any school that integrates and stipulates that school districts that integrate will lose state funding. As a first line of defense, the Stanley Plan creates a state Pupil Placement Board to block the assignment of Black students to white schools using racial criteria.

Byrd, who leads Virginia’s conservative Democrats and proclaimed that “if we can organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order I think that in time the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South,” operates the most powerful political machine in Virginia. The Byrd Organization, which effectively controls Virginia politics from the mid-1920s until the late 1960s through a network of courthouse cliques of local constitutional officers in most of the state’s counties, has long embraced low taxes, minimal government services, administrative efficiency, and white supremacy.

The massive resistance laws represent the Byrd Organization’s willingness to sacrifice Virginia’s public education system to maintain segregation. Byrd’s “pay-as-you-go” philosophy has already prevented state and local governments from building schools, roads, and other public infrastructure needed as the population boomed after World War II, leading to crowded colleges, inadequate mental hospitals, and neglected social services.

The Stanley Plan laws remain in effect until January 19, 1959, when both the federal district court and the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals rule that the General Assembly’s 1956 mandate to force the closure of any school ordered to desegregate violates the state constitution. However, the laws’ implementation results in the closure of schools in Charlottesville, Front Royal, and Norfolk in September 1958 rather than see them integrated, affecting thousands of students.

The massive resistance infrastructure demonstrates how state political machines can weaponize state government to resist federal law while maintaining a veneer of constitutional legitimacy through state legislation. The strategy of using state laws to provide public funding for private alternatives to integrated institutions—particularly through tuition grants and tax credits for private schools—becomes a template later adopted by conservative movement organizations to undermine public education while framing the effort as expanding “school choice” and “educational freedom.”