RACES: Virginia Creeper

To devise strategy for evading the U.S. Supreme Court’s school desegregation order, Virginia’s Governor Thomas B. Stanley appointed a legislative commission headed by State Senator Garland Gray, a dependable cog in U.S. Senator Harry Byrd’s Democratic Party organization. The Gray Commission hammered out a compromise designed to head off integration in communities that oppose it, and permit it in others. Even so, the plan was meeting unexpected opposition. Reason: quite apart from its cautious sabotage of the Supreme Court order, many Virginians thought the Gray plan might wreck their public-school system.

Green Light. Under fire were ramifications of the kickoff Gray proposal: a statewide referendum, scheduled for Jan. 9, on whether to hold a state constitutional convention. The convention, if authorized, could revise Section 141 of the Virginia constitution which, like similar laws in 44 other states, now prohibits the use of public funds for private schools. Revision would open the way to publicly financed “tuition grants,” which would foot the bills for parents to send children to segregated private schools anywhere in the state. Corollary legislation under the Gray plan would allow school boards to assign pupils to public schools at their own discretion—and discrimination.

Eastern and southeastern Virginia counties with Negro populations ranging from 50% to 80% were generally all for the Gray plan. Rather than integrate their schools next autumn, they proposed to close them down. The Gray plan would give them a green light.

But in Virginia’s western, southwestern and northern counties, where Negro population runs less than 10% and integration can be carried out without much trouble, many citizens had doubts. The strongest opposition came from Arlington and Fairfax, both thickly populated bedroom communities for Washington, D.C.

“Baby with the Bath.” Although the proposed constitutional revision specifically limits tuition grants to nonsectarian private schools, many religious leaders were not so sure it would. By failing to define “nonsectarian,” thought they, the revision might conceivably entitle some semisectarian schools to public funds.

Wrote Dr. George S. Reamey, the editor of the Virginia Methodist Advocate: “Our public-school system needs stronger protection. We are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath.”

Distinguished Virginians who had given previous impressive testimonials in favor of the Gray plan began hedging. Said former Governor Colgate W. Darden, president of the University of Virginia and recent U.S. delegate to the U.N. “It would be catastrophic if schools were closed in Virginia for either race.”

Plainly worried by the unusual climate of dissent, the state government pumped even harder for the referendum, aware now that the vote might be far closer than originally expected.