It was the chilly day of February 14, 1956. Sen. Harry Flood Byrd, famed apple baron and informal head of the so-called Byrd Organization, had travelled home to Richmond to address the state legislature. Amongst those issues on his mind was the developing battle over Civil Rights, one with which he had been feuding with the DC-based government for nearly a decade at this point.
But now the situation had entered what many thought would be its end stage: Brown v. Board of Education had been decided, attempts at a moderate compromise had failed, and it looked like the black-robed mandarins of the leftist court would actually insist upon imposing integration on unwilling school districts. The war between Civil Rights and States’ Rights had entered its final stage, and the media wanted to know what Harry Byrd, the arch-conservative of the Senate and leader of the most powerful political machine in the country, thought.
So, as he made his way from the legislature to the Richmond Hotel, they pressed him for an answer. It was James Latimer, a veteran political reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, who managed to publish what became the famous answer. Latimer thought that he heard Sen. Byrd declare that “Passive resistance is the best course for us to take” regarding the forced desegregation of southern schools.
That is the quote his paper ran, to the disappointment of many Virginians, particularly in the state’s Southside region, Byrd’s key base of support. Passive resistance sounded a bit too…well, passive. There would be no fight?! Others were more positive, seeing it as a sign that Byrd would be doing what his Organization had done so well during the New Deal era: throwing as much gum in the works as possible to ensure the new regulations were never really implemented or complied with, at least in the way the government had intended. Years of dedicated, patient resistance that was at least facially passive had paid off…perhaps such is what the senator intended to accomplish again.
There, things rested for a few days. Latimer’s report had only really made news in Virginia, and big things were happening across the nation.
Then, twelve days later, on the 26th of February, Byrd lit the fuse that became a region-encompassing fire for nearly a decade.
The match took the form of a slight correction issued surreptitiously via a new headline published by the New York Times. That headline, published on the front page of the paper on the 27th, quoted Byrd as calling not for “passive resistance,” but for “Massive Resistance”.
“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,” Byrd was quoted as saying in the New York Times report.
The country exploded. The phrase was a new one coined by Byrd, invigorated the South as it set about fighting the new legislation and likely rulings regarding it, and was the sort of wording that could rally everyone from Virginian patricians to Louisiana Creoles back to the flag of states’ rights. He was, in effect, calling southern segregationists to arms. And it would be he who led the charge.
The primary works used for this article are Harry Byrd of Virginia and Depression and New Deal in Virginia: The Enduring Dominion by Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 1945-1966 by J. Harvie Wilkinson (III), The Byrds of Virginia by Alden Hatch, Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd by Allen W. Moger, and The Byrd Machine in Virginia by Michael Lee Pope. Consulted specifically for this article were also Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement by George Lewis and The Making of Massive Resistance: Virginia’s Politics of Public School Desegregation, 1954-1956 by Robbin L. Gates. You can support this publication at no cost to yourself by using these links to order the books that interest you.
Read Part I here: The Byrd Organization, The Bulwark of the Patrician Order
Read Part II here: The Man Who Stood Down FDR
Read Part III here: The Patrician Against the Globalist
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