*Massive Resistance began on February 25, 1956. This policy pushback was a conservative political strategy devised by white American politicians Harry F. Byrd and James M. Thomson, aimed at persuading Virginia officials to enact laws and policies that prevented public school desegregation.
After Reconstruction ended in 1877 and the local Readjuster Party fell in the 1880s, Virginia's conservative Democrats actively worked to maintain legal and cultural racial segregation in Virginia through the Jim Crow laws. By the 1940s, Black attorneys, including some from the Legal Defense Fund, such as Thurgood Marshall, Oliver W. Hill, William H. Hastie, Spottswood W. Robinson III, and Leon A. Ransom, were gradually winning civil rights cases based on federal constitutional challenges.
Among these was the case of Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, which students initiated to protest poor conditions at R. R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia. Their case became part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. Massive resistance persisted until the Virginia Supreme Court, along with a special three-judge panel of federal district judges, declared those policies unconstitutional. Some aspects of the campaign against integrated public schools continued in Virginia for many more years.
Many schools and an entire school system were shut down in 1958 and 1959 in failed attempts to block integration. As a result, legalized racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby paving the way for desegregation and the 20th-century American Civil Rights Movement.
