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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview
A-0311-2, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill”
Virginius Dabney chronicles his long career as a southern journalist from the
1920s to the 1970s. As the editor of the Richmond, Virginia, Times
Dispatch, Dabney penned several articles about the social and political
crises of the twentieth century, often with a decidedly regional outlook. He
wrote a few books concerning southern liberalism and the regional culture of
Virginians. These works earned him an invitation as a guest lecturer at
Cambridge and Princeton in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Though Dabney
discusses his career as a novelist and lecturer, the primary focus of the
interview is on his opinions on race relations in post-1954 Virginia. While many
Virginia politicians crafted ways to massively resist integrating public
schools, he supported gradual public school desegregation. Dabney expresses his
criticism of politicians—particularly Senator Harry Byrd Sr. and Jack
Kilpatrick—who chose to close public schools rather than integrate them. To
Dabney, school closings culminated in backward thinking and fewer economic
opportunities for the state. Even though his opinions about massive resistance
emerged in his editorials, the Times Dispatch owners prevented
him from a full expression of his ideas. Dabney further discusses the
relationship between newspaper owners. He also recounts his connection to
Virginia's aristocracy and his relational ties to George Washington
and Thomas Jefferson. Steeped in this background, Dabney reacts adversely to
criticism of the nation's founders. He disapproved of Gore
Vidal's and Fawn Brodie's work on Aaron Burr and Thomas
Jefferson, respectively. Of particular interest is Dabney's
vociferous objection to historian Fawn Brodie's account of a romantic
relationship between Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson.
Virginius Dabney traces his involvement with the school desegregation crisis in
post-1954 Virginia. Dabney's political and social beliefs about
integration appeared in the newspaper he edited, the Richmond Times
Dispatch. This interview spans the breadth of his career from the 1920s
to the 1970s.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is an interview with Virginius Dabney, retired editor of the
Richmond Times-Dispatch at his home in Richmond,
Virginia interviewed by Dan Jordan and William H. Turpin. Today is July
31, 1975.
Mr. Dabney, we'll be talking today about massive resistance. To set the stage, we first talked about Virginia on the eve of the '54 decision. For example, there is a notion that the Byrd organization in 1954 was in trouble. Is that a valid observation?
Yes, I think that it was in trouble. The campaign between Battle and Miller had shaken things up considerably and the fact that Battle was saved by the Republicans going into the Democratic primary showed that there was a pretty ticklish situation.
How about the Young Turks?
Yes, they had realized that there was a real question in the legislature as to the validity of the machine's policies. They felt that the organization had been too parsimonious in supporting necessary services, schools, welfare, health and so on.
Would it be fair also to say that Stanley was not among the stronger of the Byrd governors?
I would say that was the understatement of all time.
The organization, nonetheless, was based on southside Virginia?
Yes, it always had been. That was the center of its strength and the real core of the massive resistence to improvement.
Long after the fact, Benjamin Muse wrote that he thought the chance of
compliance in Virginia in '54, before the decision was announced, was
fairly good. He based that on the fact that Virginia had a good
history
Yes. I didn't think that we were going to have all this trouble that we did have and in the early stages of the period before massive resistance actually began and after the decision of 1954, it looked as if we were going to have a fairly smooth reception of the decision.
What was the immediate official reaction to the decision of May 17th?
There was calm, I think. Stanley was not excited and he spoke in a restrained way about it and gave the impression that he was going to be working to make it effective without any hullabaloo, and he said he was going to consult both races and sounded very conciliatory.
Was that the mood as well throughout the state, were there immediate defiant cries in Virginia?
I don't remember any, I don't think there were.
In a delayed reaction, there was defiance in the southside section of the state.
Later on, yes, indeed.
And there is a famous meeting at the Petersburg Fire House.
Yes.
Would you tell us a little bit about that?
I really don't know much about that, I just have heard of a meeting and I think it was mostly the hard core resisters from southside who decided that they were not going to take it.
And even later in '54 an organization was created called The Defenders of State Sovereignty.
Yes, Herald who was also a mild-mannered individual. Both
of them made it a point not to let anybody wave the Confederate flag,
which I thought was quite astonishing from that group at that time. So,
they weren't out to murder anybody like the Ku Klux Klan, or even to
whip anybody at night or anything like that. They were quite within the
law and were determined never to integrate.
How would you compare the Defenders with the White Citizens Councils that were popular in many of the deep southern states at this time?
I'm not that familiar with the White Citizens Councils, so I really can't say. I don't know whether they ever condoned violence or not.
Well, they were very militant and drew their constituency from all classes in southern society.
Including some Ku Klux Klansmen, I suppose?
Including some Klanners.
They were more questionable than the Defenders in Virginia.
What was the makeup of the individuals in the Defenders?
Oh, I think they were just average citizens, business people and professional people who were not willing to take this decision and were determined to do everything they could to prevent it from going into effect.
Would you say that they were mostly middle-class and up?
I would say that they were, yes. The ones that I knew were. I didn't have
any contacts with them, really. Jack Kilpatrick was very
Governor Stanley in August of '54 appointed a committee that became known as the Gray Committee. What was the public's notion of what the committee was supposed to be doing?
I think they were trying to work out some kind of plan that would meet this decision and obey it without causing too much disruption in the state. As far as I know, when it was first appointed, the prevailing view was that it was not going to defy anybody or shut down schools or anything like that.
It was an all white committee. Was there a sense that this was a mistake, that Stanley should have in fact brought black leaders into it?
Yes, I think it was a bad mistake. The way they did it was to make a rule
that the whole commission had to come from the General Assembly and that
elimated the blacks because there weren't any in the General Assembly.
Stanley had said, as I mentioned, that he was going to consult both
races. He called in about four or five leading Negroes to his office,
and his consultation consisted of asking them not to pay any attention
to the Supreme Court's ruling.
Now, the NAACP was very active in Virginia at this period. Do you recall your reaction to it, and do you recall the statewide reaction to the work of the NAACP?
I think that most Virginians felt that the NAACP was too far
Was the NAACP working mainly in the courts?
Yes, I think so.
What about the Virginia Council on Human Relations, which was created in February of '55? A group of moderates, as I understand it.
I've forgotten who was the head of that, do you remember?
I don't believe that they had any notable Virginians, but they included a lot of ministers and a lot of educators, and the notion was that they would somehow or another create a climate that would make possible better race relations and acceptance of integration when it came to it.
I remember their operations in a sort of hazy way. I think I know some of the people who were in it. Nowadays, what they were trying to do sounds reasonably proper. At that time, most people were opposed to it.
Another group was the Virginia Society for the Preservation of Public Education. I believe that Armistead Boothe was involved in that.
Yes, that's right. I believe that came along after the massive resistance thing started, didn't it?
It sort of picked up at that point. Do you recall its impact or the public reaction to that?
I think most people felt that they were out of step with the majority sentiment, and that what they were trying to do was premature, that you couldn't bring the state along right away with these things that they were trying to put into effect.
A couple of leaders of this Society for the Preservation of Public
Education, Armistead Boothe and Robert Whitehead, who were also a couple
of the Young Turks in the '50s. Was this generally true with
They were independents, at least you could say that. And they were ready to oppose Byrd when they felt they should, which got them in trouble with the organization permanently. This was one of the shortcomings of the organization, they couldn't take any dissent of that sort.
About this point in time, the Richmond Press Club appointed a committee to evaluate the busing of the students and I believe that it was headed by a man by the name of Hugh Rudd, and its report suggested that Richmond could handle the problem and that desegregation could be a reality without violence. Do you recall that report and the response to it in Richmond?
Very vaguely. I knew Hugh Rudd and he had been on the paper and left to practice law. I do not remember the details of that. I think it is remarkable how much you know about all of this; and I am impressed.
In May of 1955, the Supreme Court issued its supplemental decision and suggested that action had to be taken with all deliberate speed and the district courts would supervise the implementation. Do you recall Virginia's reaction to that decision. Some say that it is a sort of a victory for the South in a way, that it would be left to the district courts and no set time table?
Yes, I think that there was a sort of mild sigh of relief, we were getting a little time to get ready for this and it wouldn't go into effect immediately. Yes, I think that was helpful.
Now, the Gray Commission issued its report in November, 1955.
Well, They were for token integration and local option An area that wanted to integrate could do so, and where they opposed it, as in the southside, they could segregate.
Was this a surprising conclusion, given the composition of the committee? I understand that there were a lot of southside legislators in it, Garland Gray was, of course, a key man in the Byrd organization and yet this seems in retrospect a rather moderate recommendation.
It does. It is a little bit puzzling to me now. I can see how some of those on that commission wanted to have token integration but I don't understand how some of the others went along, especially Gray. Of course, he later on completely reversed himself, but that was under pressure from Senator Byrd. I don't really understand how they got that through.
Do you think that Byrd knew what was going on while the commission was deliberating?
Well, surprisingly enough, he apparently didn't, because he hit the ceiling when he found out about it and made everybody that he could control turn right around and turn somersaults.
In your book, you pointed out that Byrd very carefully . . . I'm sorry, I'm out of sequence.
Now, the aftermath of the commission report was a statewide referendum on whether or not a convention would be called to modify the Virginia Constitution. That referendum apparently elicited a lot of public interest. It was held in January. Do you recall some who were for and against the referendum?
Yes, I think the Byrd people were for it. The Armistead Boothe group were against it and practically all the newspapers were for it. Stanley was for it and he led various moderates to believe that if this went through, they would have local option and go along with the Gray Commission's recommendations. And they went along and served as front men for the whole program, and then after it was ratified in the referendum, the Byrd organization proceeded to turn right around and in effect, repudiate the very things that they had led the public to think.
Now, Byrd at the time of the referendum, made some public statements, but in retrospect, they were sort of cryptic in that they could be interpreted in various ways.
Right. He and Blackie Moore, the speaker of the house,
Do you think that this was a ruse on the part of Senator Byrd, or do you think that he didn't realize what was happening until it got to the point that it was almost a law?
I don't see how he could have failed to realize it, as interested as he was, because he was right in the middle, and if he didn't know what was happening, it was the first time that he didn't.
Do you think that the public at large felt that because Stanley and other Byrd organization men supported the referendum so vigorously that they were in fact speaking for Byrd?
I certainly thought so and I think everybody else did.
Well, the aftermath of the referendum was, of course, a convention and writing into legislation some of the commission's recommendations, but at the same time, a formal massive resistance sentiment is growing and we won't recount all the highlights of that, but Byrd is making statements in Washington, and the Southern Governors' Conference was held in Richmond and there were certain maneuvers beginning in the legislature. Speaker Moore, I believe, wants to move faster than the legislature does in the spring of '56. Then another key element is the notion of interposition and I would like to discuss that a bit. Could you talk about the origins of interposition and then what it was supposed to do?
Well, as I recall it, interposition originated with the Alien and
Sedition Laws just before the turn of the nineteenth century and the
theory was advanced that the state had the right to interpose its
sovereignty between itself and the federal government, between something
that it didn't want to do and the federal government. That theory was
forgotten and washed out as far as I know, by the Civil War, and
everybody had considered it dead until a lawyer in Chesterfield County
named William W. Old exhumed this thing and wrote a pamphlet, I believe,
urging that it be adopted again, or resurrected to meet this situation
into which the state had been thrown by the Supreme Court decision.
Kilpatrick read
He also, I think, wrote in that vein that it was a sort of public relations thing, an attempt to put the whole question in more favorable terms and to buy time, but there was no evidence of that in his editorials, would you say?
I didn't see any. I was surprised to find later that he was that skeptical about it.
And it had some influence beyond Virginia, apparently?
Very much. The News Leader reprinted his series of
editorials in a pamphlet and sent it all over the South-to governors, I
guess, or to other key people, and four or five states adopted
interposition resolutions, as did Virginia. There was a great deal of
excitement about it and lot of people thought that Kilpatrick was Moses
and the whole thing was going to be solved.
Did the General Assembly of Virginia adopt a nullification resolution?
No, it was introduced with a nullification provision, but then it was taken out, fortunately I think that one or two resolutions adopted in the Deep South were completely for nullification as the best kind of defiance, but Virginia didn't.
A former associate of Kilpatrick said that during the compaign
Yes, I have. I had just forgotten. He was meeting with Byrd and with the leaders.
Did you ever meet with them?
No.
I wasn't in the inner sanctum.
In the late summer of 1956, there was a special session of the General Assembly that passed the formal massive resistence legislation. Would you comment on the nature of that legislation? What did it do to try to stop the schools from being integrated? What kinds of laws?
Well, was that the Stanley legislation?
Yes.
That was legislation which provided for shutting down the schools rather than integrate, basically. That was it.
That seemed to be the heart of it. Now this meant, of course, an end to local option considerations, because local option might lead to integration.
Yes.
And I think that People Placement Boards were created as a sort of first
line of defense. Now also in that special session, a number
There were some technical legal terms like bailments or something like that. I don't know what all the terms mean.
Publication of the membership of the NAACP was one thing.
They were simply trying to harass the organization. I don't think the legislation stood up.
They were, I think, uniformly thrown out in court later.
Yes.
But they were sort of seen as an attempt to harass and restrict an opponent.
Undoubtedly.
Do you recall any public response to this. I know that NAACP in white Virginia got to be very, very unpopular and they must have supported this thing.
No, I don't recall any response.
The grand strategy of massive resistance as unfolded in the legislation was to avoid the Brown decision. Would that be fair to say?
In effect to avoid it, yes, I think that's true.
And this meant that the organization had changed its stance from a notion of maybe going along with it in a token sense with local option, to total confrontation, and this gets us to a really key point which is, why did Virginia, did the organization, go for massive resistence?
Well, I think that it is pretty simple, because Harry Byrd decided that
he just simply couldn't take it and he wasn't going to take
Why did he decide that he couldn't go along with it?
Well, he had a very deep feeling that integration would be disastrous, and would ruin the state and the country and we couldn't have it. He was going to do the utmost that he could to prevent it.
Did it have any effect on Byrd's decision that the fact that the southside, which was his strongest support, had a very large black population which would have been affected first and strongest by integration and that perhaps to keep the support of the southside as he was having trouble with his machine, he went along simply for the fact of political expediency.
I don't think that was his express motive, but I don't think that the southside's attitude hurt his decision at all. It helped him make the decision in that he was glad to be in the same bed with southside and at the same time do what he thought was right.
Do you think that it was his personal feeling toward the Negro or do you think that it was because of his entire outlook as a conservative?
I really don't know. It is a hard thing for me to analyze.
Did you ever make any editorial comments on Byrd's . . .
We might hold that until later, if you would like, just to keep it
separate if we can. Did Byrd believe that in all of this, Virginia was
leading the southern fight against some
Yes, Byrd said several times that Virginia was the key to this whole fight, and if Virginia went down, they wouldn't be able to hold the line. So, he did feel that this was the crux of the whole thing and that Virginia should stand firm.
And it was easy to make a sort of state's rights case here because Virginians like to remember their stand in 1860-61, as well, I suppose.
True.
We have a famous quote coming out to the effect that this was to keep the organization in power for another twenty-five years. Nobody knows who exactly said that, does that ring true at all? That puts a positive expedient element to it.
Somebody may have said that, but it was the most stupid statement of the decade because it didn't keep them in power at all, and it led to the disintegration of the organization. Nobody has been able to pinpoint the origin of that statement, whether it was made by some leader in the organization, but anyway, it didn't work out that way and it was a very short-sighted view.
In retrospect, it seems that the federal government was not particularly aggressive in this period. There is some sort of notion that Byrd had some special influence with Eisenhower, and Byrd, of course, was a very powerful Senator and chairman of a very powerful committee. Do you recall at the time any notion of that?
No, I don't know anything about that.
So, I guess that a corollary is that massive resistance might work because Byrd was so powerful that Eisenhower could not afford to really be aggressive, whatever his own views might have been, that he politically couldn't have afforded to alienate people like Byrd. Well, moving on, in 1957, there was a very important gubernatorial election right at the height of massive resistance sentiment between Almond and Dalton. Would you comment a little on the candidates and the issues?
I think massive resistance was the issue and practically nothing else was. Judge Almond is a very able lawyer, who made a good record in Congress, put in a brief here and there and had a good record as attorney general. He was persuaded to give up his Congressional seat to become attorney general when the incumbent died suddenly, and he thinks that he was given the go-ahead for the governorship when he agreed to become attorney general.
That was in what year? He was nine years as attorney general.
'50, I believe, or '49.
About that time; I can't remember exactly. He knew as attorney general that this massive resistance business wouldn't stand up. He knew the resistance was going to collapse. When he came in as governor, he was susceptible to all the pressures that were on him at that time, and he made some pretty wild statements, as he is the first to admit, notably, when he knew that he had to turn around. He didn't let on that he knew it and made a really damaging speech saying "he had just begun to fight." He turned around eight days later. That was a sad blunder, as you know. Dalton was a high-minded, able man. He made a good campaign. He was less extreme in his statements about the race problem.
He almost won and Byrd came in, on account of the road issue, and turned the tide. Also, President Eisenhower had sent troops to Little Rock, which stirred up a frightful lot of feeling against the Republicans and that hurt Dalton very much. I don't think that he could have beaten Almond anyway. Almond was a fine campaigner on the stump, a lot better than Stanley, who had been a miserable campaigner when Dalton ran against him four years before. So there wasn't much of a chance that Dalton could have beaten Almond anyway, but Almond's majority was much larger because of Little Rock.
Now Almond, of course, was all out for massive resistance and didn't Dalton come out for local option?
I think he did.
Was he branded as an integrationist in the public mind because he stated what had previously been the recommendations of the Gray Commission?
Well, in a lot of people's minds I would say that he was, because by that time all this antagonism had been whipped up against the Gray Commission report, the original report.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Almond got into trouble with Byrd because he endorsed Martin Hutchinson
for the Federal Trade Commission. Hutchinson had run against Byrd for
the Senate a few years before and that was an unpardonable sin on
Almond's part to endorse Hutchinson, no matter how qualified he was. I
didn't see that he had any great qualifications. Anyway, Almond endorsed
him and that became public and
Was Almond a kind of an outsider within the organization?
He became that. He was an insider when he agreed to give up his place in Washington and take a cut in salary of one-third to gratify the organization and become attorney general. He was very much, I guess, on the inside then, temporarily, but he didn't stay there very long.
There is a notion that as a personality type, he didn't really fit the organization, that he was pretty much a self-made man, and he was more of a flamboyant orator than many of the other Byrd organization people. Is there any validity to that?
I shouldn't think that would have any bearing, that he was a self made man and a flamboyant orator. Another flamboyant orator, Willis Robertson, also was not in the inner circles, but I don't think that had anything to do with it.
One final question about the '57 election. Is it fair to think of it as a referendum on massive resistence? You've got Almond going all out for massive resistence, but Dalton's position was a little less clear. He was for local option, so it seems to me that that clouds things and is it possible to say that because of Almond's decisive victory the people of Virginia stood behind massive resistence?
That might be an unsound conclusion; it is not quite that cut and dried, I wouldn't think. It certainly tended to be that way, that the majority went for the man who was for massive resistance.
Well, Almond, of course, was elected and . . .
Let me ask one question about this. You said earlier that he had expressed doubt that massive resistence, that integration could be prevented while he was attorney general. Did he express this publicly?
No, he told friends that he realized that this whole jerry-built structure was going to collapse.
And he was the man who was actually involved in . . .
He had to defend all these things, yes.
He also, I believe, was quoted as saying that he told Stanley "I don't think that it will work, but I will do anything that you like," as attorney general.
Yes, he did.
Well, he was elected governor and he was inaugurated in Januaray of 1958 and in his inaugural address he made very clear that for the concept of massive resistence. Of course, litigation was going on in the courts all the while. In the fall of 1958, schools were closed by order of the governor.
That's right.
And what reaction in Virginia at large was there to the closing of the schools?
A lot of people were shocked by it. I think that they hardly realized
that it was going to come to that and when it did, it was a traumatic
thing for a lot of people. They began wondering how they were going to
continue in this direction. Shutting down schools seemd like a
As time passed, I gather that greater pressure developed to open the schools.
Yes.
It is often said that a key event in the sequence of the shift of opinion was a statement by Kilpatrick before the Rotary Club here in Richmond, editorials in both Richmond papers, and then a meeting at the Rotunda Club in Richmond of prominent business leaders in December. Is that a fair assessment of one of the key points of the shift?
Yes, I think so. Kilpatrick was so conspicuous in the other direction that when he said something ought to be done, that was a signal to the whole crowd, I think, that it was time to begin some new ideas and begin some new directions.
What about the meeting at the Rotunda Club? Do you know anybody who was actually there or what was said? I gather that the names have ever been listed.
Yes, I know some who were there.
Without mentioning any names, now.
Yes, the general thought was that this was hurting the state's image, and was going to hurt the state in its industrial development and that businesswise, it was going to create great opposition on the part of industrialists to move into the state where there was a danger of shutting down schools and the whole thing was counter-productive.
Almond, of course, was there and these were very important
The ones that I happen to know did not support massive resistance. I don't know whether any massive resisters were there. I have heard Judge Almond quoted as saying that that meeting did not effect his thinking at all.
Were there any newspaper people there at all?
No.
No publishers or . . .
No writers or anything, the word gradually leaked out that there had been a meeting.
There were no publishers there as opposed to reporters?
I don't think so.
In the meantime, of course, there were some key cases testing some of this massive resistence legislation, a case before the Virginia Court of Appeals and one also before a federal district court and on Robert E. Lee's birthday January 19th, both courts announced their decisions which found that massive resistence legislation was unconstitutional, as judged by the Virginia constitution and by the U.S. constitution. I have got a couple of questions about that. One is, to your knowledge, was there any collusion as to the timing of those decisions?
Not to my knowledge, but it is a most astonishing thing that they happened that way, I never have understood that.
What was the public's general reaction to this decision, as opposed to Almond's? I'll pick up Almond in a second here.
I think that most Virginians, even those in Prince Edward County, felt that they had to obey. The fact that Prince Edward did obey is pretty indicative of what the average Virginian thought. These people who were trying to work some way around the decisions apparently felt all along that they weren't going to go the last mile and have another situation like Alabama or Mississippi and have a lot of federal troops and the governor going to jail, although Harry Byrd wanted Almond to go to jail.
Did you ever have a chance to discuss the cases with the judges involved, especially Judge Eggleston who gave the majority opinion?
No, I never did.
Well, Almond's reaction was, of course, a statewide televised speech on January 20th which he later called, I believe, "that damned speech."
That's right.
Could you tell us a little about the speech and why you think that Almond gave it?
He never has been able to explain it to himself, much less to anybody
else. I have talked to him two or three times. In fact, I got the
interview with him in which he first used the term, "that
damned speech," and said that he was sorry that he had made it.
He said that he was tired and frustrated and that if he had talked to
Josephine, his wife, he never would have done it. He had just gotten so
worn out with the whole thing that he wasn't thinking clearly, I guess.
He wanted to show that he was going to do everything that he possibly
could to prevent this
It was a very emotional speech, very fir speech and apparently, Senator Byrd was very pleased with the speech.
Oh, he telegraphed him and congratulated him and when Almond tried to repudiate the speech ten days later, that was when Byrd broke with him.
And eight days later, of course, there was a special session of the General Assembly and Almond said in effect that massive resistence was over. He asked for some immediate changes in the laws to comply with the court decisions and appointed a commission, I believe, to investigate the possibilities of Virginia's future course.
That's right.
Could you tell us a little about the Perrow Commission?
Chairman Perrow was from Lynchburg and you might want to mention the way that they got the thing through the legislature to appoint the commission. The "committee of the whole" device was used so that the whole Senate could vote on it instead of having it voted on in committee, where it would have been killed without a doubt. They had barely enough backers in the Senate overall, and by getting a man who had just been operated on brought in on a stretcher to cast the deciding vote, Carter of Fincastle, they got it through. Almond appointed the commission and the commission made a report which wasn't greatly different from the Gray Commission's original report. So they got back on the track again with local option and so forth.
It was a very tough fight, but in effect, Virginia went back to the Gray Commission.
That's right and Lindsay Almond deserves a great big hand, despite his fumbling and mistakes along the way, for what he did in the final showdown.
Well, a key question here would be why did Almond switch? Why didn't he become, say, a Wallace, and stand at doors and go all out? Why did he say, "Well, we've had it, it's over and we've got to change and massive resistence didn't work?"
Well, basically because he wasn't the type of person that Faubus was or Wallace. He never intended to defy the law or stand in any doors. He knew that it wasn't legal and he was going to abide by the law.
Some say, and you mentioned this earlier, that his wife had some influence on him. Is that easy to overstate or . . .
I've heard him say twice that if he had paid attention to Josephine or consulted Josephine, he wouldn't have made "that damned speech." I don't know whether he had talked to her on that particular point, I gather that he did get her advice fairly often.
Did you read the account, I think that it is by Francis P. Miller, who said that Almond almost virtually locked the doors on the General Assembly during that time to get them to agree to the recommendations that he was making. Does that sound too dramatic to you?
Well, is that a figure of speech, that he"almost locked the doors?"
Well, I think that Miller said that he did lock the doors when they got them in and did not let them out.
Sounds rhetorical. Considering the people involved . . .
It would have caused a real riot, yes.
There is a sort of a notion that, not in a direct sense, but a notion that Almond sold out for a judgeship here. Does that have any real credibility? Later on, we know that Kennedy wanted to appoint him to a federal district judgeship here and Byrd apparently didn't like that. Kennedy made an interim appointment and now he is on the Court of Patents and Appeals, but was that a reward?
I never heard that. I think Kennedy might have looked around for somebody who had a moderate outlook on this issue and zeroed in on Almond, but I wouldn't attribute that sort of a motive to Almond.
Is it true that Byrd delayed the appointment?
He almost wrecked the whole thing. If the Times-Dispatch and other papers hadn't hammered on Byrd time and
again that it was unworthy of him to be doing that, he never would have
given in.
I believe that in Kilpatrick's papers, there is correspondence on the fact and it shows that Kilpatrick favored the appointment of Almond to the district judgeship. Are you aware of that?
I didn't know that.
And that Byrd, of course, was very against it and one of the ironies of events is that Almond did not get the district judgeship and then later on, of course, Robert Merhige did. He came much later, but Almond today would be the judge.
Yes, but he would have retired by now. He has retired.
Yes, but he would have been on the bench. Just to pursue this ironic
development one step further, the thinking is that if Almond had been
the judge when the consolidation question came up, given his general
That is, the counties and Richmond?
Yes.
I think probably so, yes.
So, in a way, Byrd unwittingly had contributed to the making of a situation that he hoped to alleviate and made it worse.
It was overruled in the final analysis.
Oh, that's true.
Almond said after the fact, that "I lived in hell," that he apparently suffered some social ostracism and the like from having broken with Byrd, and it was something that he regretted very much because he admired Byrd. Are you aware of any of that kind of pressure on Almond? After the fact?
Well, I think that undoubtedly he was spoken of sneeringly as "Benedict Almond" and things like that. He had a lot of bad hours because of it and I am sure that some of his long time friends broke with him, the people in the inner circles of the Byrd organization in particular.
And some of his later legislative proposals apparently were blocked in part, he thought, out of spite.
Well, primarily, I guess. He is not bitter about it at all now.
He did, when he switched, carry some of the organization people with him, did he not? These would be moderates, I suppose?
Yes.
Who would some of the organization men that came with him be? They agreed that massive resistance had run its course.
I can't be sure about that.
One final thing about massive resistance and then we would like to discuss briefly an overall evaluation of it and that is Prince Edward County, the problem preceded massive resistance and the problem, of course, outlasted massive resistance. What was Virginia's reaction to what was going on in Prince Edward County, the closing of the schools permanently and the fact that black children were denied an education for awhile?
That would depend on whom you talked to. Some people thought that it was great and others thought that it was outrageous. I think that it would divide more or less along the lines of those who were for massive resistance, those who went down the line to the end, and those who weren't.
Do you recall the role of Colgate Darden in trying to do something about the problem?
I don't remember his having any role in it until he was chairman of that movement to get Prince Edward's school's open. don't remember him coming out publicly.
That's what I'm thinking of, that chairmanship. Was he criticized for that?
I don't think so to any great extent. By that time, people were modifying their views.
Well, to move to a final very important category, a general evaluation of
massive resistence. In retrospect, what is your assessment
I think it was a bad mistake. I think that they should have gone along with the Gray report. I was always opposed to it. I was not the owner of the newspapers and couldn't go after it the way that I would have liked to.
Right. We want to pick up this in some detail here shortly.
O.K. I don't see why it couldn't have been worked out reasonably well on the basis of the Gray recommendations with local option, and we would have come to the present posture in time. I don't think that you could have integrated everybody at once in 1954 or '56 or '58. There was too much opposition in Virginia to that, but by gradually infiltrating the schools with a few blacks and then more, I think it would have worked, as it did in North Carolina.
Would you comment on Byrd's role and responsibility for massive resistence.
I think he had the major responsibility for the whole thing. I think that if Byrd had gone along with the Gray Commission report, there wouldn't have been any massive resistence, I'm sure of that.
Is there any question that massive resistence was a calculated as opposed to an impulsive development? I mean, that Byrd and his organization knew full well what they wanted to do. It was not an emotional and immediate response.
I'm not sure at just what point Byrd made up his mind. I think that he was in Europe when he heard about the Gray Commission report. He immediately decided that it wouldn't do. Just exactly how that developed, I don't know.
Why do you think that there was a two year delay in effect between the Supreme Court decision in May of '54 and the passing of the massive resistence legislation in the late summer of '56?
Well, let's see, when was the Gray Commission report issued? Do you have any idea?
It was in November of '55.
Well, that is almost '56 then.
That's right, that is better than a year after.
I think that explains the delay in large measure, the waiting for that Commission report and when it did report, it took a little time to evaluate and digest that. Byrd came up with his adamant opposition and all that took some time to work out.
What about the impact of massive resistence on the Byrd organization?
I think it was a divisive factor. I think that it put off a lot of the moderates who didn't think that was the way to go, and instead of consolidating the organization's hold on the state for twenty-five years, it had exactly the opposite effect.
Benjamin Muse suggests that one of the tragic aspects of massive resistence is that it encouraged the actions of other southern states. He felt that people looked to Virginia and that there was a pull for moderation and the fact that Virginia chose to go the route of massive resistence, in fact, made things much worse elsewhere. Is that exaggerated?
No, I don't think it is, and I think interposition was the crux of it.
These people were sold on the idea that this was manna from heaven; they
were all sitting around waiting for someone
Would it be fair to say that massive resistence in the full course of the events of the time did not affect Virginia's basic racial attitudes? That at the beginning of massive resistence and at the end, most Virginians did not favor integration, but that the question had become clouded by the fact of whether you obeyed the Supreme Court or whether you wanted public education, but was there a consistency of racial views?
I think that's true, yes.
Did any public figure, to your knowledge, come out in favor of integration as a good thing as such, as opposed to compliance with orders.
I don't believe that anybody did.
One final question about massive resistence, it involves an interesting thing to me and that is the presence of some secret doubters. We have Almond, we've already mentioned him, as attorney general saying that he didn't think that it would work, he would draft the legislation, but he didn't think that it would hold up. Technically, Albertis Harrison had some doubts as well.
Yes, he did.
And I believe that you wrote of David. J. Mays, you suggested that Mays, who was very important in the Committee on Constitutional Rights, and his diary reported that he was in fact telling people secretly that it wouldn't work. Is that fair to make?
I was trying to remember when I said that.
It was after his death. You wrote a feature editorial.
Oh. Yes, I knew Mays and incidentally, his diary is impounded for twenty-five years and he told me two days before he died that they were going to have to rewrite the history of massive resistence when his diary came out. I don't know what it is going to reveal. I imagine that he has got some things that went on in his private contacts. He was right in there with Byrd and the rest of them. He knew what they said and thought.
Apparently he himself, privately and secretly, believed that it wouldn't work.
That's right.
Would you comment on this, it is sort of interesting. There might be others here, but here are three of the most prominent people, Almond, Harrison and the distinguished lawyer, David J. Mays, all of whom secretly were saying that it wouldn't work but publicly were associated with it.
Well, they got caught up in this fury, you might call it, and I don't mean that they were hysterical, but so many people were or nearly so, the legislature included, that it was really almost impossible to get anywhere with any arguments to the contrary.
What would have happened had any of the three or anybody else have said publicly what they were saying privately? Would it have been political suicide?
I think so. Mills Godwin, you know, admitted that if he had done anything but what he did he would have been dead politically in no time.
I think that is all I have in terms of sort of the public
I want to ask just a preliminary question. You were talking about Stanley, Thomas Stanley, and you said that he was not a good governor. How did he get to be governor?
Well, he had been speaker, and the speaker is sort of on the political escalator, and he did a great many favors for a lot of politicians.
I think that you suggested that he was a strong contributor to the Democratic party.
That's absolutely right; he contributed to a lot of campaigns. He made gifts of one sort or another, he had good friends in the legislature who had obligations to him, and he just got to the point where I suppose Byrd felt that he couldn't turn him down.
Do you think that he bears a primary responsibility for massive resistence because of his leadership or do you think that any politician would have knuckled under to Byrd?
I don't think he bears any primary responsibility because I just think he did what he was told. He was under the gun and Byrd told him what had to be done and he did it.
I would like to talk, Mr. Dabney, a little bit about your role as an
editor, and the role of the Times-Dispatch editorial
page primarily. I gather that because of your long background as a
moderate certainly and perhaps even as a liberal in the South, that you
did not personally endorse massive resistence. At least at the
beginning, you were able to argue against it, but it reached a certain
point where your
Yes, I suppose so. I would concur with that. D.T. Bryan and Alan Donnahoe
were the two key people in the management and were both completely sold
on Kilpatrick's interposition and the whole movement of massive
resistence and anxious to do everything possible to carry it out to the
utmost limit within the law. They were perfectly sincere about this. I
just didn't agree with them and the Times-Dispatch
never did endorse interposition except as a gesture and we always said
that it could not include any nullificationist elements.
Was there an editorial endorsement of this with these specifications?
There was a kind of a left handed endorsement of interposition as a gesture, provided there were no nullificationist elements, or words to that effect.
Do you think that this is the point at which the management, that is Bryan and Donnahoe, arrived at this hard massive resistence point of view?
At which point did they arrive at it?
During the time that Kilpatrick was talking about interposition.
Yes, I do.
In other words, you had a fair amount of freedom prior to that time to argue your views. Then you are saying in effect that Kilpatrick might have been an influence on Bryan and Donnahoe?
Oh, I think he was, because his views synchronized with theirs, they were right in the same groove and they thought that this was a great idea, this interposition thing, and they were responsible for republishing the editorials and sending them around. At least, they paid for publishing them, I guess Kilpatrick sent them around. I believe they were also entirely clear in their minds that they weren't going to have any defiance or any going to jail by the Governor and all that kind of business after the courts had spoken.
O.K., now kilpatrick made his speech to the Rotary Club in late 1958 and I think that you said, or maybe it's Mr. Muse that said the next day you had an editorial backing away from this and after the next cycle, Mr. Kilpatrick had an editorial also backing away. Did anything happen there in management that could cause Kilpatrick to say this, or to cause you to write an editorial?
Yes, it was all pretty well coordinated. I knew that Kilpatrick was going to make the speech and it was all done with the agreement of Mr. Bryan and Mr. Donnahoe, all of whom had concluded that the jig was up as far as massive resistence was concerned. One thing that you wouldn't know, several of us went to see Harry Byrd in Berryville to tell him that we were not going to back massive resistence anymore and he didn't want to take him by surprise.
Who was this that made this trip and who was it, can you tell me?
Tumant Bryan and Kilpatrick; K. N. Hoffman, T-D columnist, and I. I think
those were the ones. Young Harry was there with his father and we just
told them politely that we knew this thing wasn't going to hold up much
longer and we couldn't
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
I think Byrd thought that Governor Almond ought to go to jail in all-out resistance. I am pretty sure that is exactly what he thought.
Can you remember the date of this meeting?
No, I can't.
But it was apparently after the schools had closed?
Oh, yes, it was in the fall of '59, I think . . . no, '58.
Do you know who initiated this, was this initiated by either you or Mr. Kilpatrick and agreed to by Bryan and Donnahoe, or was it something that they had suggested?
Something that they had suggested.