The story below is from our January/February 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Photos above: Digital images courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, Virginia Tech
An epic battle of wills between two Roanokers changed the course of Virginia’s history.
Stuart Saunders had had enough. It was 1958 and the proponents of Massive Resistance, Virginia’s political response to the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring school segregation unconstitutional, were in firm control of the state. Saunders, a resident of Roanoke and president of the Norfolk & Western Railway, then headquartered in the city, put another Roanoker in his sights – J. Lindsay Almond, Jr. Almond had been elevated from Virginia’s attorney general to governor in the election of 1957. What followed was an epic battle of wills between two from the Star City for the soul of the commonwealth.
The architect of Massive Resistance was Virginia’s senior US Senator, Harry F. Byrd, Sr. Byrd dominated Democratic politics in the state such that the “Byrd machine” controlled the political nomination process and almost all Democratic candidacies. Interestingly, at this same time, another Roanoke attorney and future Republican Virginia governor, Linwood Holton, was laying the groundwork for what would become a robust two-party system in the state, but that would take another decade. In the 1950s, however, Byrd Democrats ruled.
Almond had campaigned for governor as a staunch segregationist, cloaking his position in various “states’ rights” positions that cohered to Byrd’s Massive Resistance. As attorney general, Almond had masterminded much of the multi-pronged legal strategies circumventing the Brown decision, such as pupil placement forms and the privatization of public school divisions.
By the fall of 1958 some public schools in the state had been closed for months including Norfolk, Charlottesville and the counties of Warren and Prince Edward. On October 2, Almond held a news conference as governor and declared he would fight to preserve segregation against “the United States Supreme Court’s ruthless opinion threatening to nullify Virginia’s anti-integration laws.”
Saunders eyed the political landscape, realized popular opinion was behind Almond and so decided to conduct a behind-the-scenes effort to gut Massive Resistance. Saunders would later write that by 1958, Virginia’s public schools were in a “chaotic condition” and “threatened the economic development of the state.” In 1958, not one new business had relocated to Virginia, nor had any existing business announced a major expansion. Saunders, at the epicenter of a vast network of business and industry leaders, knew others were quietly seeking to leave the state due to the crippling effect of Massive Resistance on public education and workforce development. Thus, in December 1958 Saunders was moved to act.
Saunders reached out to three other influential personalities in Virginia – Harvie Wilkinson, president of the State Planters Bank of Commerce & Trusts in Richmond; Frank Batten, head of Norfolk-Portsmouth News; and Richmond attorney Lewis Powell, Jr. Calling themselves the Virginia Industrialization Group, they convened on a December evening in 1958 at the Rotunda Club of the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond and hosted a special guest – Almond. By all accounts, the conversation was heated, such that at one point Almond rose from his seat and, pointing his finger, declared he would not abandon his segregationist positions. Saunders recalled Almond “delivered a fire and brimstone speech in which he dressed us down.”
Undeterred and perhaps even emboldened by Almond’s defiance, Saunders and his colleagues immediately went to work expanding the VIG but keeping it in the background, as no minutes or records were kept of their meetings. Bankers, publishers, industrialists, college presidents, media executives, business owners and others representing all areas of the state joined in the common cause of halting Massive Resistance and repairing its damage. In 1959, their muscular influence, coupled with federal judges dismantling much of Virginia’s segregationist efforts, caused Almond to blink. Almond announced his administration’s abandonment of Massive Resistance, albeit with regret. Saunders later wrote, “We realized we had accomplished more than we thought.” Almond would later acknowledge his December meeting with Saunders and the others had been a major influence on his decision to change course.
While Almond was being vilified by the Byrd machine, Saunders and the VIG continued their work to repair the educational and economic damage done by Massive Resistance, forging a new business climate for Virginia. Their efforts exceeded their own imaginations. The VIG hired Richard Holmquist, a General Electric executive, to be an industrial development consultant to Almond. They paid his salary for three years, almost certainly in an effort to avoid his becoming a pawn in a state bureaucracy still dominated by Byrd’s men.
For the next few years, Holmquist traveled the state touting the VIG’s agenda of workforce training and economic growth. A major strategy for the group was announced in 1963, the creation of a state-wide network of post-secondary technical and vocational schools. For that, the VIG tapped a Roanoker, Dr. Dana Hamel, who was serving as president of the Roanoke Technical Institute. Through the efforts of many — most notably Saunders, Holmquist and Hamel — the state created the Department of Technical Education. In time, this yeoman undertaking produced what is today’s 23-member Virginia Community College System.
Saunders served as chairman of the VIG from its inception in 1958 until he left Virginia in October 1963 to head the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1979, Lewis Powell, who had been appointed seven years earlier as an associate justice to the US Supreme Court, thought Saunders and the work of the VIG were so important that he asked Saunders to write an informal history of the group for posterity. Saunders completed that history in 1980, and it is now included with Powell’s papers archived at Washington and Lee University.
In 1958, Virginia was in the crucible of tremendous social change and upheaval. Sparring over Massive Resistance, the iron wills of two Roanokers collided in a room at Richmond’s Rotunda Club. That meeting and its aftermath forever changed Virginia’s history.
The story above is from our January/February 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
