VIRGINIA: The Gravest Crisis

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Above all things, I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good senses we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.

—Thomas Jefferson to James Madison (1787)

Behind the massive walnut desk in Richmond's proud, Ionic-fronted Capitol, designed by Thomas Jefferson in 1785, sat florid, heavy-shouldered J. (for James) Lindsay Almond Jr., 66th Governor of Virginia in the line of Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Monroe, John Tyler and Harry Flood Byrd. He had, he admitted, been under "continuous pressure." Just the night before, he and his wife had been awakened several times by telephone calls: "She'd jump up so I could get some sleep, and I jumped up so she could get some rest. Usually, it meant that both of us jumped up at the same time." But for a man ready to preside over the dissolution of the public school system first proposed by Thomas Jefferson in 1779, Lindsay Almond was remarkably relaxed. "I feel very well, thank you," said he. "But I would like to take a stroll in the country, for I love the country."

Deeply Troubled. Virginia's countryside was indeed something to love last week. In the Shenandoah Valley, apples clustered rich and red in Senator Harry Byrd's vast orchards near Berryville. In the famed Tidewater region, haze shimmered blue over sparkling crystal estuaries. In the west, the beech's first gold and the oak's first russet welcomed autumn from the Appalachian crests. In the tangled Wilderness, dusk cast early purple shadows round Lindsay Almond's family farm land.

Yet for all its peaceful beauty, for all its graceful ways, for all Lindsay Almond's relaxed composure, Virginia was deeply, darkly troubled. The trouble lay in the issue of an era, an issue bound to come fittingly, inevitably to clearest focus in Virginia. It was as simple as this: Should Virginia obey the law of the land by allowing Negro children to attend school with whites? Or should Virginia close its public schools, blindly following a legalistic road that might well lead to the violence that Virginia's leaders most deplore? U.S. Senator Harry Byrd, Virginia's benign but absolute political boss, accurately measures the dimensions of Virginia's problem. "We face," he said recently, "the gravest crisis since the War Between the States."

Law v. Politics. That crisis is not only Virginia's or even the South's: it is the nation's. Far more than anything that jackanapes (by Virginia standards) Governor Orval Faubus can do in ragtag (by Virginia standards) Arkansas, Virginia will set the lasting pattern of Southern integration—or defiance. Virginia's Senator Byrd has bitterly recognized that fact: the forces of integration, he said last month, are "working on the theory that if Virginia can be brought to her knees, they can march through the rest of the South singing Hallelujah."