The Press: News on the Editorial Pages

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In Virginia last week readers of the state's most influential newspapers found the biggest news in weeks on the editorial pages. Long advocates of "massive resistance" to school integration, Richmond's Times-Dispatch and News Leader had decided that the commonwealth's maze of pro-segregation laws was foredoomed to failure. Editor Virginius Dabney's Times-Dispatch called for an assembly commission to think up new defensive tactics, and Editor James Jackson Kilpatrick's News Leader even talked about the possibility of limited, local-option integration. When the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch

& Star also backed away from massive resistance, all the state's major newspapers were on the record for a more moderate approach.

As if on cue, Governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr. (TIME, Sept. 22) announced that if federal courts ruled against the statewide massive resistance system, which automatically closes schools before they can be integrated, he would name a commission "for the purpose of counsel and advice." Although Senator Harry Byrd, the creator of massive resistance and the commonwealth's political boss, publicly proclaimed that he would continue to fight on the old grounds, there was little doubt that the news on the editorial pages heralded a strategic retreat in Richmond toward token compliance with the U.S. Supreme Court's integration decrees. The import was not lost on the segregationists who sent News Leader Editor Kilpatrick, the most articulate spokesman for the diehard segregationists, a bitter, one-sentence telegram: "Et tn, Brute?"