VIRGINIA: Man in Command

• Share

On the Senate floor of the State Capitol in Richmond one day last week—some 98 years after Virginia voted 88-55 to secede from the Union—there were moments when it seemed that the senator from the Appomattox District wanted to secede again. Proclaimed Senator Charles T. Moses, waving a portrait of Robert E. Lee astride Traveller: "That's the man for states' rights! He didn't surrender! He just walked in to see General Grant, gave his hat to a courier and said, 'We're out of food!' " The occasion: the diehards of U.S. Senator Harry Byrd's powerful political machine, aware that the state's massive resistance laws had collapsed, and that Governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr. was making points with a local-option plan, were determined to rough up Almond in a rearguard action.

Governor Almond, who had bowed with courage and dignity in accepting token integration as inevitable (TIME, Feb. 9), staked his power on a new program drawn up by a committee headed by Lynchburg's Senator Mosby G. Perrow Jr. The key bill would return pupil placement to local school boards, subject to rules set by the state board of education. In the final vote, minutes after Appomattox' Moses waved the picture of Lee, the Almond forces carried the day by 21-18. The house passed the senate version, 63-23.

Virginia gentleman and astute politician that he is, Lindsay Almond in victory pooh-poohed any notion of a split with the venerable Byrd organization—and went out of his way to shake hands with the diehards. But Virginians could hardly help noticing that as the Old Dominion turned away from Byrd's disastrous massive resistance policies, Lindsay Almond was very much in command.