STATEMENT OF DELEGATE ROBERT WHITEHEAD OF NELSON COUNTY,
SATURDAY, JUNE 26, 1954
I have been requested to give my views regarding Governor Stanley’s proposal to wipe out the
constitutional requirement that the General Assembly provide and maintain a public free school
system. I disagree completely with that suggestion.
The Governor assures us that there is no intention of destroying the public schools. In that
case there would seem to be no point in depriving Virginia’s parents and teachers and her 675,000
school children of the present constitutional guarantee of the continuance of those schools. He
gives us no hint of a method by which the schools are to be supported which will be in any way
different from the present method. He outlines no plan under which the public schools can be
maintained and yet be, somehow less public. We are asked instead to leave the whole matter to
the discretion of the legislature. I think we are being offered a pig in a poke.
The Governor should know that a powerful element in Virginia and in the General As-
sembly has always been fundamentally opposed to the public free school system, and has regarded
it as socialism to tax the wealthy in order to pay for the education of the poorer people’s children. -
This opposition has not, during the past generation, been open and avowed. It has contended
itself with trying to starve the public schools through inadequate appropriations, except when
compelled to vote funds by intense public pressure. That element must regard Governor
Stanley’s proposal as a heaven-sent opportunity to cripple if not destroy, an efficient public school
system in Virginia.
I can conceive of nothing more fundamental to the welfare of Virginia, or more properly to
be dealt with in its fundamental law, than the education of Virginia’s children. If that is to be
left to the whims of the legislature, all other subjects might as well be, and the State Constitution
discarded as superfluous.
I do not believe that a majority of Virginians are willing to surrender its public schools.
I do not believe that the conscience of a Christian people can consent to abandoning them. I
believe that the Governor should make a systematic and unhurried attempt to get the views of
leading Virginians of both races as to the methods by which we can best preserve that system while
assuring every Virginia child against compulsory attendance at a school unacceptable on principle
to his parents or guardian.
Virginians should be able to devise their own solution without having to borrow one from
South Carolina or Georgia, from James F. Byrnes or Herman Talmadge. And it will be a tragedy
if we can find no third way between the leadership of the radical elements in the NAACP, rabid
for integration of the races at any cost, and that of white Tories whose concern for the public school
system has never been more than skin-deep. |
Virginia’s public school system must be preserved.