Page 8 of the Gray Commission Report emphasizes the need for Virginia’s citizens to respond to the challenge of school integration with the same spirit as the state’s historical leaders. The Commission proposes legislation allowing local school boards to assign students in a way that maintains segregation and offers tuition grants to families who refuse to send their children to integrated schools. It also recommends amending §141 of the Virginia Constitution to permit public funds to be used for private school tuition, arguing that failure to do so would jeopardize other state education programs, including scholarships and aid for specialized student groups.
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public school system; provision for localities wherein public schools are abandoned; plan of assignment; no child be required to attend a school wherein both white and colored children are taught; tuition grants for educational purposes; Almond v. Day; § 141 Constitution of Virginia; enforced integration is to be avoided
segregation cases before it. Progress in recent years has been so rapifl_in
improving the Negro schools that now in many of our counties and cities
they are superior to the white schools.
Our modern public school system has been developed on a .racially
segregated basis and advancement of the Negro race has been a direct re-
sult of such a system. Without segregation, the white children would
still be largely taught in private academies as they were in the early days
in Virginia. Public schools would have made no progress and Negro
children would have received little or no public education. Future judicial
pronouncements angi the attitudes of the Negroes themselves will largely
determine whether in many parts of Virginia the clock will be turned back
a century. .
It is now judicially asserted that Negro children lose something by
being compelled to attend separate schools. The Supreme Court of the
United States, however, gave no consideration to the adverse effect of
integration upon white children, although this was expressly called to the
attention of the Court. This Commission believes that separate facilities
in our public schools are in the best interest of both races, educationally
and otherwise, and that compulsory integration should be resisted by all
proper means in our power.
The racial problem in Virginia varies radically in different localities;
in thirty-one counties in the North, West, and Southwest the Negro school
population is less than 10% of the whole; in twenty-four of the South-
eastern, Piedmont, and Tidewater counties it exceeds 50%, and in one it
is nearly 80%.
In some localities where there are few Negroes the problem of ad-
justment is not so serious as it is in localities with large Negro populations.
In the latter, it is believed that the people will abandon public schools
rather than accept any integration. Our school properties, representing
an investment of nearly half a billion dollars, are owned by the localities,
and the money for their operation is raised in great part from local taxes.
Obviously, the schools cannot continue without the support of the people,
and we must leave a large measure of autonomy to the localities even
though that may result in the closing of public schools.
Thus the local school boards must be given wide discretion to meet
their peculiar local problems. The employment of teachers; the assign-
ment of pupils; the regulation or abandonment of transportation ; the opera-
tion or abandonment of cafeterias; the continuation or abandonment of
athletics, societies of various kinds, and other extra-curricular activities;
the maintenance of existing social practices or the entire elimination from
the schools of every activity but bare instruction ; the maintenance of co-
education or separation by sex;—all of these things must be in the hands
of local people who know their own communities and whose children will
profit or suffer by their decisions.
This will call for unselfish service on the part of the best people of
each community. But this is not new in Virginia; in the years that
preceded our Revolution, times of stress and danger, our best men con-
tributed unselfishly and without compensation their thoughts and energies
to local government, even while playing their parts on a larger stage. As
county magistrates they legislated, adjudicated, and administered the laws
of their people. George Mason, who wrote our Bill of Rights, was a
magistrate of Fairfax County; Edmund Pendleton, who presided over the
Virginia Revolutionary Convention and drafted the resolution calling
upon Congress to declare Independence, was a magistrate of Caroline
