Edwin Washington Project

In the personal collection of Superintendent Oscar Emerick were two clippings dealing with the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, a far-right segregationist organization   This organization and Senator Harry F. Byrd, Jr. promoted the Southern Manifesto, a document attacking integration.  For more information on the Defenders, we recommend consulting the Balch Library in Leesburg Virginia, as well as Chapter 7 of Dirt Don’t Burn.  To see the clippings, ask the Edwin Washington Project for access to box 15.6.  Project HQ is in the Douglass High School Building, 407 E. Market Street, Suite 106, Leesburg, Va 20176.

In the view of the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, the state legislature should “restore the States to their rightful place in our Federal system by interposing the sovereignty of Virginia to check the Supreme Court of the United States in its unconstitutional assumption of power.”[i]

The Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties was a Virginia grassroots organization founded in October 1954 in Petersburg. Stirling Murray Harrison, the commonwealth’s attorney in Loudoun, led the local chapter. John Janney of Loudoun (then living in Nevada), said at a January 1960 meeting of the Defenders that “since the federal government was created by a contractual agreement among the states, federal agencies are in effect employees of the states. When those agencies overstep the authority given it by the Constitution, the states as employers should call it down.” He then urged passage of a state law stating that US Supreme Court decisions Virginia felt “to be unconstitutional or illegal would be void in the state.”[ii] Janney felt this was justified because the courts (in his opinion) were operating outside their authority. The Janney connection is important because his family’s heritage went back to the formation of the Republic and because the Janney family in particular, and Loudoun Quakers in general, had been immensely helpful to Blacks, especially in education. For example, Cornelia Janney set up a fund in the 1930s that supported the Lincoln Colored School.[iii]

The Janney family is usually spoken of in terms of its support for Black rights. The family certainly had impressive roots. John Janney’s great-grandfather was attorney general under George Washington and John Adams. The exception was John Janney. He was born in Leesburg in 1877, graduated from Virginia Military Institute, and over his life proved to be a highly controversial member of his clan. He was frequently involved in litigation related to his many commercial enterprises. He was also outspoken in right-wing politics, anticommunist activities, and—like other conservatives then and today—sought constitutional limits to government.

The Supreme Court rejected the power of states to declare federal laws unconstitutional, reserving that function to the judicial branch of the federal government—the Supreme Court and its various district and appellate courts, all of which played important roles in enforcing integration. Cooper v. Aaron (1958) put the nail in the concept’s coffin by specifically stating that the states are duty bound to enforce the actions of federal courts: