Word: byrds
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...same time the state be permitted to pay private school tuition for all white students who objected to integration or whose schools had been closed. In Europe on Senate business, Harry Byrd received a copy of the Gray Plan by mail from his son Harry Jr. A sincere segregationist, Harry Byrd could also see the political hay to be made out of fighting for a lily-white Virginia. In that sense, the Gray Plan had a fatal flaw: in such liberal cities as Norfolk and Alexandria, local authorities might permit a few Negro children to sit in white classrooms...
...Harry Byrd was much too shrewd to jump out front with objections to the Gray Plan. Before it or any harsher program could be put into effect, a change was required in one section of the Virginia constitution that prohibited the "appropriation of public funds" for "any school or institution of learning not owned or exclusively controlled by the state." On the pretext of support for the Gray Plan with its fatal flaw, the Byrd organization fought hard for a constitutional amendment. Leading the way was Attorney General Lindsay Almond, a stem-winding stump orator, who thundered at Appomattox that...
...Virginia's constitutional referendum on Jan. 9, 1956, the amendment carried, 304,154 to 146,164, and the Gray Plan had outlived its usefulness. Poor Governor Stanley, who never quite seemed to get the word, hailed the vote as a "mandate" for the Gray Plan. But Harry Byrd interpreted it as a mandate for something much tougher. He promptly warned the legislature to go slow in enacting the Gray Plan's provisions. In February, Byrd laid down the law with an outright demand for "massive resistance" against any sort of integration. And in July, Byrd met secretly...
...governor right in the middle-and that was where Lindsay Almond wanted to be. He had worked hard to regain his privileged standing in the Byrdhouse, but just in case his one deviation was still held against him, he announced for Governor in November 1956 without consulting Harry Byrd ahead of time. Whatever his private feelings may have been, Harry Byrd recognized Almond as a hot vote getter-and formidable Republican Ted Dalton was again running for Governor...
...With the Byrd organization's enthusiastic segregationist backing, Lindsay Almond let out all stops. Negroes, he cried, were "threatening government by N.A.A.C.P. in Virginia by the cold steel of federal bayonets, and we will have none of it." Ted Dalton, urging a system of limited integration, never really had a chance. And the dispatch of federal troops to Little Rock ruined him completely. Lindsay Almond was elected Governor of Virginia by a vote of 326,921 to 188,628-and the Byrd organization, playing fast and loose with segregationist emotions, was more firmly entrenched in power than ever...