Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School
The Economics of the Civil Rights Movement
Important African-American Institutions
Lynchburg Civil Rights Organizations
Lynchburg's Newspapers in the Sixties
Martin Luther King, Jr.: Connections to Lynchburg
Prince Edward County: Connections to Lynchburg
Pupil Placement Board in Lynchburg
Hydro-Electric Dam on James River, Bedford County
Let justice roll on like a river and righteousness like an everflowing stream. (Amos 5: 24)
Like a dam across the mighty James, massive resistance was Virginia’s response to the Supreme Court’s Brown versus Board of Education. Rather than to allow “race-mixing,” Virginia vowed to close its public schools. In 1956, at a special session of the Virginia State Legislature, a number of massive resistance laws were passed. Several of these laws were intended to either threaten or weaken the NAACP . This 1956 legislative special session also created the Pupil Placement Board (PPB).
But the river of justice could not be held back; by 1961, massive resistance had lost much of its effectiveness. Virginia’s laws targeting the NAACP had been found unconstitutional and a handful of public schools throughout Virginia had begun their token desegregation process. As Lynchburg’s Lynda Woodruff, Owen Cardwell, Cecilia Jackson, and Brenda Hughes (the first African-Americans to graduate from E. C. Glass High School) were to discover, however, massive resistance, in the form of the PPB, was still very much alive.