On August 24, 1956, Virginia Governor Thomas Stanley pledged to close Virginia’s public schools rather than permit any racial integration. "If we accept admission of one Negro child into a white school, it's all over…we will have given up," he said.

Governor Stanley’s remarks flagrantly defied the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public education was unconstitutional. The governor’s remarks also signaled his rejection of a rival plan by some Virginia politicians— who sought to preserve segregation while appearing to abide by the Court’s decision—that would give all students in the state the choice between attending a segregated school or an integrated one.

The same day, the governor received a petition signed by 30,000 Virginians asking him to “do everything” to maintain segregation in the state’s schools and Governor Stanley claimed his plan was “supported by at least 95 percent of all white people in Virginia.”

The next month, the Virginia General Assembly approved Governor Stanley’s so-called “Stanley Plan,” under which the governor could close and withdraw funding from any school that tried to integrate. Nine schools were soon closed in Warren County, Charlottesville, and Norfolk.

Additionally, the state school system was placed in the hands of the governor, who created a board to oversee individually all transfers of students between schools. The governor’s office made 450,000 pupil assignments without ever permitting a Black child to attend a school with white children.

Lawmakers also enacted a tuition grant program that gave over $1 million to white students to attend segregated private schools.

While aspects of the Stanley Plan were eventually ruled unconstitutional by state and federal courts, white Virginians were largely successful in preventing the integration of public schools in the state. Five years after the Brown ruling, fewer than 1% of Black students in Virginia attended an integrated public school. Ten years after Brown, that number had only increased to 5%.

The principles of the Stanley Plan were widely copied in other Southern states. To read more about the “massive resistance” of white Southern elected officials and their supporters to the integration of public schools, read EJI’s report, Segregation in America.