One December night in 1958, while other Virginians were preparing for their Christmas festivities, 29 of the state’s most powerful businessmen filed into a hotel dining room in downtown Richmond with a more serious matter weighing on their minds.
Virginia’s two-year “massive resistance” to integration was coming to a crisis boil. Gov. Lindsey Almond had taken office earlier that year, declaring that “integration anywhere means destruction everywhere.” By fall, two different federal judges had ordered the state to admit Black students to schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk and Warren County. In response, Almond ordered those schools shut down. No longer was this a debate over whether to integrate public schools; it was a debate over whether to have public schools at all. The governor, unrepentant, delivered what one contemporary called “a fire and brimstone speech declaring his undying dedication to massive resistance.”
In the room that night at the Rotunda Club at the Jefferson Hotel was the state’s business elite — “industrialists,” as they were called at the time, bankers, lawyers and newspaper publishers. Leading the group was Stuart Saunders, president of the Roanoke-based Norfolk & Western Railway. Some of these businessmen — and, in those days, they were all men and, it almost goes without saying, white — may have had their own personal views on matters regarding race, but they’d come to have a single one professionally. Massive Resistance, they believed, was bad for business.
To make that point, they came from all corners of the state in those pre-interstate days to Richmond and invited Almond to meet with them. Almond and Saunders were not strangers. Almond had been Roanoke’s congressman before he was elected attorney general and later governor; Saunders ran the most important employer in Roanoke and one of the most important in the state.
Saunders went around the room to ask attendees to speak their minds. Virtually all did. As Saunders recounted later in an unpublished paper, “We made three points: (a) massive resistance was doomed to failure, (b) this program would produce untold harm to the Commonwealth and (c) it would seriously affect the economy and image of Virginia.”
Virginia governors had been accustomed to the business community being in lockstep with their program. This was an unprecedented breach, and on perhaps the most emotional issue that generation had ever confronted, and Almond did not take it kindly. “The governor delivered another fire and brimstone speech in which he dressed us down,” Saunders wrote. “He shook his finger at us and said he would never accept integration in the public schools of Virginia. The meeting broke up in that atmosphere. However, within a week we realized that we had accomplished more than we thought. In a few days, the governor showed moderation of his hard-nose advocacy of massive resistance. He has since acknowledged that this meeting was influential in changing his mind.”
Almond eventually relented and allowed integration to go forward, although that didn’t stop Prince Edward County from closing schools on its own. We all know how history unfolded from there. What’s less well-known is what else that group of business leaders did. The two men who initiated the meeting — railroad chief Saunders of Roanoke and Richmond bank chairman Harvie Wilkinson Jr. — had a purpose in mind beyond ending Massive Resistance. Their real concern, Saunders wrote, was the state’s lagging economy. They felt Massive Resistance was a distraction from dealing with that. With state-sponsored opposition to integration winding down, the group of business leaders, which they dubbed the Virginia Industrialization Group, wanted to turn their attention to economic matters.
(Saunders’ personal account says that he and Wilkinson were the organizers. I’ve seen other accounts that list Richmond attorney, and future Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell and Norfolk newspaper publisher Frank Batten Sr. as fellow organizers. While 29 people attended the group’s initial meeting with Almond, Saunders’ paper says 90 men eventually took part at some point. The list is essentially a who’s who of the state’s business leadership in that era. Notable names included the leaders of Allied Chemical, Appalachian Electric Power, Craddock-Terry Shoe, Dan River Mills, Miller and Rhoads department stores, Newport News Shipbuilding, Reynolds Metal, Roanoke Gas, Schewel Furniture and Virginia Electric Power.)
Saunders’ account of the group’s activities (written in 1980 and filed among Powell’s papers at Washington & Lee University) sounds much like something you’d hear a Virginia governor say today. “In the late 1950s, Virginia was experiencing severe competition in economic development from many sections of the country, especially southeastern states,” Saunders wrote. “Virginia’s industrial leaders were acutely aware of this.” One particular concern they had, he wrote, “was there was no effective department of industrial development” — what today we’d call economic development. “Virginia was completely outstripped in this field by neighboring states,” Saunders wrote. “Our group was acutely sensitive to the situation and resolved to do something about it.”
Once relations with Almond settled down, the group met with the governor in 1961 and proposed the state hire “a first-rate expert” in attracting industrial prospects. “The governor acknowledged the need for such a person,” Saunders wrote, “but stated that there were no funds to pay for the salary of such an individual.” The Virginia Industrialization Group offered to come up with the money and hired Richard Holmquist, a General Electric executive who had most recently been the company’s corporate liaison in Washington, D.C.
Holmquist “proved to be most cooperative and imaginative,” Saunders wrote. He quickly came up with a 19-point program for boosting the state’s economy. Among them: promoting world trade through Hampton Roads and creating state trade offices in Europe and Japan to push Virginia products. (Today, Virginia still has those offices, plus others in South Korea and, as of last year, Taiwan.) Holmquist also identified a problem Virginia had. The economy was rapidly changing from an agricultural economy to an industrial one, but the state had no way to train those workers. In speech after speech across the state to business groups, Holmquist emphasized the need for a “properly educated labor supply.” A high school diploma would no longer cut it for many jobs. In 1962, he told a group in the city of Franklin that “education continues to constitute a major problem for Virginia.” Later that year, he told a group in Winchester that someday a “statewide system of technical education would exist.”
What Holmquist was describing was what today we’d call the community college system.
As is often the case today, North Carolina was ahead of Virginia. The Tar Heel state had already launched its community college system. (Here’s how far ahead North Carolina was: The first study was in 1952, the first enabling legislation in 1957, the actual launch in 1963.) In Virginia, the most prominent four-year schools had started setting up two-year branches around the state. The University of Virginia had opened satellite schools, as they were termed, in Accomack County, Martinsville, Lynchburg, Northern Virginia and Wise County. Virginia Tech had done the same in Clifton Forge, Danville and Wytheville. Both schools set up operations in Roanoke. The College of William & Mary opened extension schools in Richmond, Norfolk, Newport News and Prince George County.
By now, Almond was long gone from the governor’s office. His successor, Albertis Harrison, got the political credit for the economic gains that Holmquist helped set in motion, and his successor, Mills Godwin, got to deal with the political wrangling over the “statewide system of technical education” that Holmquist said was necessary. A state report endorsed the concept, and recommended that all those two-year schools be taken away from their parent institutions and put under the umbrella of a new community college system. Those four-year schools didn’t like that. They wanted to keep their branches and saw a community college system as competition. State legislators lined up to back their respective local schools. Nobody ever wants to give up anything. Virginia Tech President T. Marshall Hahn gets the credit for breaking the impasse. He offered to let go of Tech’s branches; that left the University of Virginia politically isolated. Godwin negotiated a deal from there: The university got to keep its Clinch Valley College (today the University of Virginia’s College at Wise) and its George Mason College (today the independent George Mason University); its other schools became community colleges.
That included the merger of the two rival branches in Roanoke — Tech’s Roanoke Technical Institute and the University of Virginia’s Roanoke Center — into what in 1966 became Virginia Western Community College. That school became the state’s first community college.
On Monday, a historical marker will be unveiled in Roanoke to recognize Virginia Western’s status as the first community college — and also to connect the dots between how the business community’s opposition to Massive Resistance ultimately led to the creation of that system.
You can credit Nelson Harris, a Roanoke minister, former mayor and historian, with setting this historical marker in motion. This is the eighth one he’s sponsored (with two more in the works) as Virginia aims to fill in the blank spots in our historical memory.
File them all away as more of the history we weren’t taught in school.