Come the summer of 1956, two years had passed since the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision ruling that segregated schools were unconstitutional and not a single school in Virginia had been integrated.
Arlington County had tried, only to have the General Assembly revoke its special status as the only locality in Virginia with an elected school board. U.S. Sen. Harry Byrd Sr. had called for “massive resistance” against the court’s ruling, and so far it was working.
Lawsuits to force compliance seemed to be going nowhere. The latest was a suit filed against Charlottesville by Oliver Hill (who grew up in Roanoke) and Spottswood Robinson, the two pioneering lawyers from Richmond who had been filing suits for years to try to dismantle segregation. One of their cases, out of Prince Edward County, had gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and been incorporated into that famous Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Now they were back in court in courthouses across Virginia, where they continued to meet resistance.
In the Charlottesville case, former Gov. John Battle signed onto the city’s legal defense, a sign of how seriously the state’s white establishment was holding the line. Battle telephoned Hill and told him he’d need an extension on the case.
“I asked him, how much time did he need, three or five days?” Hill wrote in his autobiography, “The Big Bang: Brown v. Board of Education and Beyond.” Hill was shocked when Battle said he wanted a 30-day delay. Hill said he couldn’t agree and would have to take the matter to the judge. “I anticipated the judge would grant Battle’s request; however, I wanted the record to show that I had resisted the request.”
The hearing was in Harrisonburg, before John Paul Jr., a federal judge. Hill had no expectation of anything other than defeat. Paul was 72, the son of a Confederate veteran, a graduate of Virginia Military Institute, where a defense of the Confederacy was part of the school’s ethos. According to a University of Virginia Law School article by former law school professor Marsha Trimble, Paul was known for his sternness and was “rarely softhearted” with convicted offenders. He imposed “substantial sentences” and when family members wrote to plead for leniency, he reminded them of “the necessity for lawbreakers to serve a reasonable amount of time for wrongdoing.”
It is easy to imagine what Hill and Robinson thought going before such a judge. The reviews were right: Paul was stern, but not in a way that the civil rights lawyers anticipated. Paul wasn’t in a mood for delay. The judge told the former governor he didn’t need a 30-day extension. “Judge Paul stated that one of Battle’s law clerks could answer the complaint in little or no time,” Hill wrote. “All Battle was going to do was deny the allegations in the complaint.” To everyone’s surprise, Paul denied Battle’s request for an extension. As they walked out of the judge’s chambers, Hill turned to Robertson and said: “Spot, I think we’ve got ourselves a real judge.”
They did, indeed. When the case came back before Paul, the judge still wasn’t in a mood to brook delay. “I am accustomed to being frank, perhaps too frank for someone on the bench,” he said. “But I would close my eyes to the obvious fact if I didn’t see that the state has been pursuing a deliberated, well-conceived plan of evasion.”
Paul ordered the Charlottesville schools integrated that fall. To say his ruling sent shockwaves through Virginia is an understatement. David Mays, a prominent lawyer in Richmond at the time, kept a diary in which he recorded simply: “Judge Paul did it.”
That decision, made on July 12, 1956, and formalized in a court order on Aug. 7, marked the first time any judge in Virginia had ordered the Supreme Court decision actually be enforced. Over the next four years, Paul’s gavel would fall on other cases — and each time he ordered integration. He ordered the integration of schools in Warren County and Grayson County. He was on the three-judge panel that ordered the University of Virginia to integrate its graduate schools. When the Charlottesville case came back before him — because the city still hadn’t complied — Paul made it clear the city would comply. The New York Times reported that “at one point, he interrupted testimony to denounce ‘politicians’ and ‘officials of the state’ who were inciting public hostility to racial integration.”
That landed Paul on the front page of The Times and earned him the enmity of his home state newspapers. When Paul refused to allow any delays in integrating Warren County schools, the Richmond Times-Dispatch said that Paul displayed a “remarkable attitude” for a judge, but didn’t mean that as a compliment.
Now, just shy of seven decades after that original ruling, Paul has entered history in a different way. The state Department of Historic Resources has approved a historical marker about Paul’s ruling. It’s scheduled to go up in Harrisonburg in May.
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To learn more about Judge Paul — whose passing in 1964 merited an obituary in The New York Times — I paid a visit to another Judge John Paul, the late judge’s nephew, now 86 and retired after decades of service as a general district judge in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County.
That Judge Paul — John A. Paul — was a college student at the time and said he often sat in on his uncle’s court cases, including the integration ones. He said his uncle never talked about his cases outside court, so ultimately he doesn’t know what the judge was thinking. (He does remember him, though, as an ardent New York Giants baseball fan who would listen to their games on the radio.)
“I guess one of the questions everybody wants to know — I’d like to know — is why did he choose to move rapidly, or more rapidly, let me put it that way, than the other judges?” the retired Judge John A. Paul says. His personal speculation is that “he felt you do what the law requires, you don’t postpone it unnecessarily.” In that case, the Supreme Court had spoken, so Judge John Paul Jr. likely felt it was his duty to enforce that ruling.
In addition, John A. Paul says, “I think he cared about education — I think he cared about the kids getting educated.”
While we’re speculating, there’s also a glimmer of history that might give us some insight into Paul: Before going onto the bench, he had been a Republican, at a time when that meant he was not part of the Byrd Machine that ran Virginia — and Virginia’s Democratic Party. Going back further in time, while his father, the original John Paul, had been a Confederate veteran, after the war he joined the Readjuster Party, a short-lived party that promoted what passed for racial reconciliation at the time and later evolved into Virginia’s Republican Party. The Readjusters did things unthinkable for that era: They included Black voters into their ranks, they pushed for an end to the poll tax and the whipping post, they advocated more funding for Black schools and were eventually responsible for founding what today is Virginia State University. That John Paul was twice elected to the state Senate. In 1880, he was elected to the first of two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives for the 7th District. He resigned in 1883 so that President Chester Arthur could name him a federal judge, a post he held until his death in 1901. He was the first Judge Paul.
His son, the John Paul Jr. who has earned the historical marker, was likewise a Republican whose career mirrored his father’s: He was elected multiple times to the state Senate and later to the 7th District seat in Congress. President Herbert Hoover named him as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia and later nominated him for a federal judgeship. At the time, that second Judge Paul was the only federal judge in the western part of the state, which meant twice-a-year trips to courthouses as far away from his native Rockingham County as Abingdon and Big Stone Gap. He was part of a three-judge panel that upheld the use of federal eminent domain to create the Shenandoah National Park and presided over the famous Franklin County moonshine conspiracy trial in which 80 people faced charges of making and selling bootleg whiskey (and 20 of them were convicted).
Whether Judge John Paul Jr. had inherited some of his father’s Readjuster political genes about racial reconciliation or simply believed it was his duty to enforce what the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled, we don’t know. But we do know that once he made his decision that schools should be integrated, he held fast and wouldn’t budge. His nephew recalls sitting in on one court hearing where the Charlottesville school board’s attorney — former Gov. Battle — advised the school board chairman “it might be smart to pack your toothbrushes” because there was some chance that Judge Paul would order him jailed for contempt of court. That never happened, but given Paul’s fearsome reputation, it was considered a possibility.
The court file for the Charlottesville integration case includes a copy of a letter from Judge Paul that, a University of Virginia Law School article says, “reveals his anger and impatience with the political situation entangling the school desegregation case.” A Charlottesville woman had apparently written to him to express concern that the schools might close rather than allow integration.
Paul responded by blaming the Byrd policy of “massive resistance” and refusing to allow localities to decide for themselves. “It is my belief that a majority of the people of Virginia would be willing to have some Negro children admitted to white schools rather than see the schools closed,” John Paul Jr. wrote back. “To refuse to carry out the decision of the Supreme Court or to delay carrying it out would be merely to give encouragement and approval to the attitude of the state government and make it more than ever determined to pursue its present course and to ignore the wishes of the citizens of various localities.”
The concern about schools being closed was real. Schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, Prince Edward County and Warren County did close rather than integrate — Charlottesville and Warren County in direct response to Paul’s rulings. That plunged Virginia even deeper into Byrd’s Massive Resistance. In the end, it was Paul’s rulings that prevailed, although Prince Edward County schools were still closed when Paul died in 1964 at the age of 80.
The video about the cases federal judge John Paul Jr. handled was created by Spotswood High School students Cherith Bradshaw, Pria Dua, Elizabeth Kidd, Miriam Loucks and Nicole Syptak. It is a project of Rocktown History in partnership with Rockingham County Public Schools.
“Paul’s handling of the school integration issue suggests that he had a deep faith in the capacity of human beings to adjust to social change, unwelcome though it might be,” former University of Virginia Law school professor Marsha Trimble once wrote. “He approached a situation which many Virginians saw as catastrophic with the same dignity, respect for the law and sense of fairness that he had brought to property or illegal liquor cases.”
Today, in the farm country of Rockingham County west of Dayton, the retired Judge John A. Paul lives on Judge John Paul Road. He’s not sure which of the previous Judge Pauls it was named after. The family pride, though, is evident. In a house stuffed with books, I noticed two on his coffee table. Both were ones that dealt, in part, with Judge John Paul Jr.’s rulings.
I’m indebted to Margaret Edds, author of “We Face the Dawn,” a book about Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson, for her assistance in providing me with research materials. She directed me to the passages in Hill’s autobiography and Mays’ diary that are referenced in this column.
There is another Paul from Rockingham County who was engaged in public service but who was not a judge. General District Judge John A. Paul’s late wife, Bonnie, was a Republican member of the House of Delegates in the late 1970s. She died in 2020.
Should the federal courthouse in Harrisonburg be named after Judge Paul?
This is the federal courthouse in Harrisonburg where Judge John Paul Jr. issued his historic rulings and where the historical marker will go up in May. The building currently doesn’t have a name. In this week’s West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter, I make the case for why it should be named after Paul.
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