Fred Lyon of Port Haywood, a retired attorney and historian whose research focuses on civil rights in Virginia, massive resistance, and Brown v. Board of Education, gave a talk last Thursday at Mathews Memorial Library. His topic was “John Warren Cooke, a Publisher and Politician Responds to Brown v. Board of Education.”

Cooke was a lifelong Mathews County resident who served in the Virginia House of Delegates for 38 years, from 1942 to 1980, including the last 12 as Speaker. Publisher of the Gazette-Journal, he died in 2009 at the age of 94.

Lyon opened with a humorous comment about Cooke “staring at me (a painting of Cooke hangs on the wall opposite the speaker’s podium) in a room dedicated to him, with his daughter (Gazette-Journal publisher Elsa Cooke Verbyla) sitting over there.”

Lyon said that Cooke “was arguably the most distinguished citizen this county has ever produced” and that the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education “was arguably the most important decision the Supreme Court has ever made.”

In the late 1950s, said Lyon, support for desegregation in Virginia was “virtually non-existent,” and local boards were shutting down school systems rather than comply with the Supreme Court’s decision making segregation illegal.

Lyon said he had long been an admirer of John Warren Cooke, who was Speaker of the House when Lyon was at Virginia Commonwealth University, and said that Cooke was “one of the greatest speakers of the house this state has ever had.”

A Democrat, Cooke served under three Republican governors, and “accomplished it with great skill,” said Lyon. “He was respected on both sides of the aisle.”

Cooke was also respected by the African American community as being fair, said Lyon, and he ran the General Assembly “with dignity and respect for all.”

“One word constantly comes up in describing Mr. Cooke,” said Lyon. “Decent. Mr. Cooke was a decent man. That was the reputation that, in his winding journey, he upheld.”

But Lyon also discussed the complex racial history underlying Cooke’s story. In the 1950s, around 90 percent of white Virginians were against desegregation, said Lyon, and Cooke was a lieutenant in the massive Byrd machine, a Democratic political organization led by Senator Harry Byrd that controlled rural politics in Virginia for many years.

“You didn’t get to a position of power in the mid-1950s without being in the Byrd machine,” said Lyon.

Some of those in the Byrd machine were extreme segregationists, said Lyon, leading the General Assembly in 1956 to enact the strategy of massive resistance, having schools shut down rather than integrate and penalizing schools that integrated by withholding state funding. The bill allowed for tuition vouchers for private schools. The actions were based on the theory that the U.S. Supreme Court was acting unconstitutionally by dictating the parameters of education, a matter that should be left up to the states.

But there were also “pragmatic segregationists” like Cooke and Gov. J. Lindsay Almond who were “avid supporters of massive resistance, until they weren’t,” said Lyon. Such men were realistic and “basically changed the course of Virginia,” he said.

The third category of segregationists, said Lyon, were the moderate segregationists like his parents, who opposed segregation in theory, but not if it meant closing the schools. Republicans at that time were racial moderates, he said, arguing for limited integration.

Black Virginians overwhelmingly supported desegregation, said Lyon, while only about 10 percent of white Virginians did so.

When Almond was elected governor, said Lyon, he and Cooke began to work hand in hand on desegregation issues. While the two delivered speeches decrying integration, “most of it was posturing,” Lyon said.

“They knew the massive resistance laws were ridiculous and the Supreme Court would not allow them,” said Lyon, “but they had no choice but to enforce the law.”

In 1957, the National Guard blockade of schools in Arkansas occurred, said Lyon, and schools across Virginia began to close. By the summer of 1958, he said, courts had ordered the school systems in Norfolk, Charlottesville and Front Royal to integrate, so the governor shut them down and students were locked out. The white students went to private schools on vouchers, while Black students received no education.

Lyon said that people like his parents began thinking it was more important to keep the schools open, “and Gov. Almond and Mr. Cooke figured that out.” Almond wanted a case to go to the courts on whether massive resistance was constitutional, although he knew he would lose, said Lyon. Then, if the court ruled it was unconstitutional, “He could say ‘I’ve done all I could do.’”

That decision from the Virginia Supreme Court and a special three-judge panel of federal district judges came in 1959, striking down Virginia’s mandatory closing law, and Almond “raged against the decision,” said Lyon, but a week later, he called a special session of the General Assembly and said Virginia would have to acquiesce to the underlying decision in Brown v. Board of Education. While the Speaker of the House at that time, E. Blackburn Moore, refused to help Almond enact the change, Lyon said that Cooke became the governor’s number-two person and worked with him to help repeal massive resistance, whipping the vote to get support.

The Black newspaper Journal and Guide applauded Almond and Cooke for putting Virginia on the road to integration, said Lyon, and the doors finally opened.

Lyon said that people thought Almond, convinced the courts could not be resisted and that desegregation was inevitable, was always “playing the long game.”

“The only way to convince Virginians was to test it,” he said. “They knew he had tried. When it was over, it was over.”

Lyon said it was politically impossible to go to complete integration in 1954, when 95 percent of the white population was opposed to it. Almond and Cooke “were some of the South’s shrewdest politicians,” he said.

“By the end, Virginia had more Black people in public schools than any other state, peacefully, with no violence,” said Lyon. “Cooke and Almond took the right way. The art of the possible.”

NOTE: Edited to reflect that in the 1950s, around 90 percent of white Virginians were against desegregation.

Historian Fred Lyon, at left, discussed the role Mathews native, former Gazette-Journal publisher, and former Virginia Speaker of the House John Warren Cooke played in ending massive resistance to desegregation in Virginia.