Oliver Hill became the first black elected to Richmond City Council since Reconstruction.

The United States Supreme Court ruled on the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education, unanimously agreeing that segregation in schools was unconstitutional. This decision overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that sanctioned “separate but equal” segregation of the races. Attorneys Thurgood Marshall and Oliver Hill argued the case, which opened the door for wide-scale desegregation.

Virginia Governor Thomas B. Stanley, responded to the desegregation decision by declaring that “I shall use every legal means at my command to continue segregated schools.”

U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr. called for what became known as Massive Resistance. Senator Byrd promoted the “Southern Manifesto” which opposed integrated schools and which was signed in 1956 by more than one hundred southern officeholders.
The linchpin of Massive Resistance was a law that cut off state funds and closed any public school that agreed to integrate.

How Richmond Reacted to Equal Rights
“Richmond, Virginia was certainly no exception to the turmoil that the 1954 Supreme Court ruling brought. White parents moved to the suburbs or deserted the public school system and enrolled their children in private schools not covered by the integration laws. Racial backlash and open hostility across the city brought a great deal of national attention to the city. In spite of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that public schools must be integrated, as late as the 1960s and early 1970s, Richmond area schools, as did many school systems throughout the country, remained largely segregated.

In the decisions of two nationally pivotal cases originating in Virginia, Green v. New Kent County (1968) and Bradley v. School Board of Richmond (1973), the language revolved around finding more effective and expedient solutions to school integration. Busing was the mechanism used to get children from one end of the district to the other. Richmond’s answer was to attempt consolidation of the city’s “black” school system and suburbia’s “white” system to form a metropolitan district. Busing (or “forced busing” as opponents called it) was supposedly designed to accomplish integration, but many people, blacks and whites alike, were distressed to have their children bused to schools that were far away from their homes. So many parents complained about the busing program that many came to believe that the system was in fact designed to fail, because the establishment didn’t really want to comply with the law. “See, it doesn’t work!” was a refrain heard over and over at cocktail parties and parent/teacher meetings.”— Promises Kept