The source is a diary that was kept by a Foreign Service officer named Robert Ode. Mr. Ode was a combat veteran of World War II, and after the war joined the Foreign Service as a clerk. He worked his way up through the ranks to become a Foreign Service Officer. He was forced to retire by a mandatory retirement law at age 60 in 1975. Thereafter, he took occasional work as a contractor for the U.S. government. He happened to take a job for the State Department that involved traveling to the embassy in Tehran, supposed to be for only 45 days. He arrived in the fall of 1979. In a perfect case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he was in the embassy in Tehran when it was overrun by the student militants on November 4th. Thus his 45-day assignment became a prolonged assignment because he remained in captivity—as the other 51 hostages did—for 444 days until they were released on January 20, 1981.

During his captivity he eventually got permission to begin recording his thoughts. He didn’t start writing immediately, he was eventually given permission, and he retrospectively wrote back to the onset of the hostage crisis on November 4, 1979. Then he wrote on an occasional basis, not quite a daily basis, for the duration of his captivity. The final product is a diary of 115 pages, it's available at the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, GA, and a substantial excerpt of it is posted on the website of the Carter Library; so it’s readily accessible by electronic means in any classroom in the country.

115 pages is perhaps a daunting length for a primary source for high school instruction, but I think that teachers can effectively and rather easily find the “meaty excerpts” to which they can guide their students for a greater understanding of what the document reveals.

What I like about this document is it’s a first-person narrative by a participant who was involved in one of the most sensational events in U.S. diplomatic history. It’s not a study of the making of official American foreign policy by the Oval Office or by the subfloor of the State Department, by the Secretary of State; but rather it’s a record of the day to day experiences—of the real life impact of an international event on an individual Foreign Service Officer who experienced that event in a very personal, first hand, and day in and day out way.

What I like about the document is that it reveals the human side of international relations. It does not reveal why policy was made or how policy was made, but it shows how policy was experienced by a key official who was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing much will be learned from this diary about the origins of the hostage crisis, about why it erupted, about how it was settled, about what kind of negotiations ensued between Carter and Khomeini. But what is learned is how the hostage ordeal affected the 52 individual American government employees who experienced it on a day-to-day basis.

In that sense, it’s kind of like studying the New Deal not by looking at the policy made by Franklin Roosevelt, but rather by reading the account of the Okies. Or it's about learning about World War II not by studying the decisions of the generals, but by looking at the lived experiences of the soldiers who swarmed up onto the beaches in the face of enemy gunfire. So it does have to be supplemented with studies or explanations of what’s happening at the top level, what’s happening between the Carter government and the Khomeini government, but this document does bring to life the actual, real experience of what took place in the lives of the Iran Embassy employees.

1979 had been a very tumultuous year. The Khomeini regime had taken over in the early months of 1979 and the U.S. embassy had remained in business throughout the duration of the year. Although—because of historic tensions between the Iranian people and the U.S. government—there were frequently demonstrations in the neighborhood, in the street in front of the embassy, with mobs of students and others walking by and chanting nasty slogans about the U.S. By the end of 1979 the embassy staff had almost gotten accustomed to it, it was like the background noise. Of course they were concerned about it, but they had sort of settled into a relatively comfortable routine.

The events of November 4th, when they first started, there was initially an assumption that just business as usual in a heightened state of tensions. But then obviously as these dramatic events unfolded the officials realized that, no, this is actually something new and different.

The first excerpt that is worth seeing is right on page 1 and page 2 and that is Mr. Ode’s firsthand testimonial about being taken captive. He reports that he was engaged in routine business at the embassy in what seemed like a routine day. On this day in particular, though, suddenly the embassy was aglow with activity. There were some indicators that some students had breached behind the security wall and were causing some worry and consternation. A Marine Corps guard came in and advised that he and his colleagues move from one part of the embassy to another. Still nothing apparent that a major ordeal was about to ensue. Mr. Ode was asked to escort an elderly gentleman from the chancery building, so he walked outside with this elderly man, who got in a car and drove away. Then he and some of his colleagues decided that maybe what was happening in the embassy was unsettling enough that they should walk up the street to another U.S. government facility. They begin to walk away and are quickly surrounded by a group of students who were armed, who demanded that they go back to the embassy. They tried to protest that as diplomats they had immunity and should be free to go. Someone fired a shot over their heads which got their attention, [so] back to the embassy they went. And before long they were bound and blindfolded with the other hostages, paraded before the cameras, and maltreated as many realized was the case.

It’s interesting how Mr. Ode records in his diary an explanation or a narration of what’s happening to him and his colleagues around him. He does so in a very professional and detached way, he’s not panicking. Now some of that might be because he was recording these events some time after they happened, some of it might be that as a career Foreign Service Officer he had been trained and professionalized to remain professional and rational and not emotional even in times of great duress. The man was a combat veteran of World War II, he had been involved in a couple of amphibious assaults on Pacific islands with enemy soldiers firing at him, so he’d been through difficult places before in life. He probably also anticipated that the trouble was not going to last for long—maybe a day or two, or a week at the most—and then the government at home, the U.S. government, would do something to liberate or rescue him; or the Iranian government would intervene and force the captors to relinquish their prey and so forth. So he probably figured it was a temporary inconvenience and that he would be going home right on schedule at the end of his 45 days.

No one knew at the time—in fact, from what we can tell even from Iranian records, not even the Iranians realized at this point in time that the Hostage Crisis was going to last so long. Those who took the Americans captive figured it would be a couple of days or a week at the longest, some of them thought that the Iranian government would intervene within hours to relinquish the captives. To their surprise Ayatollah Khomeini gave his blessing to the deed. That actually then created a political “perfect storm” in which the Hostage Crisis endured simply because of the political context in Tehran and no one forcing it to end and the U.S. government’s hands seemingly tied by the difficult circumstances against it.

So the bottom line is that Ode might not have realized at the time it was going to become a major sort of life-changing and very demoralizing ordeal, as it eventually became. Some of the other striking features of diary include the way that Ode interpreted events that we knew at that time and we certainly know in retrospect were happening on the international stage, but were unknown to him—at least unknown to him in great detail. Two examples. There was an attempt by the Carter administration to rescue the hostages by military means in late April 1980. It’s a famous and very tragic story in American history, in which the Defense Department sent a fleet of soldiers on helicopters into Iran with the mission of flying into Tehran under the cover of darkness, landing at the grounds where the hostages were being held captive, chasing away or killing the captors, liberating the hostages, loading them onto helicopters, and flying them to freedom.

Unfortunately the operation experienced technical difficulties at the outset, some of the helicopters were disabled by a sand storm; a decision was made early in the procedure to abort the operation. Then in the haste to abort, a couple of aircraft collided and there was an explosion and several U.S. GIs were killed. At that point in time the Iranians did not yet know there were American rescuers on their soil, en route to Tehran to liberate. They would only learn of the operation after it had failed and after the hasty departure of the American forces.

We can see the impact of that event in Ode’s diary, even though he is not cognizant of the details of the operation. He does not understand that there was a rescue operation; but if you cross check the dates you can discern the impact of the failed rescue mission on the status of the hostages, even though the hostages themselves had no idea what had happened. They wouldn’t learn for a couple of months that a rescue had been attempted.

The diary that reveals the impact of the failed rescue mission appears on page 23, and it’s the entry for April 25, 1980. Mr. Ode writes:

“Big demonstration outside the Embassy again today with much shouting of slogans, everything amplified to the highest degree as usual, also much horn tooting… About 4:45pm we were told to pack everything up as we were being moved to a ‘much, much better room’ and that we should be ready in 10 minutes. Bruce and I got our things together, which meant gathering up the accumulation of the past two months that I have been in this particular room and we then proceeded to wait.

“No one came for us in 10 minutes and after a couple of hours Hamid came in and told us to take only one blanket and just the essentials for the night—also to take just two books and that everything else would be brought to us within a day or two. This meant going through everything again as we had taken all the loose items such as toothbrush, razor, shaving cream, our letters, photographs, etc. as well as our clothing.

"Hamid told us to leave most of our clothing behind that it too would be brought to us later. However, since I don’t trust anything he told me I packed it anyway and also the electronic mosquito destroyer and other miscellaneous items as, of course, we were not give any idea where we were going except that it was to be a ‘much, much better room’ and from the activity going on in our building we felt that it would definitely be off the compound although at first we were under the impression we were just moving upstairs. Then our supper was brought in and we still weren’t being moved.

"Finally, seven hours later approximately 1:00am,”—this would be April 26—“I was told that I was to sleep in our room and that only Bruce was to be moved. I was so angry I told everyone off and was reminded that ‘I was not polite!’—also that ‘older men should be more polite!’ So it appears that I will again be punished for ‘being impolite!’"

This passage reveals a feeling of energy and a feeling of panic among the Iranian captors; it also shows the confusion that followed the discovery by the Iranians of the rescue mission. How in a sense of panic they wanted to move the hostages, obviously they realized that had the rescue mission reached Tehran, they could have been in a very difficult position because all the hostages were in the same place. In fact we now know in the aftermath of the [rescue mission], the Iranian captors scattered the hostages in among several different facilities with some distance between them precisely for the purpose of making any future rescue mission virtually impossible to pull off.

I think the sense of confusion among the captors was the reality. The captors tended to be young people—they were not officials of they Iranian government—they were students. They were militants. They had an edge: they had launched and they had pursued the operation against the U.S. Embassy because they wanted to embarrass Uncle Sam, they wanted to embarrass the U.S. government. They bore no particular ill will against the hostages themselves, but they thought that some kind of a political demonstration would help embarrass the United States and otherwise serve the political interests of the Iranian revolution. They were very much ad-libbing, they had no master plan of how to conduct a hostage operation; they simply took some hostages then went day-by-day. No doubt by this point in time they were beginning to feel a certain sense of fatigue and uncertainty and then when they realized the U.S. military had made a foray against them, that probably made them very nervous. They had to ad-lib some more and adjust their own plans accordingly.

There is a long history to the Iran Hostage Crisis that really begins in the middle part of the 20th century. Iran emerged from World War II under the control of a monarch, who was known as the shah—the shah means “king” in Persian. The king of Iran, or the shah of Iran, was a man named Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He emerged from World War II as the leader of Iran and in a position of partnership and friendliness towards the United States and other Western powers.

Now about five years after World War II, in 1950–51, the Iranian people rallied behind a nationalist politician named Mohammad Mosaddegh, who became Prime Minister of Iran in 1951, and who challenged the shah for power and control of the country. There was a brief period of political turmoil, which ended in 1953 when the U.S. government and the British government sent their intelligence agencies into Iran to overthrow Mohammad Mosaddegh and restore the shah to full power. That was seen at the time by the Eisenhower administration as a great foreign policy success because it restored Iran to a friendly power and stabilized Iran for the foreseeable future. And it did seem to stabilize Iran for the foreseeable future, for 26 years in fact the shah remained in power as a friend and partner and ally of the United States government. He provided certain goods to the U.S. such as access to affordable oil and a sense of military security in the vital region know as the Persian Gulf.

Now the action of 1953 also planted some deep seeds of resentment against the United States in the hearts and minds of the people of Iran. They lived for a generation under the military boot of the shah’s regime, if you will, they were repressed by the shah, kept out of political power. But gradually, especially as the 1970s passed, the Iranian people begin to rally behind revolutionary leaders like Ayatollah Khomeini. Ayatollah Khomeini was a religious figure, who did not live in Iran but actually lived in exile, first in Iraq and eventually in France. From exile he began to organize a revolutionary movement within the country through the network of religious leaders who resided throughout the state. Push came to shove and a revolution erupted in the late 1970s that led to the overthrow of the shah in early 1979 and the heroic return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran a couple of days later.

Ayatollah Khomeini then spent the remainder of 1979 building a religion-based theocratic state, a new government in Iran that would be based on the precepts of a certain brand of the Islamic religion, and one that would be completely purged of any influence of the old royalist government of the shah. That regime had an anti-American flavor to it. Because the Americans had been the “best friends” of the hated enemy the shah, naturally there was going to be tension between the new Iranian government and the U.S. government.

Now, for several months after the revolution—from January 1979 to November 1979—although tense, the relationship was stable. The Embassy in Tehran remained open, the U.S. diplomats continued to engage in day-to-day business with the Iranian government, and in Washington, DC, the Iranian Embassy continued likewise to engage in routine business with the U.S. government.

The militant students were essentially a group of young, nonofficial, everyday students—young people, young adults, workers—who had been so fired up by the Iranian revolution that they spontaneously took to the streets to demonstrate and protest and shout angry slogans against the U.S. government. It appears—and here we have to engage in some guesswork, because this is a mob activity, there’s not a real good document trail, we don’t know exactly what they were thinking—but it appears that they thought they could demonstrate against the embassy and maybe somehow embarrass the U.S. government by crashing through the walls of the U.S. Embassy and taking over the place—maybe riffling through the files, maybe trying to capture some secret documents, maybe embarrassing Uncle Sam. They would do that simply as a way of expressing their anger, venting their frustrations, of ‘bloodying the nose,’ if you will, of the U.S. government.

It does appear that they fully expected that the Khomeini government would honor the principle of diplomatic immunity, and would immediately use police and military forces to end any such demonstration. But what they found was Khomeini reacted to the events of November 4th by giving them his blessing. By saying he was glad that these proud sons of Iran had invaded the den of spies that was represented by the U.S. Embassy and had embarrassed the U.S. government. That surprised them—pleased them and surprised them—but then put them in a position where they felt they had some political power and some political influence and they certainly had the ability then to keep the hostages in captivity for a prolonged period of time.

In addition to the dramatic moments of the takeover of the American Embassy in November of 1979, the failed rescue mission of April 1980, the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran War of September 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan on November 4th, 1980—which was immediately revealed to the captives, to the hostages—and then of course the liberation in January 1981, another striking feature of the diary is how it records the audacity and the resistance that Mr. Ode and his American colleagues displayed. You can find elements of this on almost every page. On a thematic level, the document is heavy with their uncompromising refusal to recognize the validity of their captivity, their repeated demands that they be released or that their immunity be respected, their occasional rebellion against something that their captors were doing. Every once in a while, a captor would blindfold one of them and make them go outside or would insist on blindfolding them while they were walking to the shower facilities. And they would refuse, they would say I’m not going to do that and they would tear the blindfold off. So small inconsequential acts of resistance perhaps, but one can sense that they were no doubt important to the captives to be able to make a stand and to insist that their integrity and their rights be maintained.

The hostage takers had the goal of trying to embarrass the United States on the world stage, and most historians agree that they did achieve that objective. The Jimmy Carter administration had the responsibility of dealing with the hostage crisis. President Carter initially decided that he would use peaceful means to try to liberate the hostages. Again probably calculating that they wouldn’t be there very long. A few days, a few weeks at most, after a few weeks had passed, maybe a month—certainly they’d have to let them go by then. No one in the Carter administration anticipated it would last that long. When President Carter initially decided that he would use peaceful means he rather stubbornly insisted that he would continue to use peaceful means.

About five months after the Crisis began, he decided to shift gears and go to military means. But then we had the failed rescue mission of April 1980 that was deeply embarrassing to the U.S. government. It led to a feeling worldwide that “boy, the United States may be just an empty shell of what it used to be if it can’t even carry out a small-scale rescue operation against a third-world country without ending in disaster and profound embarrassment.” Then President Carter went back to the diplomatic mode, trying to work every angle he could to bring release to the hostages as quickly as possible. He probably calculated that if he could get the hostages released unharmed, that there would be massive celebrations at home and ticker tape parades, and somehow that ticker tape would fill the ballot boxes in the presidential election of 1980—meaning he would coast to an easy reelection against his Republican competitor, Ronald Regan.

What happened instead is that the captors held on to the hostages until after the election. Ronald Regan defeated Jimmy Carter. There were lots of reasons why the voters preferred Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in the presidential election of 1980. The economy, Carter’s sense of leadership, other issues certainly are worth mentioning, but the Iran Hostage Crisis was very near the top of the list—perhaps one of the most significant factors determining the outcome of that election. So the captors were very successful at reaching their goal of embarrassing the U.S. government. In fact, they probably directly caused the downfall of the Carter administration after a single term in office.

At home the Hostage Crisis, for odd political reasons, emerged as a celebrity event. That was in part because President Carter encouraged Americans to think about it every day. He encouraged Americans to light candles, to hang yellow ribbons, to pray for the hostages, to take acts of sacrifice on behalf of the hostages and so forth. Perhaps Carter did that because he was trying to build a certain political context so that when the hostages came home—before the election as he hoped—he would coast to reelection because of the euphoria that would follow. Ironically that backfired on him. Because of the attention being invested in the Hostage Crisis it became a subject of angst and frustration and embarrassment for many people, and that came back to haunt him in the election of 1980.

When I teach the Hostage Crisis to modern-day students—most of whom are too young to remember, or certainly were not born at the time—I have to first spend time emphasizing to them what a big event this was for the people who lived through it. Because when they look at the facts, they don’t understand why it emerged as such an amazing drama at the time that it unfolded. I mean, after all it was only 52 American officials taken hostage, they were maltreated of course, but none of them died, eventually they came home. That doesn’t really compare to something like the Vietnam War, the Korean War, World War II. So their first question is, what’s the big deal? Why are we even talking about this? We’ve had other episodes of hostage taking in Lebanon and other countries around the world and we don’t give them that kind of attention. It takes some background work in explaining the political context of the late 1970s, early 1980s, and the long legacy of the U.S.-Iran relationship, and the connection between the Hostage Crisis and the presidential election of 1980—which put Ronald Reagan in charge of the country. Only then do they begin to understand why it was such an important event and why it seemed to those who had experienced it in real time to have been such an important event.

These are political cartoons, which typically do appear on the editorial page and are a comment on the major political events of the day. The first cartoon from May of 1954 entitled "Now What," was drawn and published in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision.

Typically, the editorial cartoonists will reflect the editorial position of the newspaper. Certainly in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in the 1950s, the cartoonists would’ve more or less reflected the editorial position of the newspaper. By the time you get to the ’50s, you cannot avoid talking about massive resistance, you can’t avoid commenting on the Brown decision, you can’t avoid commenting on the imminent closing of the public schools. These are single images that convey a quite bit of information. Once you really begin to look deeply at this, you start to understand and to see where Virginia has gone in the four years from the Brown decision.

Virginius Dabney was the editor of the Times-Dispatch from the ’30s until late 1960s. And he recognized that massive resistance itself was not going to lead to anything productive, but the publisher of the paper, the Bryan family, were firm supporters of massive resistance, and so the bargain that essentially was worked out is that Dabney just didn’t say much about massive resistance. He certainly didn’t editorialize against it.

This is actually, I think, quite typical of the elites in Virginia, He was certainly amongst those, but Virginius Dabney once famously described massive resistance as an aberration from Virginia’s heritage of sound leadership and forward-looking thought. So, he was able to sort of dismiss this four- or five-year period as a blip on an otherwise excellent record when, in fact in many, many ways, massive resistance is the logical culmination of a particular type of race relations that people like Virginius Dabney did support.

Dabney is a complicated figure in this in that he was somebody who always editorialized for the better treatment of African Americans in Virginia. But within this paternalistic vein that had developed in Virginia; at one point in time he was seen as a liberal in the '30s because he was advocating better treatment of blacks and anti-lynching. By the '40s he’s more moderate, by the late '50s and '60s he’s actually seen as quite conservative.

Richmond had two papers. There was the Times-Dispatch which was the morning paper and then the News Leader which is the afternoon paper. The editor of the News Leader was James Kilpatrick who was one of the real leaders of massive resistance in many ways. In Norfolk, you have the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, the other major paper in the state and it was the only one of the white papers that opposed massive resistance. Not that they embraced and desired integration, but that they recognized that the Supreme Court was the law of the land, that the Justice[s] had spoken and it was a responsibility to adhere to those decisions.

The Norfolk Journal & Guide and the Richmond Afro-American were black papers of the time. They were weeklies, and they had a relatively small readership. I think that most African Americans felt they had the Supreme Court ruling on their side and that ultimately that would have to prevail, but getting there wasn’t easy. Richmond was the capital, the power center, and so the Richmond paper certainly was the most important in the state and then the Norfolk paper after that in terms of overall readership.

The 13th Amendment simply abolished slavery towards the end of the Civil War. The 14th Amendment said that no citizen of the United States can be denied the equal protection of the laws. What was so important about the 14th Amendment was that it basically said that any citizen of the United States is first and foremost a citizen of the United States and secondarily, a citizen of their individual state and therefore it meant that no state could deny any individual any of the guarantees that were made by the federal government.

The 15th Amendment said that no person could be denied the right to vote based on race or previous condition of servitude. It doesn’t say that you can’t be denied the right to vote for other reasons, so what you end up with is the implementation of Jim Crow. Because of the 15th Amendment, no state could pass a law which said blacks can’t vote, but what they did instead was come up with all sorts of other methods for achieving essentially the same purpose.

Understanding clauses were educational tests where it was up to individual registrars to decide who passed certain tests. One of the problems with the literacy tests and understanding clauses is that there were in fact many uneducated whites who might have failed those tests. This is where you get grandfather clauses in which states would pass a law which said that if your grandfather could vote, then you can vote. There was no black person whose grandfather could vote because you’re talking about the slave era.

It was under the guise of the 14th Amendment that in Brown, the Supreme Court basically says that the court in Plessy was wrong, that equal protection laws do not allow for segregation. The 14th and 15th Amendment are quite important in terms of understanding the whole edifice of white supremacy and of Jim Crow. It’s not until 1965 with the Voting Rights Act that the vestiges of the disfranchisement laws are finally put to rest.

In the late 19th century you have the implementation of series of state laws, many of them begin with railroad transportation and quickly spread to other aspects of public life. As public schools come into being, they are fully segregated. The segregation laws tend to have to do with public separation of the races in public places.

The whole notion of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 when the Supreme Court gives its permission for the South to maintain and build a segregated state. Homer Plessy, who was a man who was one-eighth black, wanted to test the law. The state of Louisiana had passed a law which said that the races could not sit together on railroad cars. He did so anyway. He was arrested, charged with a violation of the law.

The case went to the Supreme Court and by an eight-to-one decision, the Supreme Court said that laws that mandated segregation were okay as long as facilities for both blacks and whites were equal and so the phrase separate but equal comes out of this, talking about parks, playgrounds, schools, trolley cars, then later buses, railroad cars, any sort of place of where the public might mingle.

The standards definition of desegregation is the abolishment of racial segregation and integration, as the full equality of all races in the use of public facilities. A distinction I often find helpful especially in the context of understanding massive resistance, and even more so with what happens after massive resistance is that I think that in many respects desegregation means the end of state-sponsored segregation. Desegregation comes to mean the absolute minimum necessary to comply with the law. What really happens in the wake of massive resistance is that you end up with token integration, at least for another decade until another series of court decisions force more complete integration.

On a national level Brown v. Board of Education was the culmination of a nearly two-decade campaign led by the NAACP to attack segregated education at the professional and graduate school—the whole notion of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 when the Supreme Court gives its permission for the South to maintain and build a segregated state.

The NAACP began winning a series of precedents: in the Maryland courts, then Missouri, in Texas, Oklahoma. NAACP recognized that they could keep doing this forever and ever, they basically were arguing that there was nothing equal about segregation, that the states were failing to meet their constitutional mandate under Plessy. The hope was not that they’ll simply increase funding and we’ll have a separate but equal society, but that they would recognize that to do so would be so prohibitively expensive, that real meaningful change would have to take place.

The case of Brown v. Board of Education, which was five cases which all examined the question of segregation in the public schools at the pre-collegiate level—these cases worked their way through the different courts and then finally they were bundled together by the Supreme Court and we know them as Brown v. Board of Education.

In the early ’50s we know Virginia provided one of the cases that was bundled in Brown, the case out of Prince Edward County which started when a group of young students led by Barbara Johns, who was a junior at Moton High School—the facilities in Farmville are horrific and the students finally say enough. Many of their parents are scared because their parents’ jobs depend upon not causing trouble and so the students don’t tell their parents about this. One day they march down to the superintendent’s office and have a protest of their own.

It would be simply wrong to suggest that African Americans in Virginia weren’t demanding more change. Even though the Brown case comes out of Kansas, it’s every bit as much about life in Virginia. People often assume that the Brown decision dealt with segregation and all of its guises and aspects, but the Brown decision actually was limited to segregation in the schools.

Part of the problem with Brown and part of what why we end up with massive resistance is that the court they’re obviously worried about the reaction in the South. So they actually did not in 1954 issue an actual implementation ruling. They could have said all public schools in the South must be desegregated beginning in September, but they did not. They left it up to the district courts and they said they must move with quote unquote “all deliberate speed” and this provides the context for massive resistance.

The NAACP basically said look you’ve got to do this now, or else the white South is going to stall and certainly the NAACP proved to be quite right about this. So, the court decision comes down in May of 1954 and the initial response in Virginia is sort of like this cartoon suggests. The Virginia constitution guarantees every child the right to a public education. So, there were some who thought well maybe if we get rid of that guarantee then we don’t have to run public schools. There were others who thought you know that was going a bit too far. So you have this ferment in the summer or fall of 1954 who are trying to figure out what to do.

We have an ocean with no land in sight whatsoever, but a giant rock sticking up right in the middle. It says "Supreme Court Segregation Decision," in reference to the Brown decision which declared segregation of the schools unconstitutional. The ship itself is sitting on top of the rock. It’s on the point of the rock so you could imagine if the weight shifted too much one way or the other that it would fall into the ocean. The water itself is pretty still.

The ship is an old wooden vessel labeled The South. Inside the ship there is a schoolhouse. It says public schools. In the front, presumably the captain of the ship is a man that looks like a throwback from the Confederate era. He’s got the trademark long moustache and long, pointed beard. The big top hat, almost a 10-gallon hat except we’re not in Texas but otherwise similar to that. Almost the type of man that you would imagine as a model for Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame. This is an old Confederate general, the embodiment of the myth of the lost cause if you will, of the Southern confederacy, and yet here he is in 1954 at the helm of the ship The South standing at the front, but firmly inside the boat, gazing out to sea to look and see whether or not help might be coming.

The overall message is that the Supreme Court decision has put the South in a very difficult spot with regard to the public schools, but disaster is not necessarily imminent. There may yet be a way out of this. The ship is not breaking apart as far as we can see. It’s stuck but not coming apart. The title of the cartoon itself “Now What” suggests some ambivalence about where things are headed.

The Byrds would have to be considered the most prominent political family in Virginia in the 20th century. Harry Byrd, Sr., was the dominant political figure in Virginia from the early 1920s until his death in the mid 1960s. He was elected governor in 1925 as a very young man. Recognized as the head of what comes to be known as the Organization—a small tightly-knit group of important political figures that revolved around the county courthouse the county clerk and the county judge and the county sheriff. He was brilliant at maintaining contact with people, at knowing how to relate with people. People around the state loved Harry Byrd and he was as a governor in some respects progressive for the time, but certainly on issues of race and many others, quite, quite conservative. He went to the U.S. Senate, until 1965 when he became very ill and he actually resigned his seat so that the governor could appoint his son, Harry Byrd, Jr., and then Harry Byrd, Jr., occupied that Senate seat until he retired in 1982.

It’s interesting to note the ways in which the political dynamics of Virginia and the South shifted. Up until the 1960s, Virginia, like every other Southern state, was virtually all Democrats. The Democrats were the party of white supremacy, which makes sense if you think about the Republicans as the party of Lincoln and of Reconstruction. The Democrats regained control in the late 19th century, and it was very much a one-party state until the advent of the civil rights movement when the national Democratic party embraces civil rights beginning in 1948 and then accelerating in the 1960s, you begin to see many southern Democrats switching parties.

A lot of the South was watching to see what Virginia would do. In the fall, the governor appoints what’s known as the Gray Commission in November of 1955. The Gray Commission issues a report. The key provision, and the most controversial one, was a recommendation that the state begin to make available tuition grants so that any white family that objected to sending their child to a school which was integrated could get a tuition grant from the state to go to private school. In January of 1956 the state overwhelmingly voted to amend the Constitution to allow for tuition grants.

The Gray Commission would actually have allowed some integration in places. It was very clear that Arlington especially was ready to integrate its schools. Also, the mountainous parts of Virginia, there’re very few African Americans and they would’ve made financial sense to integrate the schools because running two separate school systems was costly. So the fear was that there were parts of the state that would in fact comply with the court decision and for a lot of people in the southern part of the state, that was untenable.

So, it’s in the spring/summer of 1956 that Harry Byrd and others began to try to formulate a plan and this leads to the real showdown in August and September of 1956 when the governor calls a Special Session of the legislature and what come to be known as the Massive Resistance Laws are passed. The most important components of Virginia’s Massive Resistance Laws were that the people placement was taken out of the hands of local officials and put in the hands of a state people placement board, so that meant that people in Arlington, for instance, could not automatically send to a formerly white school a handful of black students.

Secondly, the Massive Resistance Laws provided for tuition grants. Most importantly, though, what the Massive Resistance Laws did is that they empowered the governor to take control of and close down any schools which integrated as a result of court orders.

On the other side of the issue, there were various people who made very clear that they were more committed to public education than they were to segregation. I think if you had surveyed most white Virginians at the time of the Brown decision they would have preferred to maintain segregation, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily willing to defy the Supreme Court. If forced to choose between segregation and public education, they would prefer public education.

The portions of the state, which had the heaviest concentration of African Americans, most of whom were prevented from voting by a variety of reasons, were vastly overrepresented in the Virginia legislature. In the 1956 Special Session when the Massive Resistance Laws were implemented, the key vote in the state Senate was 21 to 17. The 17 who voted against massive resistance actually represented more Virginians than did the 21 who voted to implement the law.

The second cartoon is from late September 1958 and clearly things are quite different. The ship is still intact but somehow it has managed to get off the rock. We have huge waves. There’s massive lightning bolts which appear that they might be headed towards the ship even if they haven’t hit quite yet. The storm is clearly in full force and presumably the waves have risen high enough to pull the ship off of the rocks.

The title "Riding Out the Storm" suggests that there is a way out of this. The fact that the ship has not turned over. It’s still upright. We still have the Confederate-era gentlemen at the helm. He’s now identified specifically as Virginia as opposed to the South. He’s looking out to see what’s ahead, and the presumption is that there is a possibility of still riding out the storm, however severe it now seems to be.

This isn’t a cartoon that has an image of an integrated classroom that somehow leads to some catastrophe. But it certainly suggests that it’s important to maintain segregated schools. Integration is seen as a cause of a storm that’s going to somehow damage or change the way of life.

The character is the same person in both cartoons and yet in the first cartoon, it says "The South," certainly a sense that the South as a whole is sort of stuck looking for a way out, whereas in the second one, it doesn’t say "The South" anywhere. It does say "Virginia" and so in that case it’s more a sense of this is Virginia’s path because by 1958 much of the rest of the South is watching to see what Virginia will do. The message of the first cartoon is that the Supreme Court decision has caused some problems for the South. It’s not entirely clear what’s going to happen next, but what does that actually mean in practical terms.

By 1958, four years later, quite a lot has happened, both on the national level but especially in Virginia. Those who are most committed to keeping the schools segregated have now taken quite a different step. Instead of the ship saying "The South" on the side, it actually now says "public school closing." This is the point just a few weeks before schools actually are closed. There’s still a message here that Virginia can navigate its way through the waters. Despite the Supreme Court edicts, this is somehow a viable strategy to get through this crisis, although it’s become much more problematic.

This was a public relations disaster for the state. Histories of massive resistance are often quick to credit a group of businessmen and bankers in Richmond who quietly said you’ve got to do something to stop this, this is hurting the state’s reputation, it’s hurting business.
I think we should be very careful because these individuals said nothing for four years, so to give them credit for stepping in when they should’ve done so much earlier I think is problematic. By the end of 1958, early 1959, the NAACP and others were challenging the constitutionality of the Massive Resistance Laws in both federal and state courts. In January of 1959, both state and federal courts ruled the Virginia Massive Resistance Laws unconstitutional.

So in the spring of 1959, you have a final showdown between those who want to return to the local option, but with tuition grants, always giving white students the option of getting out of integrated schools at state expense and then those who continued to resist despite all the court decisions. What you really end up with is very token integration. The percentage of black students attending white schools is quite small until the late 1960s. In 1968, the Supreme Court finally said enough of 'all deliberate speed.' It’s been 15 years since the Brown decision.

Start with what appears to be the obvious and then draw out from that what the different components represent. What does this ship represent? What does the person at the helm represent? What is it that’s going on in the sea here? What might the cartoonist not be telling us or not sharing with us? Asking them to explain what do they see here, what do they think is likely to happen?

I think it's important to pay attention to all of the details, to really look at each particular component both on its own and also collectively. See how these pieces fit together. You could look at the cartoons without the caption at the top and it would be interesting to see whether the caption is one that you would necessarily come up with yourself based on the image. In reading any cartoon or any image it's important also to ask what’s not in the picture. And one way you might answer that question is think about how would other newspapers have portrayed the series of events. And in Virginia certainly if you looked at either of the African American newspapers you would have gotten a very different perspective.

The northern Virginian Pilot is the only major white newspaper in the state that opposed massive resistance. And certainly if you were to compare this to cartoons that they had at the time you would see a very different image. They would’ve suggested what they argued editorially, which is that it was doomed to fail. That it could not possibly pass constitutional muster. That by prolonging the inevitable, you’re simply heightening tensions.

It would be very interesting to compare the cartoons with the actual written editorials of those papers. It would be interesting to think about the different ways in which public opinion is reflected. Newspapers aren’t necessarily always accurate. Public documents, to compare what a newspaper is reporting with what the actual public statements are, whether it’s a press release of the governor or looking at the actual laws, looking at election returns. One of the things that’s quite fascinating is to look at private letters, what people are saying behind the scenes. What is the cartoon telling us about the event versus what does it tell us about the person who’s actually created the image. The more sources you can find the better because you’re going to often get conflicting points of view and then it’s important to try to understand those sources in a way that makes those seeming disparities make sense.