Do Not Go Gentle
J. Sargeant Reynolds Against the Dying of the Light
Last week, my friend and frequent coauthor, Darcy Nikol Bryan (MD) mentioned J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, a two-year institution in Richmond, Virginia. I told her that I had known Sarge Reynolds personally and that, sadly, hardly anyone under age 60, even in Richmond, has any idea who he was. That’s a shame, as his was a story of triumph, tragedy, courage, and loss. As the photo shows, his story and my story intersected just a little bit.
The Virginia of my youth was a place of beauty, gentility, and culture—but also of hatred, incivility, and despotism. Last week, I had occasion to recall a young Virginian, J. Sargeant Reynolds, whose limitless promise was toppled by premature death. As a 34-year-old lieutenant governor dying of brain cancer, his swan song seized the advice of Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night. … Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” In 1971, Reynolds was the keynote speaker at the Shad Planking—an event that was in mid-century the annual bacchanal of the segregationist cult that ruled Virginia. To political leaders trying desperately to shore up the crumbling foundations of state-mandated racism, Reynolds offered a simple message: “Enough.”
Reynolds was an heir to the Reynolds Aluminum fortune, on a glide path to the governorship, and already the subject of presidential speculation. Shortly after taking office in 1970, however, he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. In his final year, he managed to preside over the State Senate’s 1971 session, deliver his powerful Shad Planking speech, and then disappear from sight until his death on June 13. By chance, a mere two-and-a-half weeks after Reynolds’s death, a new state constitution, in the works since 1968, replaced the segregationist document that had defined state law since 1902.
Virginia Wasn’t Mississippi
To understand the environment of Reynolds’s speech, it is important to understand the history and context of Virginia’s state-sponsored racism. The state’s patrician ruling class thought of the Klansmen, lynch mobs, and demagogues farther south as contemptible white trash. In Virginia, state-sponsored hatred was pervasive and relentless, but also businesslike, bureaucratic, and oh-so-polite.
In 2015, Rod Dreher, a conservative writer from Louisiana, wrote a chilling piece titled, “When ISIS Ran the American South: When the barbarians who burned people alive and celebrated it publicly were us.” In it, he described the reign of terror then underway in the Middle East by ISIS—mass beheadings, burning prisoners to death, wholesale cultural destruction—all carried out in celebratory public events. But, as Dreher noted,
ISIS is doing nothing that wasn’t widely done in the United States to black people until well within living memory.
Dreher goes on to describe the carnival-like atmosphere that surrounded lynchings in the Deep South—townspeople gathered in joyous rapture, cheers at the sight of slow torture, picnic tables and revelry, photo postcards commemorating the events.
Such barbarity was not the Virginia Way. In its 1902 Constitution, built upon the U.S. Supreme Court’s “separate-but-equal” rulings like Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Virginia leaders sought to craft a racist legal system that was, in their minds, progressive and virtuous.
[Progressive] reformers sought efficiency in government by emphasizing the roles of experts and specialists over elected officials and common citizens. In Virginia, progressives attempted to make experts, or “virtuous” voters, out of the entire electorate by educating citizens on their civic responsibilities and then excluding whole classes of voters deemed unfit. African Americans were among those most often excluded.
Virginia’s segregation was top-down and orderly. Virginia Governor Harry Flood Byrd, Sr., signed The Virginia Anti-Lynching Law of 1928, which the Encyclopedia Virginia calls “the first measure in the nation that defined lynching specifically as a state crime,” though, the article continues, “most whites who ultimately supported an antilynching statute emphasized a need for law and order, not a respect for the rights of African Americans.” Byrd was later a U.S. senator and for decades, unchallenged boss of the state’s all-powerful political machine.
Racial classification was largely the job of one fanatical state official, Walter Ashby Plecker, MD, who spearheaded the adoption of the one-drop rule for African Americans and legally eradicated the state's Native American tribes by declaring their members to be African American. The latter action, premised on the fact that there had been some intermarriage between the two groups, obliterated the tribes' constitutional recognition and rights (restored by Congress and the president only in 2018). Ironically, the two actions threatened to create problems for Virginia's white upper-crust, many of whom claimed descent from the marriage of John Rolfe to Pocahantas. Thus, the 1924 Racial Integrity Act carved out an exception. Those whose ancestry was 1/16 or less Native-American (classified by the Act as African-American) could be considered white.
Born 10 days before the attack on Fort Sumter, Plecker boasted in 1943 of his racial database on Virginians: "Hitler's genealogical study of the Jews is [probably] not more complete." In private, Plecker disliked the 1/16 exception and ignored it when he wished. In this same period, the state dived headlong into eugenics. The U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous Buck v. Bell ruling (1927) okayed Virginia’s program of eugenic sterilization, largely aimed at “improving” the white race. That ruling led to the forced sterilization of over 70,000 Americans—many of them children and most of them on spurious grounds.
As the Civil Rights movement gathered steam through the middle third of the century, the Byrd Machine threw the full might of the state at preserving segregated schools. Part of Plecker’s project as director of the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics was conducting genealogical studies on individual Virginians. As in the case of one Pal Beverly, he claimed to have found a black ancestor and, on the basis of that discovery, ejected Beverley’s children from white schools and threatened him with penitentiary time if he claimed to be white. (See the state racial identification card above.)
The Supreme Court’s Brown v Board of Education ruling (1954) struck at the Byrd Machine’s central premise—complete racial separation within schools. According to the Virginia Museum of History and Culture:
Senator Byrd promoted the "Southern Manifesto" opposing integrated schools, which was signed in 1956 by more than one hundred southern congressmen. On February 25, 1956, he called for what became known as Massive Resistance. This was a group of laws, passed in 1956, intended to prevent integration of the schools. A Pupil Placement Board was created with the power to assign specific students to particular schools. Tuition grants were to be provided to students who opposed integrated schools. The linchpin of Massive Resistance was a law that cut off state funds and closed any public school that attempted to integrate.
In Prince Edward County, an hour or so west of my birthplace of Petersburg, Virginia, the county government closed the county’s schools for five years in defiance of court rulings. White students were shunted to private schools via public funds, while black students were left to fend for themselves. In 1958, Governor J. Lindsay Almond acknowledged that Massive Resistance was a failure and that integration would come, but the wheels of government continued to stall and minimize any progress in this direction. In 1967, another sacrosanct element of Virginia law fell to a Supreme Court ruling; Loving v. Virginia voided the state’s legal prohibition against interracial marriage. In 1971, the Court issued its ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, okaying the use of school busing in service of integration.
Reynolds’s Ascent
It was in this tumultuous environment that Reynolds entered the breach. At 29, he was elected to a single term in the state’s House of Delegates. At 31, he moved to the State Senate and launched his campaign for lieutenant governor a year later. Some thought him pretentious for running while so young, and he was liberal on racial issues.
1969 proved to be the Byrd Organization’s Waterloo, as the machine’s candidates lost the Democratic primary races for all three state offices—governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. For the first time since Reconstruction, a Republican, A. Linwood Holton, Jr., was elected governor and in one of his most memorable acts, opted to send his own children to majority-black public schools. (Holton, who died in 2021 at age 98, was later father-in-law of Virginia’s Democratic senator and 2016 vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine.) Sargeant Reynolds won the lieutenant governorship in a near-landslide, along with another racial liberal, Andrew P. Miller, who was elected attorney general (and whose father had challenged the machine 20 years earlier).
Reynolds became the odds-on favorite for the governorship four years hence. (Virginia governors are barred from seeking consecutive terms, so Holton could not run in 1973.) Reynolds had a self-deprecating charm that had Virginians talking about him as a Senate candidate and a presidential candidate later in the 1970s. He was handsome in a Kennedyesque way, albeit quite diminutive. (I am 5’8” today and was quite a bit less than that at age 15. Judging from the photo above, I would guess that Reynolds was 5’4” or 5’5”.) Shortness of stature can be detrimental to political success, but Reynolds joked about his own height and the audience laughed along.
His Republican opponent, Buzz Dawbarn, was a decent fellow but deadly dull. At some point, Dawbarn railed that Reynolds wasn’t really interested in being lieutenant governor—that he just wanted to be governor and then president. Reynolds responded with (I paraphrase), “Well, I’ve heard that said. And I’ve also heard that if the Republicans keep nominating Buzz Dawbarn to run against me, I might just make it.” Thus ended that line of attack from Dawbarn.
Some accused him of trying to buy the office with his family’s money. Reynolds just shrugged and said (again, paraphrasing), that, “I would never try to buy an office. I’m just planning to rent it for a few years.” This impish charm made it impossible to challenge him.
The Best-Laid Plans
Governor, senator, and president were not in the stars for Reynolds. He had barely unpacked his new office when something seemed terribly amiss, healthwise. Doctors initially said it wasn’t a tumor, but he suspected otherwise. His suspicions proved terribly accurate.
I’ll briefly interject myself into his story. Growing up in the Virginia I have described, my central passion was seeing the state discard its racial morass. Reynolds’s enlightened message on race appealed to me, so one morning, I walked into the State Senate chamber, shook his hand, and volunteered to work for his campaign. For a year or so, I saw him with some frequency, and he always offered a big hello. Though I was a 15-year-old nobody, he repeatedly told audiences that I was the first person in my Congressional district to offer him support, and his words did wonders for an awkward teenager’s ego.
After his cancer diagnosis, I only saw him one time. He was presiding over the Senate, and I walked up to shake his hand. He was polite, but I wasn’t sure he recognized me. I wondered whether there were cognitive or perceptual problems. Or perhaps his mind was simply focused on the inevitable.
In what would be his final major speech (I believe), he agreed to address the Shad Planking—a decision which was initially controversial and then, after the event, controversial for altogether different reasons. From the Encyclopedia Virginia:
Reynolds’s decision to attend upset some African American leaders, but his purpose for doing so became clear during his speech. Before an audience that included staunch segregationists, Reynolds denounced Massive Resistance, the policy Virginia had adopted in 1956 against the desegregation of public schools. He declared that the state must guarantee each child, regardless of the circumstances of his or her birth, the education that would be most beneficial to him or her. Referencing the previous day’s United States Supreme Court ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, which upheld the busing of schoolchildren for the purpose of desegregation, Reynolds declared, “It doesn’t matter whether we agree or disagree with that ruling. The point is that under our American system of government it stands until the Constitution is changed or the court reverses itself.” He pledged, “Virginia will not be propelled into massive resistance again.”
After that, Reynolds’s voice was heard no more. It was a hell of a way to go out. And I suspect he knew that speech would define his legacy.
Afterthoughts
I admit to a lifelong fascination with would-be immortals whose fame and promise were stolen by premature death. I don’t mean Mozart, Gershwin, Shelley, Otis Redding, James Dean, or Martin Luther King, Jr. They all departed the scene too early, but their names were already seared into memory. My fascination is more with the forgotten might-have-beens. With those destined for greatness, but whose names were not yet set in concrete. William Kapell, Olive Thomas, Judy Tyler, and Ginette Neveu were all likely destined for greatness, but thanks to plane crashes, a car wreck, and an accidental poisoning, you probably have to Google their names to know who they were.
Virginia had two such figures in the 1970s. Sarge Reynolds died at 34. Seven years later, Richard Obenshain, architect of the modern Republican Party in Virginia died, age 42, in a plane crash while running for the U.S. Senate. There is an unspeakable tragedy to such thefts.
On a more upbeat note, six years after Reynolds delivered his address at the Shad Planking, I played a small role in breaking down barriers at that event. In 1977, State Senator L. Douglas Wilder very likely became the first African American to attend the Shad Planking. (He was later elected lieutenant governor and governor.) I had known Wilder since 1969, but I had nothing to do with his attending the event. However, that same year, I was working professionally for a legislator, Jack Melnick, who was running for state attorney general. On one particular day, we had arranged for a prominent newspaper reporter to accompany the candidate and me for the whole day. We realized that morning that Jack had agreed to visit the Shad Planking that day. But women had always been expressly prohibited from attending the event. What to do?
The three of us talked it over and decided, “Let’s take her.” We did so and saw glares of disapproval. On the food line, the reporter asked for some baked beans and one of the event’s volunteers, probably inebriated, said, “Sure,” and hurled a ladle full of beans all over her. His mortified co-volunteers quickly whisked him away and apologized profusely. But, so far as I know, her attendance ended the ban on women forevermore. Today, the event continues each year, but without the stain it carried in Byrd days.
[ADDENDUM, 1/18/23] One morning, in the Fall of 1969, I stepped out of the front door of Sarge Reynold’s campaign headquarters into the sunlight. A young African American man, seeing me carrying campaign paraphernalia, stopped, stuck his hand out, and introduced himself. Assuming that Sarge Reynolds won the November election, he told me, he was planning to run for Reynolds’s vacated seat in the State Senate. I listened intently, all the while thinking, “This fellow seems really bright and interesting, but there’s no way on earth an African American can be elected to the Virginia Senate in 1969.” I wished him luck as we went our separate ways. This was the aforementioned L. Douglas Wilder, who proved my silent thoughts wrong by winning Reynolds’s Senate seat and, in 1989, becoming the first African American in U.S. history to be elected to the governorship of any state. How things had changed in the 18 years following Reynolds’s parting words.
Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.
I’ve been a resident of Albemarle County for more than 25 years and have occasionally been able to piece together little bits of Virginia’s history. It was maybe 10-15 years ago I learned of public school closings in the era of many of the landmark court cases you note here. I read of the Bell case in Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” and sought out the marker along Preston Ave commemorating that injustice. Having grown up in the 60s in Illinois, I was unaware of most of this carry in until the busing riots in Boston in the early 70s became national news. Our boys are native Virginians, born and bred in the Old Dominion and now at university in states further west. I would would bet they were never told anything of this history. It is a story that needs to be told, and if you’ve been telling it all along, I apologize for having not noticed before. But thank you for helping me understand the history in our adopted state, er I mean commonwealth.
Thanks for your response. I’d never heard the cat in the oven story, but I do have the same sense of being an outsider here. But as an Illinoisan, I’m a natural adversary, at least to older generations. Over the years I got used to regularly hearing that I was a Yankee, starting after moving to Texas in the late 70s. I gave in to the moniker and now when asked said that I reply that I came from the side that won. I think it’s funny, but I’ve discovered it isn’t a universal view. That said, I live in the south by choice. Thanks again.