Earl A. Fitzpatrick

As part of Massive Resistance, the Virginia General Assembly passed the Stanley Plan in September 1956, which included provisions for pupil placement boards, as well as to close any school that integrated, even pursuant to a court order. Dalton became a leading opponent of school closures, while Fitzpatrick followed the Byrd/Stanley strategy.

Roanoke had always considered itself more progressive than, for example, Prince Edward County, whose schools were a companion case to Brown. Roanoke's school board already had an African American member, Dr. Lylburn Downing, and it had recently built Lucy Addison High School and several elementary schools for its African-American community. However, the quality of those facilities was worse than those for white children, with some schools overcrowded, some heated only by wood stoves and/or lacking indoor plumbing as well as cafeterias and auditoriums. In January 1956 over NAACP opposition, Virginia's voters approved an amendment to the state constitution which allowed tuition grants to private schools (which became known as segregation academies). In early 1956, the Roanoke NAACP local's new president, attorney Reuben Lawsen, sent the Roanoke School Board a letter demanding desegregation. The school board delayed, then in 1958 proposed to issue bonds to construct new schools and improve facilities, which required voter approval. The school bond market by then was terrible because the Stanley Plan implemented in the fall of 1956 included not only provisions closing any school that integrated, it also established an expensive system of vouchers supporting segregation academies for parents who did not wish their children to attend integrated schools.[6]

On February 18, 1958, the General Assembly passed (and Governor Almond signed) additional legislation protecting segregation, what the Byrd Organization called the "Little Rock Bill" (responding to President Eisenhower's use of federal powers to assist the court-ordered desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, allowing the governor to permanently shut down schools policed by federal authority or near such a school). As the legislation's sponsor, Fitzpatrick watched as Governor Almond signed it into law.[7]

In addition to the pupil placement, school closure and school voucher laws overtly supporting segregation, the Stanley Plan included seven laws expanding the common law legal offenses of champerty, maintenance, barratry, running and capping, as well as the statutory violation of unauthorized practice of law. In early 1957, Virginia's legislative leaders appointed two committees to carry out those new laws and investigate the NAACP, which was pursuing the legal cases to desegregate Virginia schools. The President of the Virginia Senate appointed Fitzpatrick (who became Vice-Chairman of the new Committee on Offenses against the Administration of Justice) and E. Almer Ames Jr. of Onancock; the Speaker of the House of Delegates appointed John B. Boatwright to chair the committee, with William F. Stone and J. J. Williams Jr. as members. Shortly after the session began in January 1957, the Boatwright committee issued letters requesting information from the NAACP, as well as the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties and other segregationist organizations, and the next month began subpoenaing NAACP membership lists. These activities prompted litigation (NAACP motions to quash the subpoenas) in Richmond and several Virginia counties. In March 1957, the Boatwright Committee opined that various segregationist organizations did not commit the newly expanded legal offenses of champerty, maintenance, barratry, running and capping, nor the unauthorized practice of law.

The commission's first report, issued November 13, 1957, recommended enforcement of those new laws against specific NAACP lawyers, whom it named.[8] The subpoenas and other activities soon reduced NAACP membership in Virginia by half. Two years later (after Fitzpatrick's defeat in the Democratic primary and with Stone remaining on the committee after his elevation to the Senate) the commission issued another report, that complained that the Virginia State Bar was not punishing those lawyers but instead spending $5000 on a Jamestown commemoration and $6350 on a new continuing legal education program.[9][10][11][12]

Meanwhile, on January 19, 1959, both a three-judge federal panel and the Virginia Supreme Court declared the Stanley Plan unconstitutional. The NAACP's actions contesting the Boatwright Committee's investigation of its attorneys, as well as similar cases concerning the Thomson Committee (also established in the Stanley Plan and merged into the Boatwright Committee in 1959), also wound their way through the courts. In May 1959, the U.S. Supreme Court in Scull v. Virginia ex rel. Committee on Law Reform & Racial Activities unanimously overturned the contempt conviction of a Quaker printer hauled before the Thomsen Committee. The following month, the U.S. Supreme Court issued Harrison v. NAACP, sending back the first of the NAACP cases, so that the Virginia Supreme Court could first interpret the new laws.

In the July 14, 1959 Democratic primary, Roanoke City Democratic Committee Chairman, fellow lawyer and former Marine William B. Hopkins, defeated Fitzpatrick. By August, Roanoke's school board announced its withdrawal from the segregationist Virginia Education Association, and three African American students were assigned to white schools, although the pupil assignment board refused to assign several other African American children whose parents requested transfer to white schools. When Hopkins assumed the Senate seat in January 1960, he began fighting to repeal the poll tax. Hopkins won re-election numerous times, and later led a commission to reorganize and modernize Virginia's state government.

In 1960, as Fitzpatrick returned to private practice, the NAACP filed Cynthia Greene v. School Board of Roanoke City, and soon Marsh v. County School Board of Roanoke County[13] and another case involving Pulaski County schools, all of which wound their way through the federal courts as Roanoke's and the other school boards continued passive resistance strategies. Several Roanoke schools integrated peacefully in September 1960, although others did not. Judge Simon Sobeloff of the Fourth Circuit ordered Roanoke's schools to integrate.[14]

Meanwhile, because the Virginia Supreme Court only struck down one of the six new ethics laws, the NAACP case went back to the U.S. Supreme Court, and was argued twice. In the interim, the Virginia Bar attempted to prosecute NAACP attorney Samuel W. Tucker, but a circuit judge in Emporia, Virginia (in southeast Virginia) threw out that case in 1962. In January 1963, the U. S. Supreme Court in NAACP v. Button (1963), by a 6 to 3 majority struck down the remainder of the Stanley Plan's revised legal ethics laws. Roanoke's schools finally integrated in 1964.

From 1965 until 1973, as the Byrd Organization disintegrated, Fitzpatrick represented the Salem District on the Virginia Highway Department Board, replacing S. Sutton Flythe of Martinsville.[15]