• In Davis, a black passenger boarded a bus and saw that the only empty seat was between two whites.  The bus driver told her to sit at the back even though there were no open seats there.  She objected and was arrested for violating a 1930 bus segregation law.  A divided Virginia supreme court overturned her conviction, but only because the driver had made no effort to get a white passenger to move to the front.   But soon after, in New, the court upheld the conviction of another black passenger who refused to take an empty seat at the back of the bus.

“[The defendant] placed her own construction upon such provisions, disregarded the instructions of the person in authority and declared her intention to remain where she was regardless of all consequences … [The majority says that] those in charge of such transportation must require a white passenger to move his seat before a Negro passenger is approached or asked to move to some other space in the coach or bus.  This is not ‘substantial equality of treatment.” – Justice Henry Holt (dissenting), in Davis

“The settled public policy of the State [is] to separate white and colored passengers, in promotion of the comfort of the traveling public, and in the ‘preservation of the public peace and good order.’” – Justice Claude Spratley, in Atlantic Greyhound

Virginia Digs In:   Miscegenation

• Encouraged by Perez v. Sharp (1948), in which the California supreme court invalidated  its state’s miscegenation law (§ __), civil rights activists challenged Virginia’s law.  They failed in Naim, but a decade later they scored a victory of national importance in Loving. 

• In Naim, decided a year after Brown, Virginia’s supreme court attempted to limit Brown’s stricture against segregation to schools.  The court reasoned, somewhat wishfully, that the Supreme Court ruled as it did only because education was “the very foundation of good citizenship” and that Brown’s reasoning did not apply to marriage.  The Naim court attacked interracial marriage in unusually harsh terms, thus showing that segregation ran deep and would not easily be overcome even in the Old South.  The Supreme Court instructed Virginia’s court to investigate and further consider whether there was truly a distinction between segregation in marriage and segregation in schools, but Virginia’s justices responded by saying, in effect, that there was nothing to reconsider. 

• Ten years later, in Loving, the Virginia court again upheld its state’s miscegenation law but did so in considerably more restrained terms than it had in Naim.  The court simply noted that while the Supreme Court might extend Brown to interracial marriage it had not yet done so, and that it was not prepared to make that change on its own.  In 1967, the Supreme Court responded by invalidating Virginia’s and all other states’ miscegenation laws.