Linwood Holton, Jr., was not an obvious candidate to advance the cause of national reconciliation. He was a white son of the Old South, and grew up during the Great Depression, in Big Stone Gap, in the rural southwest corner of Virginia. His mother worked at home and his father ran a railroad that pulled coal out of the mountains.
During the Second World War, Holton served in the Navy in the Pacific, and, after he attended law school, he entered politics in Roanoke, where he gained a reputation for discomfort with racial segregation. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Virginia embarked on an ignominious campaign of “massive resistance,” in which it closed public schools rather than integrate them. Holton opposed the practice, and lost three campaigns for office between 1955 and 1965. But, in 1969, after assembling a diverse coalition, he became the first Republican to be elected governor of Virginia since 1874. In his inaugural address, he quoted Abraham Lincoln in calling for a society that operates “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Months later, a court ordered the city of Richmond to achieve meaningful integration of its public schools. Many wealthy white students moved to private education, but Holton and his wife, who had four school-age children, enrolled them in majority-Black public schools.
By the end of his term, in 1974, Holton was out of step with Republicans, who had embarked on Nixon’s Southern Strategy of...
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