The idea has a remarkably broad array of supporters, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Stanley McChrystal.
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 appealing to segregationists estranged from the Democratic Party. Holton was never elected to office again; he spent the rest of his career as a lawyer and as an appointee to various government posts. He died on October 28th of this year, at the age of ninety-eight, at home in Kilmarnock, Virginia. In an interview with the Washington Post before his death, he called his work on integration the “greatest source of satisfaction and pride for me.”
What inspires a person to transcend our tribal boundaries? What does it take to nudge members of separate racial and income groups to begin to appreciate one another’s perspectives and experiences? There is rarely a neat, single point of origin—a real-life Rosebud—in anyone’s story, but Holton’s offers clues about the source of his motivation: the suffering, for instance, that he witnessed, as a child, in the lives of Black mentors and caregivers. In a memoir, “Opportunity Time,” he wrote of a man he admired named John Cloud, a servant in a neighbor’s house, who was bullied by one of Holton’s white friends. Cloud, despondent, referred to himself with a racial slur. “I hardly heard what he said next,” Holton recalled. “It didn’t make any difference—the beginning of that sentence gave me pain that I still carry.” Holton’s daughter Anne identified another crucible. “He served in World War Two with folks of different races, and then came home to a segregated Virginia,” she told me, in a 2016 interview.
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