September Showdown Introduction
(WDBJ Television, Roanoke, VA)

WDBJ reporter Forest Landon introduced the WDBJ news special "September Showdown" on the school closings crisis in September 1958 in Virginia schools. The showdown referred to the looming possibility of school closings under the massive resistance laws. Federal courts had issued orders to desegregate schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren County for the fall of 1958. In the summer of 1958 school administrators, county officials, parents, and state officials were trying to sort through a range of responses to the court orders. Some in the localities expected the schools to comply with the federal court orders, and some thought that the locality should resist the state's threatened school shutdown. Others thought the state a viable and necessary agent to step in and prevent the federal court orders from being carried out. At the local level there were almost no easy solutions in the summer of 1958, and WDBJ's special attempted to put forward the major issues.