Secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The convention was necessary to amend the state Constitution to allow tuition grants to private schools, called segregation academies because they primarily served white parents who wanted their children educated in an environment isolated from non-white students, including African Americans. On July 23, 1956, Gravatt gave a speech advocating continued segregation before the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, with which he was heavily involved. Gravatt assisted David J. Mays in the litigation which gave rise to the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Harrison v. NAACP (1959) and NAACP v. Button (1963). He was also a member of the Commission for Constitutional Government, which Mays and James J. Kilpatrick led, and which couched segregation policies in constitutional terms to appeal to Northerners. From at least early 1955, Gravatt represented the Prince Edward County Commonwealth's Attorney or Board of Supervisors in several cases. He was among those advising the county board that it could choose not to appropriate any funds for public education, and thereby close its schools to avoid desegregation. Prince Edward County thus closed its schools in 1959 to avoid mandated racial integration. In March 1964, after nearly five years of the school closure, and after fellow lawyer Collins Denny, Jr., head of the Defenders of State Sovereignty had died, Gravatt argued Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County before the United States Supreme Court. When he attempted to highlight the new integrated county school built using federal grants (after severe disturbances in August 1963), as well as argue that schools were solely a matter of state jurisdiction, Justice Hugo Black chided Gravatt for evasiveness and Chief Justice Earl Warren tartly questioned him as to whether that meant black children had a "freedom to go through life without an education." Justice Black wrote the Court's decision, which was issued on May 25, questioning the county's long deliberation and lack of speed in implementing Brown, as well as denouncing the closure policy for subverting the court's decision for the unconstitutional reasons of race and opposition to desegregation. Gravatt also assisted on the briefs in Board of Supervisors of Prince Edward County cert. denied 385 U.S. 960 (1966) and School Board of City of Richmond, Virginia v State Board of Education of Virginia, which was affirmed by an equally divided Supreme Court on May 21, 1973 Death and legacy Gravatt died