Massive resistance was a strategy declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia and his son Harry, Jr.'s brother-in-law, James M. Thomson, who represented Alexandria in the Virginia General Assembly, to get the state's white politicians to pass laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation, particularly after Brown v. Board of Education. Many schools, and even an entire school system, were shut down in 1958 and 1959 in attempts to block integration, before both the Virginia Supreme Court and a special three-judge panel of Federal District judges from the Eastern District of Virginia, sitting at Norfolk, declared those policies unconstitutional. Although most of the laws created to implement massive resistance were overturned by state and federal courts within a year, some aspects of the campaign against integrated public schools continued in Virginia for many more years. Byrd Organization and opposition to racial integration After Reconstruction ended in 1877 and the local Readjuster Party fell in the 1880s, Virginia's conservative Democrats actively worked to maintain legal and cultural racial segregation in Virginia through the Jim Crow laws. To complete white supremacy, after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Virginia adopted a new constitution in 1902 effectively disenfranchising African Americans through restrictions on voter registration and also requiring racially segregated schools, among other features. In the early 20th century, Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966), a Democrat, former Governor of Virginia, and the state's senior U.S. Senator after World War II, led what became known as the Byrd Organization. Continuing a legacy of segregationist Democrats, from the mid-1920s until the late 1960s the Byrd Organization was a political machine that effectively controlled Virginia politics through a network of courthouse cliques of local constitutional officers in most of the state's counties. The Byrd Organization's greatest strength was in the rural areas of the state. It never gained a significant foothold in the independent cities, nor with the emerging suburban middle-class of Virginians after World War II. One of the Byrd Organization's most vocal, though moderate, long-term opponents proved to be Benjamin Muse, who served as a Democratic state senator from Petersburg, Virginia, then unsuccessfully ran for Governor as a Republican in 1941, and became a publisher and Washington Post columnist. Using legal challenges, by the 1940s, black attorneys who included Thurgood Marshall, Oliver W. Hill, William H. Hastie, Spottswood W. Robinson III and Leon A. Ransom were gradually