program is still in effect and remains a primary financing source for wildlife areas. Robertson was a typical member of the Byrd Organization, though differed at times and eventually became independent from the machine. He was chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs from 1959 to 1966. In 1956, Robertson was one of the 19 senators who signed the Southern Manifesto against the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), which mandated schools' desegregation. When President Lyndon B. Johnson sent his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, on a train trip through the South to encourage support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Robertson was one of four Southern Senators who refused to meet with her on the whistle-stop trip. In retaliation, President Johnson personally recruited Virginia State Senator William B. Spong Jr., a considerably more liberal Democrat, to run against Robertson in the 1966 Democratic primary. Even some Byrd Democrats had moved away from resistance to integration as espoused by Robertson and the Organization's patriarch, Harry F. Byrd. Meanwhile, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had added black and lower-income voters. Spong defeated Robertson in the primary in one of the biggest upsets in Virginia political history. The Byrd Organization's long dominance of Virginia state politics had begun to end. Opposition to civil rights March 10, 1956, Christian Science Monitor Asked to comment "on his region's state of mind and any specific American attitudes he feels are necessary to avoid violence and bring healing in a deteriorating situation following the Supreme Court school desegregation order," Robertson stated: Virginia recognizes the correctness of the 1850 decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and in the 155 subsequent decisions of State and Federal courts holding that the equal rights provision of a constitution could be properly satisfied by public schools for the white and colored races which are separate but equal. During the last 10 years notable progress has been made in the Southern States in meeting that equality requirement. But that progress will be nullified by a program of rapid, enforced desegregation. In fact, public education for both races in some Southern States would be destroyed. The worst feature of the current desegregation effort, however, is the resulting bitterness and racial animosities in areas where harmony heretofore prevailed. Southerners believe that the cherished constitutional