The Virginian Pilot today reprinted 14 editorials written by Editor Lenoir Chambers over the course of 1959. The first and last are available online here. These editorials won the Pulitzer Prize for Chambers in 1960.Some 13,000 Virginia students were affected by the closing of schools across the Commonwealth, about 10,000 of them in Norfolk.
In his nomination letter to the Pulitzer judges, managing editor Robert Mason made the case for Chambers:
For all during the school crisis, and particularly during the year of its nadir — 1959 — Lenoir Chambers said and said again in his editorial columns what the law was, and what justice was, and what good sense was, and what reality was.
He never wavered. He wasted no time on the fiction of what might have been or might be. When some of his colleagues of the Virginia press at last joined him in his view, he welcomed them warmly, and he did not chide them for the lateness of their education.
It is not too much to say, I am persuaded, that Lenoir Chambers has done more, and under conditions more vexing and longer sustained, to give logic and direction to Virginia, and to the whole South, in the school problem than any other editor.
Editorial page editor Donald Luzzatto says in a companion piece that these editorials “have apparently not been published in this newspaper” since they originally appeared. That is a shame, since if nothing else, they are a reminder of a time when the newspaper demonstrated its true independence. Even after the Norfolk schools reopened, Chambers continued to write about the subject, taking on the powerful Byrd machine, discussing the situation in Prince Edward County. I wish all of the articles were available to the public. (The other 12 are available to the paper subscribers via ePilot and since they changed the provider for ePilot, I haven’t figured out how to link to the articles.)
These editorials will become a part of my newspaper collection. And when the Pilot editoral board fails to live up to its rich history, I’ll have them at my fingertips to use as a reminder for them.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
The Prince Edward schools remained closed for years.
One of my college classmates was from Prince Edward County. She started college at age 19, a year late, because she did not begin school until she was almost 8, years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. She was white, but her family could not afford to send her to private school.
I wish our Virginia public schools did as good a job of teaching the history of Massive Resistance as they do teaching the Southern version of the reasons for the Civil War.