Fifty years today a single man died, and with his passing, Virginia politics — and perhaps American politics — shifted its course.
That man was J. Sargeant Reynolds.
At the time he was the 34-year-old scion of the Reynolds Metal family — and Virginia’s lieutenant governor. He was on a path that, if conventional wisdom at the time held, would have soon taken him to the governorship — and, many believe, the U.S. Senate and perhaps a presidential run beyond that.
History is full of ambitious politicians but Reynolds held a special place in Virginia at the time — a bridge between its past and its future. Had Reynolds not died so young, he might have become a national beacon for what was then heralded as “the New South.”
Instead, his passing left the Virginia Democratic Party in a decade-long wilderness and accelerated the rise of the Virginia Republican Party.
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Virginia memorializes Reynolds today through the name of a community college in Richmond but the impact he had on Virginia politics — either through his life or his untimely passing — lives on in other ways.
Reynolds went into politics during a time of turmoil, both nationally and in Virginia. The state’s shameful policy of Massive Resistance to integration had ended just years before, but white Virginia was still grudgingly slow to accept its Black citizens as full members of society.
The Democratic Party was torn between the Byrd Machine’s conservatives and upstart liberals; Republicans were still a minor party who hadn’t elected a statewide official since Reconstruction.
In 1965, at the age of 29, he ran for the House of Delegates in Richmond — and led the Democratic ticket in the era of multi-member districts. Two years later, he won a state Senate seat, and set his sights on running statewide.
Reynolds was handsome, perhaps even glamorous in a Kennedyesque way. He certainly had plenty of money, and a self-effacing wit about his privileged background.
What set Reynolds apart was his politics. His family name gave him credibility with the conservative leaders who dominated the party at the time, but his heart was as a progressive on racial issues — which was still shocking for some at the time.
Roanoke World-News reporter Ozzie Osborne wrote that Reynolds pulled off an unusual feat: “He swept not only the Negro ghettoes but also did extremely well in such plush, ultra-conservative sections such as Windsor Farms.”
In 1969, the Democratic Party finally fractured enough that Republican Linwood Holton was able to win the governorship, a breakthrough that marked the beginning of Virginia’s two-party system of government.
Holton, though, did not pull in his ticketmates. Reynolds swept to victory as lieutenant governor with 54% of the vote over H.D. Dawburn of Waynesboro.
Before Reynolds took office, he did something with lasting consequences: For the special election to fill his legislative seat, he endorsed a Black lawyer named Douglas Wilder — helping launch a political career that led to the governorship Reynolds himself never reached.
At the time it was widely assumed that Reynolds would not only be the Democratic nominee in 1973, but that he’d be the winner. Republicans had no real bench of candidates — as history was later to prove after Reynolds’ death. The Roanoke Times wrote that Reynolds seemed “politically invincible.”
In June 1970 he delivered the graduation speech at Montevideo High School in Rockingham County. Striking a poetic tone, Reynolds advised graduates not to waste time in life: “Time is the enemy of us all.” Those words proved too prophetic.
Four days later he felt a strange pain. Later he collapsed at a family reunion. Before the summer was out, he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. He hoped radiation would kill it, and for a time that seemed possible.
Come the spring of 1971, Reynolds was making what Roanoke Times reporter Melville Carico called “a dry run” for a gubernatorial run with a heavy schedule of public appearances. “He shows the same energy, the same zest, the same sparkle for give-and-take conversation as he did before,” Carico wrote. “If it were not common knowledge, no one around him would have reason to believe he had been ill.”
That was not the real story that spring, though.
That April, Reynolds delivered his most famous speech — perhaps one of the most important delivered by any Virginia politician.
On April 20, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld busing as a way to achieve desegregation — a ruling that led some Southerners to warn of a new round of Massive Resistance.
Reynolds went to the Shad Planking, a fish-cooking festival in Wakefield that was a political rite of passage, and before an audience that included many of those old-line conservatives delivered a blistering denunciation of the state’s racial past.
“Virginia will not be propelled into Massive Resistance again,” he declared. Those may seem easy and obvious words now, but they weren’t then. “If coming down here to the Shad Planking in Southside Virginia and making such statements spells political doom for me — so be it,” Reynolds told his slack-jawed listeners. “At least I will have had the very warm feeling of having done and said what I thought needed doing and saying.”
Less than two months later, he was dead. Wilder observed at the time that “Virginia has lost more than she presently realizes.”
We know what happened after Reynolds’ death: The liberal Henry Howell moved into the void to run for governor and failed.
Lacking a candidate, Republicans recruited former Democratic Gov. Mills Godwin, hastening the realignment of the two parties that saw Republicans take control of statewide politics (although not the General Assembly).
Not until 1981 did Charles Robb manage to put enough pieces of the Democratic Party back together to win the governorship.
Now imagine if Reynolds had lived. He’d have left the governorship just in time to run for the open U.S. Senate seat in 1978.
Instead of Republican John Warner’s five terms, we might have had Reynolds’ five terms instead. It’s not hard to imagine a Sen. Reynolds running for president — perhaps in 1988 instead of Michael Dukakis or 1992 instead of another son of the New South.
If Bill Clinton, for all his flaws, could win that year, surely Reynolds could have.
Life can be cruel, though, and death is even crueler. Today Reynolds rests in the family cemetery in Patrick County, gone now for longer than he lived.