Elwood Floyd Yates (March 18, 1903 – August 31, 2010) was an American automobile dealer, farmer and politician who served for over a decade in the Virginia House of Delegates(1940-1951).
[6] By 1930, Yates had married and moved with his wife upriver to Powhatan County, Virginia where he bought a farm near the county seat (Powhatan Court House),and also had an automobile and transport business.
Yates also was active in the Methodist Church, Ruritan Club, Masons, Izaak Walton League and Democratic County Committee (including service as chairman).
In 1939, voters in Powhatan County and Chesterfield County (directly across the James River) elected Yates to the Virginia House of Delegates (a part time position), and re-elected him five times, so he served from 1940 until 1951.
[7] Although Richmond and Chesterfield county lawyer Edward M. Hudgins succeeded Yates as the delegate representing those two then-rural counties before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decisions in Brown v. Board of Education (which prompted Massive Resistance by the Democratic Byrd Organization), Yates represented the 11th Senatorial District (Powhatan County, as well as its western neighbors Appomattox, Buckingham, Cumberland, Amherst, Nelson and Amelia Counties) during the 1956 Virginia Constitutional Convention, which tried to implement Massive Resistance.