The day after Brown I, Stanley had called for "cool heads, calm study, and sound judgment" and said he would write to Byrd, who at first was neither defiant nor conciliatory.
But within days, the governor's office was deluged with letters expressing fears about communist plots (this being the McCarthy era and early Cold War) and race mixing.
Congressmen Watkins Abbitt and Bill Tuck, as well as state senators Gray, Mills Godwin and Albertis Harrison.
[7] Stanley's appointees were weighted towards those districts with the largest black communities by percentage, which thus would be most affected by the Supreme Court's rulings.
By that autumn white leaders in those affected communities had formed the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, which would radicalize their response.
Both segregationists and moderates had come to oppose the original Gray Commission plan, especially after extensive press criticism led by James J. Kilpatrick and after federal judges in July 1956 ordered integration of schools in Norfolk, Arlington and Charlottesville.
Meanwhile, the Gray Commission's executive committee met, and with the assistance of then-attorney general J. Lindsay Almond crafted the more radical Stanley Plan.
That spring, the NAACP also challenged various aspects of the new Virginia plan which were directed against it and similar to new legislation in other southern states.
Meanwhile, Almond brought a "friendly" lawsuit against comptroller Sidney C. Day, seeking the Virginia judiciary's approval of the school voucher plan after the constitutional changes (after he was elected Governor in 1957, his successor as Attorney General, former Gray Commission member Albertis Harrison was substituted in the legal proceeding captions).
On January 19, 1959, both the Virginia Supreme Court in Harrison v. Day and a three judge federal panel in James v. Almond found the Stanley Plan unconstitutional.