Edmund Douglas Campbell (12 March 1899–7 December 1995), attorney, was born on the campus of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, where his father was a professor of geology and later dean of the college. He was the son of Henry Donald Campbell and Martha Miller Campbell and the grandson of John Lyle Campbell, who had also taught geology there for many years. Campbell enrolled in the university at age fifteen and graduated in 1918 as valedictorian of his class. After serving in the army for six weeks at the end of World War I, he continued his education and in 1920 received a master's degree in economics from Harvard University. Campbell then returned to Washington and Lee, where he served as an assistant professor of commerce in 1921–1922 and in 1922 graduated first in his class from the law school.
Ed Campbell, as he was known, was admitted to the bar in Washington, D.C., in 1921 and opened a law practice there. On 15 August 1925 he married Esther Anne Butterworth, in Arlington County, where they lived and had one son and one daughter before her death on 2 July 1934. On 16 June 1936 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Campbell married Margaret Elizabeth Pfohl, daughter of a Moravian bishop and at that time the dean at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton. They had twin sons in 1941.
Campbell entered politics in 1936 when he won election to the Arlington Public Utilities Commission, of which he became chair. Arlington was then making a transition from a traditional northern Virginia county to a middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C. Thousands of civil servants, drawn by the expansion of federal agencies, moved into Arlington. Their demands for improved services, especially in public education, inevitably clashed with the low-tax, minimal government views of the Democratic Party's controlling faction under the leadership of Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966). Promising to address the needs of the county's new residents, Campbell won election to the Arlington County board of supervisors in 1940. He served on the board, including two one-year terms as chair, until 1946. Campbell also took a leading role in forming the nonpartisan civic association Arlingtonians for a Better County. In 1947 the General Assembly granted Arlington the right, unique in Virginia at that time, to elect members of its school board. Elizabeth Campbell, who became her husband's full partner in public life, ran successfully in the first school board election in November of that year. She served until 1955 and again from 1959 to 1963.
When the growth of Arlington and its neighboring localities resulted in the creation of a new, tenth congressional district for Virginia, Campbell sought the 1952 Democratic nomination for the seat. After defeating a Byrd organization candidate in the primary, Campbell ran in the general election without the organization's backing and lost by a narrow margin to Republican Joel Thomas Broyhill. Campbell's greatest influence on public policy in Virginia came in the years following the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that mandatory racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Acting in compliance with the Court's 1955 implementation decree, the Arlington school board, chaired by Elizabeth Campbell, prepared a plan for gradual desegregation. In March 1956 members of the General Assembly angrily denounced the plan and passed a bill terminating the right of the county's citizens to elect school board members.
Later that year the assembly adopted a Massive Resistance plan designed to block any desegregation of the public schools. Its centerpiece was a series of laws requiring the governor to close any public school under a federal desegregation order and to cut off all state funds for the school's operation should the locality try to reopen it. The Campbells were among the people in Northern Virginia most active in organizing effective political opposition to Massive Resistance. In April 1958 they helped organize the Arlington Committee to Preserve Public Schools, which rapidly grew to 4,300 members by November of that year. Campbell opposed segregation, but he and his wife agreed that as a tactical measure it was prudent to limit committee membership to whites. The committee framed the question before the public not in emotional terms of segregation versus integration but as a choice between Massive Resistance and preserving the public schools.
Arlington was spared any school closings because a federal judge delayed desegregation there until 1959. Two other federal judges, however, issued desegregation orders for nine schools in the cities of Charlottesville and Norfolk and in Warren County, after which the governor enforced the school-closing statutes. The closing of Norfolk's public white secondary schools idled 10,000 students and led parents to organize the Norfolk Committee for Public Schools, modeled on the Arlington committee. The Norfolk group tried to enlist a local attorney to bring suit in federal court to reopen the schools. Unsuccessful in their efforts, they asked Campbell, who agreed on the condition that Norfolk attorney Archie L. Boswell would assist him. The three-judge federal panel hearing the case set aside the suit filed by attorneys for the African American students in favor of the plaintiffs Campbell and Boswell represented. The Norfolk city council then voted to cut funds for all public African American secondary schools, thus shutting another 7,000 students out of school. Campbell successfully obtained an injunction from federal judge Walter Edward Hoffman to block the board's decision. In addition to the legal action, Campbell sought to expand his Arlington committee strategy by joining with others to form the Virginia Committee for Public Schools. On 19 January 1959 the federal court in James v. Almond, the case Campbell had argued, ruled that the school-closing laws were unconstitutional, and on the same day the state's highest court found that those laws violated the Virginia constitution. Massive Resistance was thus legally defeated.
In 1962 Campbell brought suit in federal court on behalf of Northern Virginia legislators and voters who contended that their region and the cities in the lower Tidewater area were underrepresented in the reapportionment of the General Assembly adopted that year. He again united legal and political action to effect significant change that shifted legislative strength from the rural areas that had supported Massive Resistance to the urban areas that had accepted desegregation and favored a more active state government. Following a victory by Campbell in the three-judge district court, Virginia appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court. The Court joined the Virginia case, Davis v. Mann, with five other cases and in its 1964 decision in Reynolds v. Sims agreed with Campbell's argument that the standard of "one person, one vote" applied to apportionment of state legislative seats as well as to congressional districts.
Campbell practiced law for another quarter century with his Washington firm of Douglas, Obear, and Campbell and later Jackson and Campbell. He served for a time on the Board of Governors of the American Bar Association and in 1961 and 1962 was president of the Bar Association of the District of Columbia. Campbell became legal counsel for Mary Baldwin College. He sat on its board from 1942 to 1976 and acted thereafter as an associate trustee and later trustee emeritus until his death. Campbell was always helpful to young attorneys, and his sympathy for them was institutionalized at Washington and Lee University with the Edmund D. Campbell Public Interest Loan Fund to assist graduates of the law school in repaying their educational loans. Campbell's wife was active in many educational and civic organizations in Arlington and the District of Columbia and was a founder and one of the most influential officers of the capital's educational television station, WETA. Both earned many honors during their careers, and in 1989 both received honorary doctorates from Washington and Lee.
In 1994 Campbell published Musings of a 95 Year Old, a short book of essays that explained his commitment to social issues within the larger context of his religious and ethical values. Edmund Douglas Campbell died at his home in Arlington on 7 December 1995 and was buried in the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery in Lexington.
Sources Consulted:
Family information supplied by widow, Elizabeth P. Campbell, and son Benjamin P. Campbell; Marriage Register, Arlington Co., 1925, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; Washington Post, 17 June 1936; some letters in Archie L. Boswell Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Old Dominion University, Norfolk; James H. Hershman Jr., "Massive Resistance Meets Its Match: The Emergence of a Pro–Public School Majority," in The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis (1998), 104–133; feature articles in Washington Post, 1 Feb. 1984, 13 June 1991, 11 Dec. 1995, and Washington Times, 12 Dec. 1995; obituaries in Washington Post, 9 Dec. 1995, New York Times, 10 Dec. 1995, Washington Times, 11 Dec. 1995, Lexington News-Gazette, 13 Dec. 1995, and Washington and Lee University Alumni Magazine 70 (winter 1996): 47; editorial tributes in Arlington Journal and Washington Times, both 12 Dec. 1995, Richmond Free Press, 14–16 Dec. 1995, and Washington Post, 17 Dec. 1995; memorial in Washington and Lee Law Review 53 (1996): 1211–1227 (portrait on 1210).
Photograph in Washington and Lee University The Calyx, 1922.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by James H. Hershman Jr..
How to cite this page:
James H. Hershman Jr., "Edmund Douglas Campbell (1899–1995)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 ({url}, accessed [today's date]).
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