Early Years
Albert Vickers Bryan was born on July 23, 1899, in Alexandria, the son of Marion Beach Bryan and Albert Bryan, a bank cashier who served on the Alexandria city council and was active in the Democratic Party. He graduated from Alexandria’s public high school, attended the University of Virginia, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and received his law degree in 1921. Returning to Alexandria to practice law, Bryan married Marie Elizabeth Gasson on December 1, 1923. They had two sons.
While he was a young attorney Bryan made important political connections. His law partner was the namesake son of Howard W. Smith, who in 1930 began a thirty-six-year tenure in the House of Representatives. Like the elder Smith, Bryan became a loyal supporter of Harry F. Byrd Sr., who was then the new leader of the Byrd Organization the dominant faction of the Democratic Party in Virginia. Bryan served as the Alexandria city attorney from 1926 to 1928, when he was appointed and subsequently elected commonwealth’s attorney. He practiced law and served as commonwealth’s attorney until 1947, when President Harry S. Truman appointed him a federal judge of the Eastern District of Virginia. Bryan was sworn into office on June 10, 1947, and served until August 1961, the last two years as chief judge of the district.
Desegregation Decisions
Bryan was completely a product of Virginia’s traditional society. Courtly and scholarly, he was, in the words of a fellow federal judge, “the epitome of a Southern gentleman.” As a jurist, Bryan was equally known and respected for the clarity of his legal writing and his strict adherence to precedent. During his years on the federal bench he had to deal with several major cases involving school desegregation and legislative apportionment—matters that brought into conflict Virginia’s traditional society and the U.S. Supreme Court rulings he was required to enforce.
In 1952 Bryan sat on a three-judge federal panel that heard the case challenging public school segregation in Prince Edward County. Writing for the court and basing his decision on longstanding precedent, he ruled in Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County that racial separation was constitutional. In 1954 the Supreme Court reversed Bryan’s ruling and sixty years of precedent in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Two years later, while presiding over the desegregation case involving the Arlington public schools, Bryan in Thompson v. County School Board of Arlington County adopted the narrowest possible interpretation of the ambiguous wording of the Supreme Court’s implementation decree. When two fellow federal judges issued desegregation orders in 1958 that triggered a confrontation with the state’s Massive Resistance laws, Bryan, again in Thompson v. County School Board of Arlington County , gave that county until February 1959 to comply. The delay helped the Byrd Organization’s leadership avoid an embarrassing confrontation with liberals and moderates in a community where opponents of Massive Resistance were fully prepared to keep the public schools open even if the state’s school-closing laws were invoked. After state and federal courts invalidated the Massive Resistance statutes in January 1959, Bryan’s decree covering the Arlington and Alexandria schools, along with a similar court order in Norfolk, brought about the first public school desegregation in Virginia. In 1969 in Griffin v. State Board of Education , closely adhering again to Supreme Court precedent, Bryan struck down the last vestige of Massive Resistance, state tuition grants to students attending segregated private schools.
Later Years
In 1961, in a move intended to conciliate Howard W. Smith, by then the powerful chair of the House Committee on Rules, President John F. Kennedy raised Bryan to a newly created seat on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Sworn in on August 24, 1961, he faced another important issue in Virginia politics the very next year. In the reapportionment case of Mann v. Davis, Bryan ruled that in order to reflect demographic changes, the General Assembly would have to be reapportioned to increase the number of seats for Northern Virginia and the Tidewater cities. Once again, by closely following precedent set by the Supreme Court in Baker v. Carr, he helped undermine a major bulwark against change—control of the legislature by the most tradition-minded regions of Virginia. Bryan took senior status and in effect retired on August 16, 1971, a month after his son Albert Vickers Bryan Jr. was appointed a federal district judge.
Bryan sat on the board of visitors of the University of Virginia from 1956 to 1964 and was rector of the university from 1960 until his term on the board ended. He was also a vestryman of Christ Episcopal Church in Alexandria for many years and senior warden at the time of his death. Bryan died on March 13, 1984, in Fairfax Hospital after open-heart surgery and was buried at Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria. In 1995 Congress named the courthouse for the Eastern District of Virginia, in Alexandria, the Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse.
