In July 1956, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, federal judge John Paul of Harrisonburg issued the first school desegregation order in Virginia, ruling for the NAACP in a suit against Charlottesville City Public Schools. In September 1958, after two years of appeals in this case, Paul also sided with the NAACP in a suit against Warren County Public Schools. In response, Governor J. Lindsay Almond closed the schools slated to admit the Black student plaintiffs in these two cases. This was the first use of the state's Massive Resistance laws to shutter public schools. The Virginia Supreme Court and a special federal court declared the closures unconstitutional in January 1959.