Thomas Bahnson Stanley was an American politician, furniture manufacturer and Holstein cattle breeder. A Democrat and member of the Byrd Organization, Stanley served in a number of different political offices in Virginia, including as the 47th speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates and as the Commonwealth's 57th governor. He became known for his support of the Massive Resistance strategy to prevent school desegregation mandated by the United States Supreme Court's decisions in Brown v. Board of Education, and Virginia's attempt to circumvent those decisions was known as the Stanley Plan.

The Byrd machine, or Byrd organization, was a political machine of the Democratic Party led by former Governor and U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd (1887–1966) that dominated Virginia politics for much of the 20th century. From the 1890s until the late 1960s, the Byrd organization effectively controlled the politics of the state through a network of courthouse cliques of local constitutional officers in most of the state's counties.