These private writings by a prominent white southern lawyer offer
insight into his state's embrace of massive white resistance
following the 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education" ruling. David J.
Mays of Richmond, Virginia, was a highly regarded attorney, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, and a member of his city's
political and social elite. He was also a diarist for most of his
adult life. This volume comprises diary excerpts from the years
1954 to 1959. For much of this time Mays was counsel to the
commission, chaired by state senator Garland Gray, that was charged
with formulating Virginia's response to federal mandates concerning
the integration of public schools. Later, Mays was involved in
litigation triggered by that response.
Mays chronicled the state's bitter and divisive shift away from
the Gray Commission's proposal that school integration questions be
settled at the local level. Instead, Virginia's
arch-segregationists, led by U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd, championed
a monolithic defiance of integration at the highest state and
federal levels. Many leading Virginians of the time appear in
Mays's diary, along with details of their roles in the battle
against desegregation as it was fought in the media, courts, polls,
and government back rooms.
Mays's own racial attitudes were hardly progressive; yet his
temperament and legal training put a relatively moderate public
face on them. As James R. Sweeney notes, Mays's differences with
extremists were about means more than ends--about "not the morality
of Jim Crow but the best tactics for defending it."
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