RACE, REASON, AND MASSICE RESISTANCE: THE DIARY OF DAVID J. MAYS, 1954-1959
edited by JAMES R. SWEENEY ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

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 and his private writings offer insight into his state's embrace of massive resistance following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. My book comprises excerpts from his diaries from 1954 to 1959. During this time Mays was counsel to a commission, chaired by state senator Garland Gray, charged with formulating Virginia's response to federal mandates concerning integration of public schools. 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. His differences with extremists were about means more than ends-not the morality of Jim Crow but the best tactics for defending it.