Thomas Balch Library
208 West Market Street
Leesburg VA 20176
Winter - Spring Programs 2008

Programs sponsored by Thomas Balch Library are held in the downstairs
meeting room and are free unless otherwise noted. Due to limited seating
we recommend registering in advance by calling 703/737-7195.

Politics and Culture in the Twentieth Century South: Race, Reason, and
Massive Resistance
James R Sweeney
Sunday, 24 February 2008, 2PM
James R. Sweeney will discuss his recent book Race, Reason, and Massive
Resistance: The Diary of David J Mays, 1954-1959.  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 white
resistance following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. This
volume 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 US 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' 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' own racial attitudes were hardly
progressive; yet his temperament and legal training put a relatively
moderate public face on them. As Sweeney notes, Mays differences with
extremists were about means more than ends-about "not the morality of
Jim Crow but the best tactics for defending it." 
James R. Sweeney, Associate Professor of History, Old Dominion
University, specializes in Virginia history and recent American
political history. He received his BA from Providence College and his MA
and PhD from Notre Dame.  His publications include Old Dominion
University: A Half Century of Service; "The Trials of Shelby County,
Tennessee: 'Judge Lynch' Presiding," Tennessee Historical Quarterly; "A
Segregationist on the Civil Rights Commission: John S. Battle,
1957-1959," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, and Harry
Byrd: Vanished Polices and Enduring Principles," The Virginia Quarterly
Review.  
Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.

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