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. ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html