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 more about means than ends--about "not the morality of Jim Crow but for the best tactics defending it."
