David J. Mays

David John Mays (November 22, 1896 - February 17, 1971) was a Virginia lawyer and writer who attempted to slow racial desegregation on behalf of Byrd Organization during the Massive Resistance era. Mays served as counsel to the Gray Commission which tried to formulate segregationists' response to the United States Supreme Court rulings in 1954 and 1955 in consolidated cases known as Brown v. Board of Education. He later unsuccessfully defended actions taken against NAACP attorneys (although he had argued against adoption of those laws and correctly predicted they would be overturned) and significantly unequal legislative reapportionment. In 2008 the University of Georgia Press published an annotated volume of excerpts of his diaries concerning the early years of Massive Resistance (1954-1959). In 1953, Mays won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Edmund Pendleton 1721-1803 (Harvard University Press, 1952), a biography of the late 18th-century Virginia politician and judge Edmund Pendleton.

Mays was born in Richmond to Harvey James Mays, a chemical company foreman, and his wife, the former Helga Nelsen. His Danish immigrant grandfather, Rasmus Nelsen, founded the Nelsen funeral home in Richmond. He eventually had 10 brothers and sisters and attended public schools near his father's employment stations in Alabama and a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee. While he and his father traveled from Washington D.C. to visit Vanderbilt University, they stopped in Ashland, Virginia, where the elder Mays renewed a friendship and the younger Mays ultimately decided to attend Randolph-Macon Academy. David Mays never received a degree from that institution, although he studied and achieved high grades both from 1914-1916 and 1919-1920.

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