N.W. Ark. Times, 2 Nov 75 [handwritten annotation] Ex-Congressman Hays To Lecture Brooks Hays, former United States Congressman from Arkansas, will speak at the University of Arkansas Wednesday on "Reflections of a Troubled Moderate: Little Rock, 1957-58." The lecture, which is being sponsored by the Department of History, will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Graduate Education Auditorium. It is open to the public and is free. Hays represented the old Fifth Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives from 1943 to 1959. He played a prominent role in the Little Rock integration crisis, serving as an intermediary between the late President Dwight D. Eisenhower and former Governor Orval Faubus. His role is credited with bringing about his defeat in 1958 by a segregationist eye doctor, Dale Alford of Little Rock. Hays subsequently served on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority and as an assistant secretary of state for congressional relations and presidential assistant under the late President John F. Kennedy. He is a 1919 graduate of the UA and received his law degree from Washington University three years later. In 1972, he became one of the few persons to run for Congress from two states when he lost a race in North Carolina to Wilmer (Vinegar Bend) Mizell, the former major league baseball pitcher. Hays had moved to North Carolina in 1969 to serve as a director of the Ecumenical Institute at Wake Forest University. Last spring, Hays donated his congressional and political papers to the David W. Mullins Library at the UA. During his visit to the campus next week, he will be working with Dr. Walter Brown, professor of history, on an oral history project, which will supplement his papers. Both the papers and tape recordings will be available to scholars engaged in research on Arkansas and national history. The papers constitute the first original source material to be made available to scholars concerning the efforts to mediate the Little Rock crisis. The papers begin in the 1920s and run through the 1966 election campaign, when he sought unsuccessfully to win the Democratic nomination for governor. Hays also will be meeting with classes in the Departments of History and Political Science while on campus.
Brooks Hays Materials
