1. Lawrence Brooks Hays was an American lawyer and politician who served eight terms as a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from the State of Arkansas from 1943 to 1959.
21 Facts About Brooks Hays
1. 2.
Brooks Hays was a president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
3.
Brooks Hays was born in London, Pope County, Arkansas, on August 9,1898.
4.
Brooks Hays attended law school at George Washington University, becoming a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity, earning his law degree in 1922, after which he was admitted to the bar.
5.
Brooks Hays served as assistant attorney general of Arkansas from 1925 to 1927.
6.
Brooks Hays ran for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1928 and 1930, but was unsuccessful both times.
7.
Brooks Hays served as a Democratic National committeeman for Arkansas from 1932 to 1939.
8.
Brooks Hays served as assistant to the administrator of resettlement in 1935 and held administrative and legal positions in the Farm Security Administration from 1936 to 1942.
9.
Brooks Hays ran for the United States House of Representatives and was elected to the Seventy-eighth.
10.
Brooks Hays was not an integrationist, and he had signed the 1956 anti-desegregation Southern Manifesto, but his actions inflamed segregationists in the state, who rallied around Amis Guthridge the attorney for several segregationist groups in the Democratic primary.
11.
Brooks Hays was nominated by JD Grey, long-term pastor of the First Baptist Church of New Orleans.
12.
In that capacity, Brooks Hays traveled with Rev Dr Clarence Cranford, his pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and president of the American Baptist Convention, to Moscow for a joint peace mission.
13.
From 1959 to 1961, after his congressional tenure had ended, Brooks Hays served on the board of directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
14.
Brooks Hays served in the Kennedy administration as Assistant Secretary of State for congressional relations in 1961 and as Special Assistant to the President of the United States from late 1961 until February 1964.
15.
Brooks Hays became a professor of political science at the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers University and a visiting professor of government at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
16.
Brooks Hays served as director of the Ecumenical Institute at Wake Forest University from 1968 to 1970.
17.
Brooks Hays served on the board of directors of the National Conference on Citizenship in 1960.
18.
In 1966, Brooks Hays ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Arkansas.
19.
Brooks Hays finished third, ahead of the man who had defeated him as a write-in candidate in 1958, Dale Alford, but behind Frank Holt and "Justice Jim" Johnson.
20.
In 1972 Brooks Hays was the Democratic nominee for election to the Ninety-third Congress as a representative from North Carolina, but lost to the Republican incumbent, Wilmer Mizell.
21.
Brooks Hays died on 11 October 1981 in Chevy Chase and was buried at Oakland Cemetery in Russellville, Arkansas.