Brooks Hays Memorial Christian Fellowship Award Program - Page 2

Award announcement, including a biography of Brooks Hays, for the Brooks Hays Memorial Christian Fellowship AwardBrooks Hays Brooks Hays was one of Arkansas's most honored sons. His career was very nearly unique in its application of Christian principles and Christian faith to a life of public service in government. Hays was an influential member of Congress who fell [a] casualty in the general election of 1958 to the tide of unreason that was sweeping the South in resistance to school desegregation. He was defeated after he undertook the role of mediator between President Eisenhower and Governor Faubus in the Little Rock school crisis, but in adversity he fashioned a second career more illustrious than the first. He became an advisor to presidents (Kennedy and Johnson), a distinguished lecturer at leading universities including Rutgers and Wake Forest, in a symbol of courage in the service of his country and his fellow man. He was himself a "profile in courage" perfectly suited to the pattern of heroes commemorated in the book that John F. Kennedy had written as a young man. The career of Brooks Hays was remarkable in a number of ways, including the place of honor he earned in the service of both church and state. He was a Southern Baptist—indeed, at that time, the only layman to have become president of the Southern Baptist Convention (he served two terms in this position). He was a member of the Second Baptist Church in Little Rock during his years in the House of Representatives. A Sunday School class at Second Baptist still bears his name, although, with the wit that made him nationally famous as a humorist, he once remarked that he was the only member of Congress to have been "named after a Sunday School." Hays died in 1981, 23 years after the end of his first career in the 1958 election. He was widely eulogized in editorials and in commentary by public figures about the country. The Washington Post described him as "one of the gentlest spirits in this hard-boiled town—a stead-fast and courageous man." In his home state, the Arkansas Gazette said in a moving editorial: "So it was that Brooks Hays remained loyal to the end to the constituency that had turned against him in an aberration that was characteristic of the time. He was a man of extraordinary gentleness, particularly for a figure who almost innocently became embroiled in so many roaring controversies. And he knew that government is by consent of the governed, even as he made his own appeals for reason and law, for equality and brotherhood. He knew, in the secular as well as the religious context, whence power derived and he never sought to question the source.