Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Biography of Dr. Benjamin E. Mays

Benjamin Elijah Mays Biography

Mays, Benjamin Elijah (1 Aug. 1894 or 1895-28 Mar. 1984), educator, college president, and civil rights activist, was born near Rambo (now Epworth), South Carolina, the son of Hezekiah Mays and Louvenia Carter, tenant farmers who had been enslaved. Benjamin, the youngest of eight children, grew up in the rural South when whites segregated and disfranchised African Americans by law (he himself was not allowed to vote until 1945, when he was fifty-one years old). His first childhood memory was the 1898 Phoenix Riot in South Carolina where, he recalled, white vigilantes murdered his cousin.

At an early age Mays developed an "insatiable desire" for education. Extreme racial inequality, however, marked the South's segregated education system. In 1900, for example, African Americans, 55 percent of South Carolina's population, received only 2 percent of the appropriations for higher education. By the age of seventeen Mays had been in school no more than four months a year. To continue his schooling, he had to grapple with racial discrimination, poverty, and his own father, who wanted him to remain on the farm. In 1916 Mays graduated valedictorian from the high school of the black South Carolina State College at Orangeburg and became engaged to Ellen Harvin, a fellow student.

Struggling against a culture that devalued African-American intellect, Mays determined to receive the best education possible and to prove to himself that he could compete successfully with whites. Mays decided to attend a northern college, but his first choice, Holderness School in New Hampshire, rejected him because of his race. A year later Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, accepted his application. In 1920 Mays graduated from Bates and married Harvin, who was then teaching home economics at Morris College in Sumter, South Carolina; she died in 1923. After leaving Bates, Mays applied to Newton Theological Seminary, but again was refused because he was black. Instead Mays attended the University of Chicago. He continued to encounter racism; many cafes close to campus refused to serve African Americans. Three semesters later the president of Atlanta's Morehouse College, John Hope, enticed Mays away from Chicago with an offer of a teaching position at Morehouse. From 1921 until 1924 Mays taught algebra and mathematics and for one year was acting dean at the all-male Morehouse. He also was the pastor of the Shiloh Baptist Church; he had been licensed for the ministry in 1919 and ordained in 1921.

During these years Mays kept alive his dream of earning an advanced degree. He left Morehouse after three years to continue his work at the University of Chicago. In 1925 Mays completed his M.A. He contemplated pursuing a Ph.D. at Chicago but instead decided to teach English at his high school alma mater, South Carolina State. There he met Sadie Gray, and in the summer of 1926, while both of them conducted graduate work at the University of Chicago, Mays married Gray. Because South Carolina State prohibited married couples from working together, the newlyweds accepted jobs with the National Urban League. Mays had no children from either of his marriages.

As the executive secretary of the National Urban League in Tampa, Florida, Mays labored to improve the poor conditions for African Americans in housing and employment. Especially effective in reaching out to delinquent African-American youths, he made sure that they were sent to the Urban League rather than the home for juvenile offenders. Mays and his wife exceeded their job requirements by helping Tampa's African-American community build self-esteem. By challenging the humiliating system of segregation, however, the Mayses angered many whites. Expecting to be fired for failing to abide by the status quo, they resigned from the Urban League in 1928.

The couple moved to Atlanta, where Mays assumed a position as the secretary for the National Young Men's Christian Association, working with African-American students in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida. One of Mays's outstanding accomplishments was the partial integration of the YMCA in the North and the South. In 1930 Mays left the YMCA to accept an offer from the Institute of Social and Religious Research, a Rockefeller-affiliated agency, to conduct a study of African-American churches in the United States. Mays and a fellow minister, Joseph W. Nicholson, researched 609 urban congregations and 185 rural churches and in 1933 published the results as The Negro's Church.

The intellectual rigors of research renewed Mays's lifelong quest to earn a doctorate; in 1931 he returned to the University of Chicago. In addition to studying, Mays protested discrimination on campus by fighting for equal seating at public events and equal housing in the dormitories. In the summer of 1934, after finishing his coursework, he accepted a position as the dean of the School of Religion of Howard University in Washington, D.C. His success there brought him recognition and invitations to various speaking engagements, permitting him to travel overseas for the first time in his life. Traveling taught Mays that prejudice was a worldwide problem, as he observed discrimination against people of color in other countries. With foreign leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi of India, Mays discussed strategies to effect nonviolent social change and reduce discrimination. In 1935, at the age of forty, Mays earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago School of Religion.

After six years at Howard, Mays accepted an offer on 31 May 1940 to become president of Morehouse College. At that time severe problems plagued the university. It had lost almost $1 million of endowment money, had low morale, and was poorly situated among the colleges that formed the Atlanta Affiliation. Mays's leadership helped transform the school. In his twenty-seven years as president, he supervised donations of more than $15 million and oversaw the construction of eighteen buildings, elevating the school's status as a liberal arts college. Mays boosted the student body's morale as well, especially with his popular Tuesday morning talks with students. In the talks Mays always encouraged Morehouse men to be strong and accept nothing less than equality.

One student inspired by Mays's tenacious stand against racial discrimination was Martin Luther King, Jr. Mays's outstanding oratorical skills and broad social vision left a deep impression on King. Their friendship, begun when King entered college, continued until his assassination in 1968. Impressed by Mays's sermons at Morehouse, King often stayed afterward to discuss thorny issues with him, and these meetings soon blossomed into regular discussions in Mays's office. Both Mays and King shared a commitment to nonviolent social change. When King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Mays, to the dismay of conservative whites and King's black rivals, organized a successful citywide celebration in Atlanta. At King's funeral four years later, Mays gave the eulogy.

Mays's relentless stand against segregation earned him scorn from many sources. Nominated in 1961 to the Civil Rights Commission by President John F. Kennedy, Mays was denied confirmation by the Senate because he advocated integration, viewed by a majority of legislators as a violation of "impartiality." Because of his active opposition to segregation and disfranchisement during the 1930s and 1940s, conservatives charged Mays (and others who struggled for civil rights) with being Communists. Mays's opponents cited the Georgia Committee on Education's 1958 report, Communism and the NAACP, which listed thirty-one "Communist activities" in which Mays had participated.

Supposedly subversive were Mays's membership in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in 1947-1948, his support of the American Crusade to End Lynching, his chairmanship of a conference on discrimination in higher education for the Southern Conference Educational Fund, and his very active leadership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Mays was no Communist; indeed, his deep Christian commitment made him unsympathetic to what he perceived as "Godless Communism." Mays also drew fire from conservative civil rights leaders for his criticisms of the U.S. war with Vietnam. Mays never hesitated to speak out and pursue what he thought was right.

Although president of an urban college, Mays felt a commitment to African Americans living in the countryside. He often spoke at rural congregations and felt a particular duty to rural children. The importance of Mays as a role model to African-American students is illustrated by the naming in 1953 of the small, rural black school in Pacolet, South Carolina, the Ben E. Mays High School. This school also honored Mays by naming a day each school year in his honor, and Mays always attended the accompanying ceremony. He also continued his ties to his alma mater, South Carolina State, acting as president of the alumni association. Mays believed in treating everyone fairly. "The test of good religion is not how we treat our peers and those above us," he wrote in his autobiography, Born to Rebel, "but how we treat those beneath us, not how we treat the man highest up, but how we treat the man farthest down. . . . the real test of my religion would be how I treat the man who has nothing to give me--no money, no social prestige, no honors."

After Mays retired as president of Morehouse College in 1967, he served for twelve years as chair of the Atlanta school board and tirelessly sought to rectify inequalities that African-American children endured. Active in national as well as local politics, Mays advised President Jimmy Carter, who thought of Mays as his friend, critic, and adviser, especially on issues of civil rights. To that end, Mays never stopped agitating for racial equality. In Born to Rebel, Mays wrote, "I worked all my life as if eternity was in every minute."

Committed to improving life for African Americans, Mays found religion to be essential to the task. His unwavering faith in God gave him strength to fight segregation and oppression. "The Christian," Mays stated in his autobiography, "cannot excuse himself by saying, 'I cannot go against tradition; I cannot buck the mores; I cannot jeopardize my political, social, or economic future.' The true Christian is a citizen of two worlds. Not only must he answer to the mores, but he must give an account to God." His religion also gave him a forgiving attitude toward the perpetrators of racism. The "chief sin of segregation," he maintained in Born to Rebel, "is the distortion of human personality. It damages the soul of both the segregator and segregated. . . . It is difficult to know who is damaged more--the segregated or segregator."

Mays produced many outstanding scholarly works, publishing seven books and authoring numerous articles. He was especially successful in exploring the relationship between black religion and race relations in two influential works, The Negro's Church and The Negro's God, as Reflected in His Literature (1938). In another book, Seeking to Be Christian in Race Relations (1957), Mays argued that the slave spirituals comprised the origins of the nonviolent protest tradition in the African-American community. In 1971 Mays published Born to Rebel: An Autobiography, an invaluable contribution to the study of American race relations.

Throughout his life Mays felt a keen sense of alienation and grievance. Segregation affected blacks and whites so deeply that Mays "never felt that any white person in Greenwood County [his native county] or in South Carolina would be interested in anything I did." Yet in 1981 the state erected a granite monument in his home county, a monument larger than that honoring another native, Preston Brooks, a white U.S. representative who in 1856 caned Republican abolitionist senator Charles Sumner. Although Mays witnessed much racist violence during his lifetime, his life demonstrated the efficacy of nonviolent social change and the tenacity of African Americans to win equal rights in the country of their birth. In the end, the nation and the South celebrated Mays and the life he led. He was awarded forty-nine honorary degrees, his portrait was hung in the South Carolina State House in Columbia in 1980, and he was inducted into the South Carolina Hall of Fame in 1981. He died in Atlanta.

Bibliography
The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University houses the majority of Mays's papers. A few papers are at the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina. More than forty boxes of uncataloged Mays papers sit in the chaplain's office at Morehouse College. Mays also published A Gospel for the Social Awakening: Selections, Edited and Compiled from the Writings of Walter Rauschenbusch (1950), Disturbed about Man (1969), Lord, the People Have Driven Me On (1981), and Quotable Quotes of Benjamin E. Mays (1983). For an historical overview of Mays's life, see Orville Vernon Burton's foreword to Born to Rebel (repr. 1987). On Mays's role as an educator, see Barbara Levinson, "Three Conceptions of Black Education: A study of the Educational Ideas of Benjamin Elijah Mays, Booker T. Washington, and Nathan Wright, Jr." (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers Univ., 1973); Dereck Joseph Rovaris, "Developer of an Institution: Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, Morehouse College President, 1940-1967" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1990); Doris Levy Gavins, "The Ceremonial Speaking of Benjamin Elijah Mays: Spokesman for Social Change, 1954-1975" (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State Univ., 1978); and Edward A. Jones, A Candle in the Dark: A History of Morehouse College (1967).

For the crucial role religion played in Mays's development, see his works "I Have Been a Baptist All My Life," in The Baptists Tell Their Story, ed. John S. Childers (1964); "Why I Believe There Is a God," in Why I Believe There Is a God: Sixteen Essays by Negro Clergymen (1965); and "The New Negro Challenges the Old Order," in Sketches of Negro Life and History in South Carolina, ed. Asa H. Gordon (1929). Also see Richard I. McKinney, "The Black Church: Its Development and Present Impact," Harvard Theological Review 64, no. 4 (Oct. 1971). For Mays's importance to the civil rights movement and to the spiritual development of Martin Luther King, Jr., see Lerone Bennett, Jr., "The Last of the Great Schoolmasters," Ebony, Dec. 1977, pp. 74-79, and Thomas J. Mikelson, The Negro's God in the Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. A week-long conference on Mays was held at Morehouse College in Feb. 1995 and resulted in a collection of essays edited by Lawrence E. Carter, Sr., Walking Integrity: Benjamin Elijah Mays: Mentor to Generations (1996). An obituary is in the New York Times, 29 Mar. 1984.

Orville Vernon Burton

Citation:
Orville Vernon Burton. "Mays, Benjamin Elijah"; http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-01112.html; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 15:50:04 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.