Benjamin Elijah Mays(August 1, 1894 – March 28, 1984) was an American Baptist minister and civil rights leader who is credited with laying the intellectual foundations of the Civil Rights Movement.
Mays taught and mentored many influential activists: Martin Luther King Jr, Julian Bond, Maynard Jackson, and Donn Clendenon, among others. His rhetoric and intellectual work focused on notions of nonviolence and civil resistance – beliefs inspired by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. The peak of his public influence occurred during his almost thirty years as the 6th President of Morehouse College, a historically black institution of higher learning.
Mays was born in the Jim Crow South on a repurposed cotton plantation to freed sharecroppers. He traveled North to attend Bates College and the University of Chicago from where he began his career in activism as a pastor in the Shiloh Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. After a brief career as a professor, he was appointed as the Dean of the School of Religion at Howard University in 1934 which elevated him to national prominence as a proponent of the New Negro movement.
Six years later, Mays was elected as the president of Morehouse College, an at-the-time financially unstable enterprise. Over his tenure from 1940 to 1967, the college's financial endowment was doubled, and enrollment quadrupled; it was established as a leading liberal arts college in the United States.
Due to the relative smallness of the college, Mays mentored and taught many students, most notably King. His connection with King spanned his early days at the college in 1944. King was known as Mays' "spiritual son" and Mays his "intellectual father." After King's famous "I Have A Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, Mays gave the benediction.
Upon the 1968 death of King, he was asked to give the eulogy where he described him in his "No Man is Ahead of His Time" speech. Mays stepped down from the presidency in 1967 continuing to work as a leader in the African American community. He presided over the Atlanta Board of Education from 1969 to 1978, where he initiated the desegregation of Atlanta.
Mays' contributions to the civil rights movement have had him hailed as the "movement's intellectual conscience" or alternatively the "Dean [or Schoolmaster] of the Movement". Historian Lawrence Carter described Mays as "one of the most significant figures in American history".
Hundreds of streets, buildings, statues, awards, scholarships, grants, and fellowships are named in his honor. Numerous efforts have been brought forward to posthumously award Mays the Presidential Medal of Freedom as well as feature him on a U.S. postage stamp.
On January 3, 1921, he then entered the University of Chicago as a graduate student, earning an M.A. in 1925. Early on in his academic career he decided to join Omega Psi Phi, a national fraternity for colored men. This organization was known for pooling resources and information among its members, so Mays viewed it with great interest. Mays viewed it as "a mountain top from which he could see above and beyond".
In 1924, upon hearing news that there was to be a fraternity meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, Mays traveled by train. However, his decision to travel first class from Birmingham to St. Louis was indirectly against the Jim Crow laws. The ticket salesman only sold Mays a ticket when he lied about who it was for. While riding to St. Louis, the Pullman warned Mays that he was risking his life by sitting in first class and that he should get off at the next stop. Shortly after, three white men, guns drawn, escorted Mays into a car in the back known as the "Jim Crow car". He eventually made it to the Omega Psi Phi meeting, where he spoke of his experience.
To finance his time in university, Mays worked as a Pullman Porter, a railway assistant. Much of the money he had earned growing up was spent financing his time at Bates. On Christmas Day 1921, Mays held only $45 dollars ($587 in 2018 USD). Mays began labor organizing to increase his wage, which was seen negatively by the Porter managers. Although he legally established a labor group for Pullman Porters, he was fired from his job for "attracting too much attention to labor rights."
His time at the University of Chicago was marked by segregation. He was asked to sit at the colored area in the dining halls and was only allowed to use certain rooms for reading. Mays tolerated the segregation with the mindset that he was "only there to get a degree, to convince another brilliant set of Yankees that he could do their work." Although he was licensed to preach in 1919, he was officially ordained a Baptist minister in 1921.
During this time he encountered John Hope, the current president of Morehouse College. Hope spoke to Mays about the lack of "a fine education for the colored in Atlanta". Mays traveled to Atlanta in 1921 and served as a pastor at the Shiloh Baptist Church until 1923.
In March 1925, Mays was awarded an M.A. in religious studies from the University of Chicago. Upon receiving his master's degree, he wrote to the pastorate with his intention of resigning to pursue a doctorate in the coming years. However, due to his financial status, he took up a teaching position instructing English at South Carolina State College from 1925 to 1926. Mays left his teaching position after routinely clashing with other faculty over grade inflation and academic standards.
From 1928 to 1930, he worked as the national student secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). A couple of months later, he was asked to serve as the director of Study of Black Churches in the United States by the Institute of Social and Religious Research of New York.
In 1932, Mays returned to the University of Chicago with the intent of completing a Ph.D. in line with what was asked by the Institute of Social and Religious Research of New York. After some deliberation between fields of studies he could pursue a doctorate in he eventually decided to study religion and not mathematics or philosophy. Mays also worked as a student assistant to Dr. Lacey Kirk Williams, pastor of Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago and President of the National Baptist Convention.
In 1933, he wrote his first book with Joseph Nicholson, The Negro's Church. It was the first sociological study of the black church in the United States and was submitted to the university faculty as his dissertation in 1935. Historian John Herbert Roper estimates that Mays was one of 20 African Americans to earn a doctorate during that year!