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Civil rights activism. Nickname (s) "Bennie"; "Buck Bennie". Benjamin Elijah Mays (August 1, 1894 – March 28, 1984) was an American Baptist minister and American rights leader who is credited with laying the intellectual foundations of the American civil rights movement. Mays taught and mentored many influential activists, including Martin ...
Mays died on March 28, 1984 in Atlanta leaving a rich legacy of activism and advocacy.
Mays was 70 years old—no longer the college’s president but a civil-rights leader—when he delivered King’s eulogy, at Morehouse, on April 9, 1968.
- Found Fulfillment in Academic Achievement
- Encountered Anger and Racism in Atlanta
- Worked to Strengthen Black Colleges
- Inspired Civil Rights Activists
- Selected Writings
- Sources
The youngest of eight children, Benjamin Mays was born in Epworth, South Carolina, in 1894, and raised on an isolated cotton farm. At that time, the maximum school term for black children was only four months—November
Mays’s positive experiences as a student at Bates College had filled him with a new sense of pride and optimism. But the Atlanta he encountered in the early 1920s was a tense and angry place, where streetcars, elevators, parks, waiting rooms, and even ambulances were segregated; where Ku Klux Klan rallies and lynchings were everyday facts of life; ...
In 1934 Mays became dean of the School of Religion at Howard University. During his six-year tenure, he succeeded in strengthening the faculty and facilities to such an extent that the school achieved a Class A rating from the American Association of Theological Schools. This made it only the second all-black seminary in the nation to receive such ...
Perhaps Mays’s greatest influence was on the individual students he encountered both in the classroom and through the college chapel. His greatest honor, he later said, was having taught and inspired Martin Luther King, Jr., the college’s most celebrated alumnus. During Morehouse commencement ceremonies in June of 1957, Mays honored Dr. King for hi...
(With Joseph W. Nicholson) The Negro’s Church, Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1933. The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Literature, Chapman & Grimes, 1938. Seeking to Be Christian in Race Relations, Friendship, 1957. Disturbed About Man (sermons), John Knox, 1969. Born to Rebel: An Autobiography, Scribner, 1971. Lord, the People Have D...
Books
Mays, Benjamin, Born to Rebel: An Autobiography, Scribner, 1971. Salley, Columbus, The Black 100, Citadel Press, 1993.
Periodicals
Bestsellers, April 15, 1971. Black Enterprise, May 1977, pp. 26–29. Books, March 26, 1933. Christendom, Summer 1940. Christian Science Monitor, April 17, 1971. Ebony, July 1954, p. 27; January 1961, p. 48; June 1965, pp. 165–72; July 1971, pp. 88–94; August 1971, p. 52; December 1977, pp. 72–80. Jet, August 3, 1992, p. 24. New York Times, March 29, 1984, p. D23. New York Times Book Review, April 25, 1971, pp. 47–48. Washington Post, March 29, 1984.
Other
Benjamin E. Mays, “History on Video”(30-minute biographical tape), first televised on Black Entertainment Television, 1992. —Caroline B. D. Smith
Sep 1, 2013 · Mays lived a life emblematic of and deeply consequential to a century-long struggle for African American justice and equality. The son of former slaves, Mays witnessed the 1898 Phoenix race riot in Greenwood County, South Carolina, and came of age in the Palmetto state as the veil of Jim Crow descended across the South.
- Peter F. Lau
- 2013
Remembering Dr. Benjamin E. Mays’s Legacy. “It started here in a log cabin and a cottonpatch. If it hadn’t been for Benjamin Mays, thereprobably wouldn’t have been a Martin Luther King.” So said Ambassador Andrew Young as hespoke at the dedication of the Benjamin E. Mays Historical Preservation Site in Greenwood,South Carolina on April 26, 2011.
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August 1, 1894 to March 28, 1984. Described by Martin Luther King, Jr., as his “spiritual mentor,” Benjamin Mays was a distinguished Atlanta educator who served as president of Morehouse College from 1940 to 1967 (Scott King, 249).
