Mays, Benjamin Elijah

Impact on the world

Led Morehouse College for 27 years starting in 1940, more than quadrupling its financial endowment and nearly tripling its enrollment while establishing it as one of just four Georgia colleges to earn a Phi Beta Kappa chapter; he personally mentored a teenage Martin Luther King Jr. after the two met when King enrolled in 1944, with King later calling Mays his 'spiritual mentor and intellectual father' and crediting him, alongside professor George Kelsey, with redirecting his ambitions from law or medicine toward the ministry; one Atlanta mayor remarked that there would have been no Martin Luther King Jr. without Benjamin Mays, since King was, in that mayor's words, very much a product of Mays's religious thinking.

Life & background

Born in 1894 on a South Carolina cotton farm to formerly enslaved sharecropper parents, Mays grew up amid the darkest years of Jim Crow violence and worked his way through Bates College in Maine as a summer railroad porter after his own father, who saw no value in education past the third grade, repeatedly clashed with him over his ambitions. He earned a master's degree and, in 1935, a doctorate in religion and ethics from the University of Chicago, having already co-authored 'The Negro's Church' in 1933, a groundbreaking sociological study of Black religious institutions, before becoming founding dean of Howard University's School of Religion in 1934. In 1940 he was recruited to lead financially struggling Morehouse College, building it over the following 27 years into an academically rigorous institution that produced a remarkable concentration of future national leaders, including Atlanta's first Black mayor Maynard Jackson, future Morehouse president and federal science administrator Walter Massey, and, most consequentially, Martin Luther King Jr., who as a 15-year-old early-admission freshman regularly followed Mays back to his office after chapel sermons to continue their conversations about theology and current events; Mays personally introduced King to Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance, became a frequent dinner guest at the King family's Sunday table, and defended King's continued leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott even against the wishes of King's own father. The two men made a private pact that whichever survived the other would deliver the eulogy, and on April 9, 1968, an estimated 150,000 people gathered on the Morehouse campus to hear Mays eulogize his former student, urging the mostly white crowd not to dishonor King's memory through retaliatory violence and insisting that Morehouse would never be the same because, in Mays's own words, Martin Luther King had once passed through. Mays went on to become the first Black chair of the Atlanta Board of Education, overseeing the city's peaceful school desegregation through the 1970s, received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal and 28 honorary degrees over his lifetime, and died in 1984; he and his wife are buried together on the Morehouse campus he led for nearly three decades.

Sources

1. Stanford Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute; New Georgia Encyclopedia; Morehouse College (King at Morehouse); American RadioWorks; Inside Higher Ed; Swarthmore College Mellon Mays Program