Mays, Benjamin E.

August 1, 1894
March 28, 1984

The educator and clergyman Benjamin Elijah Mays was born in Ninety-Six, South Carolina, the eighth and youngest child of Hezekiah and Louvenia Carter Mays. His father supported the family as a sharecropper. A year at Virginia Union University in Richmond preceded Mays's matriculation at Bates College in Maine, from which he graduated with honors in 1920. At the divinity school of the University of Chicago, he earned an M.A. degree in 1925. Ten years later, while engaged in teaching, social work, and educational administration, Mays received a Ph.D. from the same divinity school.

Mays lived in Tampa, Florida, in the early 1920s, where he was active in social work in the Tampa Urban League, exposing police brutality and attacking discrimination in public places. However, higher education soon became his principal vocation. Teaching stints at Morehouse College in Atlanta and South Carolina State College in Orangeburg between 1921 and 1926 put Mays in the classroom as an instructor in mathematics, psychology, religious education, and English.

In 1934, with his Ph.D. nearly finished, Mays went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., as dean of the school of religion. He served for six years, and during that time graduate enrollment increased, the quality of the faculty improved, and the school's library was substantially augmented. During his tenure the seminary gained accreditation from the American Association of Theological Schools.

Mays's administrative successes at Howard University convinced the trustees of Morehouse College to elect him as the new president of their institution in 1940. He served until 1967. During his tenure, the percentage of faculty with Ph.D.s increased from 8.7 percent to 54 percent, and the physical plant and campus underwent numerous improvements. One of Mays's protégés at Morehouse was Martin Luther King Jr., who attended the college from 1944—when he entered as a fifteen-year-old—through 1948. Mays, both by example and personal influence, helped persuade the young King to seek a career in the ministry. Mays remained a friend of King's throughout his career, urging him to persevere in the Montgomery bus boycott. In 1965 Mays was instrumental in King's election to the Morehouse board of trustees.

In addition to his activities in higher education, Mays remained involved in religious affairs. Although he was active as a pastor for only a few years in the early 1920s, he became a familiar presence in the affairs of the National Baptist Convention and in several ecumenical organizations. In 1944 he became vice president of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, a national organization of mainline Protestant denominations. In 1948 Mays helped organize the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Amsterdam, Holland, where he successfully pushed for a resolution to acknowledge racism as a divisive force among Christians. When a delegate from the Dutch Reformed Church proposed that an all-white delegation from the WCC investigate apartheid in South Africa, Mays argued convincingly for an interracial team.

Mays was a distinguished scholar of the black church and black religion. In 1930 the Institute of Social and Religious Research in New York City asked Mays and Joseph W. Nicholson, a minister in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, to survey black churches in twelve cities and four rural areas. In their study, The Negro's Church (1933), they argued that black churches represented "the failure of American Christianity." They found that there was an oversupply of black churches, that too many churches had untrained clergy, and that they carried too much indebtedness. These shortcomings deprived the members and the communities they served of adequate programs to deal with the broad range of social and economic ills they faced. Nonetheless, Mays and Nicholson praised the autonomy of black churches and their promotion of education, economic development, and leadership opportunities for African Americans.

In 1938 Mays produced a second important volume, The Negro's God as Reflected in His Literature, a study of how blacks conceptualized God and related the deity to their temporal circumstances. Mays argued that many blacks believed God to be intimately involved in and mindful of their condition as an oppressed group. Even those who doubted or rejected either the notion of God or the social dimension of the deity, Mays argued, were still influenced by their understanding of the social purpose of God. In later years Mays wrote an autobiography, Born to Rebel (1971), which was published in an abridged version in 1981 as Lord, the People Have Driven Me On.

After his retirement in 1967, Mays won election to the Atlanta Board of Education in 1969. He became president of that body in 1970.

Mays married twice. His first wife, Ellen Harvin Mays, died in 1923. His second wife, whom he married in 1926, was Sadie Gray Mays. She died on October 11, 1969. In 1982 Mays was awarded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)'s Spingarn Medal. Mays died in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1984.

See also Howard University; Montgomery, Ala., Bus Boycott; Morehouse College; National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc.; National Urban League; Spingarn Medal

Bibliography

Carson, Clayborne, Ralph E. Luker, and Penny A. Russell, eds. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 1, January 1929-June 1951. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Carter, Lawrence Edward, Sr., ed. Walking Integrity: Benjamin lijah Mays, Mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1998.

Bennett, Lerone. "Benjamin E. Mays: Last of the Great Schoolmasters." Ebony (October 1994). Reprint, Ebony 59, no. 11 (September 2004): 172–175.

Mays, Benjamin E. Born to Rebel. New York, 1971, rev. ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002.

Mays, Benjamin E. Lord, the People Have Driven Me On. New York: Vantage, 1981.

Mays, Benjamin E. The Negro's God as Reflected in His Literature. Boston: Chapman and Grimes, 1938.

Mays, Benjamin E. and Joseph W. Nicholson. The Negro's Church. New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1933.

dennis c. dickerson (1996)
Updated bibliography