The Magnificent Mays: A Biography of Benjamin Elijah Mays

Abstract

John Herbert Roper Sr.'s book is a fitting tribute to Benjamin Mays (1894–1984) and a thorough treatment of the life that Mays brought to us in his autobiography, Born to Rebel (1971). 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. Schooled in the values of hard work, education, and Christianity, Mays attended South Carolina State College, graduated from Bates College, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Like other striving young African American men of his generation, he worked for a time as a Pullman car porter, even seeking to organize his co-workers before A. Philip Randolph successfully organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. For a time Mays dedicated himself to the work of the Tampa, Florida, Urban League. In the mid-1930s, Mays led the revival of Howard University's School of Religion. He did so as a group of black intellectuals—who W. E. B. Du Bois dubbed the Young Turks—sought to refashion the black struggle for civil rights as a struggle for economic justice, and Charles Hamilton Houston turned the university's law school into a laboratory for civil rights activism. To deepen his understanding of nonviolence as an approach to achieving social justice, Mays visited Mohandas Gandhi in India. In 1941 he began a lengthy tenure as president of Morehouse College, where he mentored a generation of black leaders, most notably Martin Luther King Jr. Although Mays would be viewed by some activists in the 1960s as out of touch with the black power trajectory of the movement, Mays's commitment to black freedom extended deep into the trenches of school integration efforts as chairman of the Atlanta school board in the 1970s.