Mays was born in South Carolina on August 1, 1894, outside a town in Greenwood County with the unlikely name of Ninety Six. He inspired and taught us and stood by us when we challenged Atlanta’s racial discrimination. He seized the opportunity, and prospered in the Washington, DC-based position for several years. As the president of Morehouse College in Atlanta for 21 years, he guided the institution as it rose to the top ranks of the nations historically black colleges. The NAACP awarded him the Spingarn Medal, its highest honor. All rights reserved.Important conversations are happening now. The Mays Historical Site, which includes a museum, a 19th century one-room Black schoolhouse, and the simple log cabin that was Dr. Mays’s birthplace and childhood home, is a long overdue recognition of him by his native state, South Carolina.One of Dr. Mays’s earliest childhood memories was of the armed White mob that came to his home during an 1898 riot and forced his father to bow before them at gunpoint. He was the youngest child of Hezekiah Mays and Louvenia Carter, freed slaves who became tenant farmers. I …
But it’s up to me to use it. I must suffer if I lose it. But tragically, she died in childbirth in 1923.Mays returned to Chicago the following year, and in 1925, completed work on his Divinity School master’s thesis entitled Pagan Survivals in Christianity Mays planned to continue his studies toward a Ph.D., but once more was compelled by circumstances to return to teaching, this time at his old alma mater, South Carolina State.
Benjamin Elijah Mays, who was born in 1894 to former slaves, was an adviser to Presidents, mentor of mentors like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., lauded preacher and scholar, advocate for social justice, and the president of Morehouse College from 1940 to 1967. He went on to Atlanta, where he pastored Shiloh Baptist Church and was recruited to serve as a math instructor and debate coach at Morehouse. Share with your friends. to use it. Tap here to turn on desktop notifications to get the news sent straight to you.Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapterWe made it easy for you to exercise your right to vote!Part of HuffPost Impact. Students were regularly invited to their house, and I was one of eight very lucky Spelman students privileged to sing with eight Morehouse students at Morehouse's 9:00 a.m. Sunday morning chapel services in Sale Hall, where I heard Dr. Mays and other speakers from Morehouse and the outside world every week. King cited Mays as one of his great influences. Finding himself equal to the academic challenges, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1920 at the age of 26.Moved by strong religious feelings he had learned from his mother, Mays then enrolled at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Other articles where Benjamin Mays is discussed: assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Funeral rites: Former Morehouse president Benjamin Mays delivered the eulogy, and Mahalia Jackson (about whom King had once said, “a voice like hers comes along once in a … #Tragedy #Life Is #Lows “Every man and woman is born into the world to do something unique and something distinctive and if he or she does not do it, it will never be done.”-- Benjamin E. Mays . All rights reserved. -- Benjamin E. Mays .
Dr. Mays was a great unselfish soul who through the countless young people he inspired lives on. Daddy had invited him to speak at our church, and because there were no hotels where Black visitors could stay in my Southern town, the pastor and parishioners always provided hospitality to strangers great and humble. After returning to school to earn a Ph.D. in Religion from the University of Chicago, Dr. Mays was appointed dean of the School of Religion at Howard University in 1934, and served there until assuming the presidency of Morehouse.I first met Dr. Mays in 1953 when I was thirteen years old and he came to stay at my house.