Benjamin Mays

Benjamin Elijah Mays--devout Christian minister, uncompromising advocate for justice, career educator and longtime president of Morehouse College in Atlanta--was called the "Schoolmaster of the [civil rights] Movement" by the historian Lerone Bennett Jr. Indeed, among the thousands of proud black men who were shaped by Mays, there were many who played key roles in that movement, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Julian Bond. Bond, once communications director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and now a university professor and chairman of the board of the NAACP, remembered Mays in a recent interview: "He was the embodiment of everything we wanted to be, and even though we knew we could never achieve his greatness, we strove to be like him. I revered him."

Bond was not alone in his reverence. In recalling Mays's influence on her husband, Coretta Scott King wrote in My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr., that her husband's decision to go into the ministry "was largely due to the example of Dr. Benjamin E. Mays.... From first to last, Dr. Mays took a great interest in Martin. It was not so much that he deliberately guided him toward the ministry as that he influenced Martin by his own example. For although Dr. Mays was brilliant, he was not removed from the heart of the people. In the pulpit he talked a great deal about social justice; you might say he preached a social gospel. This conformed exactly with Martin's ideas, and it helped to form them.... At Morehouse, listening to Dr. Mays preach...Martin came to see that the ministry could be intellectually respectable as well as emotionally satisfying."

Andrew Young, once King's trusted lieutenant, then Congressman, ambassador to the United Nations and mayor of Atlanta, made the point that the leading black professionals in every city in the country and "most certainly one of the key preachers and probably most of the black elected officials owe where they are to Dr. Mays."

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