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<\/a>How did Mays influence King during the boycott?<\/h5>\nSixty-one years ago, in the summer of 1956, King had left Montgomery midway through the boycott, first to appear at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., and then to visit his parents in Atlanta, where he learned that he would be arrested if he returned to Montgomery.<\/p>\n
King\u2019s father invited prominent African American leaders, including Mays, to the King home in Atlanta to help his son think through the consequences of staying in Atlanta rather than going back and being arrested.<\/p>\n
Many in the group urged King to stay in Atlanta, but King said he would return to Montgomery. Silence followed, and his father burst into tears. At that moment, King later wrote, \u201cI looked at Dr. Mays, one of the great influences in my life. Perhaps he had heard my unspoken plea. At any rate, he was soon defending my position strongly. Then others joined in supporting me.\u201d<\/p>\n
At a point critical to not just the boycott but to the movement itself, it was Mays\u2019 voice and support that King felt.<\/p>\n
Did you ever meet Mays?<\/h5>\n
I met Dr. Mays once when I was a student. I was a member of what was called the Afro-American Society at Bates. We were having a potluck meal in the bottom of Parker Hall, and he surprised us. He just appeared out of nowhere. I don\u2019t know why he was on campus but he just spent time with us and it was really wonderful.<\/p>\n
For a long time, many of us at Bates didn\u2019t know much about him other than he was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2019s mentor. In the 1990s, a few of us \u2014 the late Bob Branham, Beckie Conrad \u201982, and myself \u2014 traveled to the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University to look at Mays\u2019 papers for the 1994 Symposium at Bates celebrating the centennial of his birth. I began to get a strong sense of Mays\u2019 influence on American religious history and thought during that trip and the conference that followed.<\/p>\n
When I look at Mays and think about his relevance or importance, I think it goes back to his phrase that \u201cBates didn\u2019t emancipate me, but it did me the greater service of helping me to emancipate myself.\u201d That\u2019s what stands out.<\/p>\n
For Mays, emancipating himself meant competing with and doing better than white students in his studies and activities. What do you take away from his focus on competition to prove his self-worth?<\/h5>\n
He wanted to lay to rest any doubts that he, or anyone else for that matter, might have about his intellectual ability. Mays was born and raised in a segregated society where the prevailing idea was that African Americans were intellectually inferior.<\/p>\n
He wanted to prove to himself that he could hold his own in any educational context. He thought Bates was a place where he could do that \u2014 where he would be accepted but also where he could challenge himself and learn to overcome any anxieties or obstacles that might arise. And he did very well.<\/p>\n
Do we know if that was a typical experience of Southern African Americans who went to Northern schools, to frame their goals in competitive terms?<\/h5>\n
Certainly, it was true of W.E.B. Du Bois, who was born in Great Barrington, Mass., yet earned a degree from Fisk University and then got a second B.A. at Harvard because he wanted to prove himself there \u2014 he wanted to see if he could hold his own.<\/p>\n
There were a number of African Americans who did this, but quite often the schools they wanted to attend wouldn\u2019t admit them. Individuals like Mays and Du Bois were determined to demonstrate their ability to succeed in any academic environment, again laying to rest for themselves and others the negative stereotypes and myths about the capabilities of African Americans.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Benjamin Mays, Class of 1920, photographed in 1980 when he returned to Bates for his 60th Reunion. Photograph by Jim Daniels.<\/p><\/div>\n
Mays begins his autobiography, Born to Rebel<\/em>, at age 4 or 5 by describing his father being harassed by night riders. Instilled at an early age, that fear \u2014 of segregation, of the consequences of crossing the color line \u2014 was something that Mays fought against until his dying day.<\/p>\n For him, the color line wasn\u2019t simply the cultural, social, or political practices of segregation. They were things that he didn\u2019t want to internalize. He wanted to overcome them.<\/p>\n They\u2019re thinking about ways to remain engaged in the political process, ways to be heard. I keep holding up Mays as an example. I\u2019ve said that Mays wasn\u2019t able to vote until he was almost 52 years old. And from the moment he set out to get an education, Mays believed education would help liberate him from the fears and the normative ideas or practices around race and segregation.<\/p>\n Mays saw and experienced segregation in one form or another for his entire life<\/em>. He was still preaching against different kinds of segregation until his dying day. So there\u2019s this whole idea that you don\u2019t give up the fight, that you never give up, that we\u2019re always engaged in this struggle for emancipation.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why Mays\u2019 words are in our mission statement. We believe that education is emancipating. Mays looked at education as a way to liberate people from ignorance and fear and to help them to envision new possibilities for themselves and for society.<\/p>\n He said that he believed that everyone had something to give to humanity. And if they didn\u2019t do the work that they were capable of, then that work wouldn\u2019t get done.<\/p>\n We\u2019re reading the eulogy now. I always think that\u2019s so powerful, that he was able to say that, to have this vision of King as being \u201cof his time\u201d and speaking to his time in a very specific way. King seemed to view his life in the same way. He really does talk about being in this place at this moment.<\/p>\n Mays delivers the final eulogy for the slain Martin Luther King Jr. on April 9, 1968, at Morehouse College. Photograph courtesy of Howard University.<\/p><\/div>\n King also gives you a sense of his journey. At the time of the boycott, he talks about how his journey connected with the local leadership and action, with the discontent among people experiencing the injustices of segregation. And how there was power in one small, seemingly insignificant gesture by Rosa Parks of just sitting down \u2014 it wasn\u2019t the first time \u2014 and how her being arrested connected with people and ignited something. All of this played a part in the emergence and organization of the Civil Rights movement.<\/p>\n To stay engaged in the process \u2014 that\u2019s the challenge!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I think something like that is happening right now. People are being challenged to think: What does it mean to be an American citizen? What does it mean to be free? What involvement and what place do I have in the political process?<\/p>\n Your candidate may not have won but does that mean that you walk away from the process and leave the responsibility to someone else? Or is there work you can continue to do to promote your idea of what it means to be free or an American? To stay engaged in the process \u2014 that\u2019s the challenge!<\/p>\n The Free Will Baptists\u2019 social and political commitments \u2014 abolitionism, temperance, education \u2014 came from their religious convictions. They believed that it was their responsibility, their duty, to transform the world around them and to look at the Sermon on the Mount as their practical way: that you feed the hungry, you clothe the naked, you visit those who are in prison, and you take care of the homeless.<\/p>\n Mays, like King, believed and practiced a \u201csocial gospel\u201d that applied to every aspect of individual\u2019s life and involvement with others. If the gospel only meant something on Sunday mornings or in your private meditations, then that wasn\u2019t really the gospel message. For Mays and Dr. King, the gospel had a social message, one of social reform, social change, and realizing the Kingdom of God in the world.<\/p>\n It shows that he was part of a small group of African American scholars and intellectuals who were looking at India\u2019s struggle against imperialism and colonialism as a way to help their own strategies for addressing segregation in the U.S.<\/p>\n Mays engaged Gandhi around the whole question of nonviolent resistance. And when you see that happening in 1936, you see that he is thinking, \u201cHow can I use this same strategy, this same approach, in the U.S.?\u201d<\/p>\n It also shows how he was becoming an international figure, too.<\/p>\n Sometimes people wonder just how involved he was in the civil rights movement. Well, he was very involved, educating the next generation of leaders, working behind the scenes, donating money, supporting the leadership and individuals within the movement, especially Dr. King and some others.<\/p>\n The only criticism that I do know of came later in the 1960s with a whole new generation of political activists. These were enormously important years in the consciousness of African Americans: black pride, Black Power, and a new kind of militant activism were emerging.<\/p>\n “Initially, my students just see Mays as someone ‘out there,'” says Marcus Bruce ’77, the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies. By the end of the course, they’ve begun to appreciate “the trials, tribulations, abuses he had to suffer.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n Mays very firmly believed in the possibility of African Americans, but he wanted to go the route of education and help African Americans gain leadership positions in every field. Mays was seen by some younger activists as \u201cold school\u201d and out of step in this regard \u2014 as, on occasion, was King.<\/p>\n Recently I visited Paris and saw an exhibit called The Color Line at the Quai Branly Museum that looks at African American experience, from slavery to the Black Lives Matter movement, through the lens of art. When I came to the section on the 1960s, there were pictures of the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, and, in one glass case, Mays’ book Born to Rebel<\/em>.<\/p>\n It struck me: Do they know the extent, intensity, and complexity of the differences and visions that existed between Mays\u2019 and a new generation of African American activists? What we now celebrate as a period of rich diversity of ideas among African Americans was a painful and difficult period in Civil Rights history.<\/p>\n He said it was the only time when he felt in danger in Lewiston. He felt real hostility and anger in that audience, and it frightened him. He saw the power of the medium to frighten people and generate mindless aggression and anger toward someone like him.<\/p>\n While he didn’t write specifically about Birth of a Nation<\/em>, he wrote about another film, The Green Pastures<\/em>, a popular Broadway musical in 1930 with an all-black cast that became a film with an all-black cast in 1936.<\/p>\n The movie depicts Bible stories through stereotypes of African Americans. It portrays God as a black man, \u201cDe Lawd,\u201d speaking a black dialect \u2014 not correct or proper English speech \u2014 and scenarios that painted a quaint, folksy, stereotypically exaggerated image of African Americans and religious belief. Heaven is described as a fish fry.<\/p>\n Mays begins the book that is his dissertation, The Negro\u2019s God: As Reflected in His Literature<\/em>, by talking about The Green Pastures<\/em> because he was bothered by the stereotypical depiction of how African Americans viewed God. He wanted his book to be a work of scholarship that recovered the richness and diversity of conceptions of African American ideas about God in their literature, in their scholarship, in their poetry.<\/p>\n Many of my students raise questions about Mays\u2019 particular attention to the role of race and gender in the education of young black men, especially the idea of Mays, when he was president of Morehouse, emphasizing the masculinity of young Morehouse men and their graduates.<\/p>\n I tell them that Mays taught the young African American men of Morehouse the \u201clessons\u201d he had learned in his life and career, lessons in \u201chow to be free in a segregated world,\u201d how to define themselves by their \u201cown terms in a world that offered no terms for their existence.\u201d<\/p>\nSince the presidential election, where are your students in their thinking?<\/h5>\n
So education still has the power to liberate students from fear?<\/h5>\n
That connects to Mays\u2019 eulogy for King, when he said that there\u2019s no such thing as someone, like King, being \u201cahead of their time\u201d because the time is \u201calways ripe to do that which is right and that which needs to be done.\u201d<\/h5>\n
<\/a>Free Will Baptists founded Bates. Is there something about how they interpreted their gospel and teachings that resembles what Mays and King were doing?<\/strong><\/h5>\n
What should we know about Mays\u2019 meeting with Mahatma Gandhi?<\/h5>\n
Was Mays ever criticized?<\/h5>\n
<\/a>I have seen an interview with Mays where he talks about seeing the pro-KKK film Birth of a Nation<\/em> in Lewiston, and afterward running back to campus because he feared for his safety.<\/h5>\n
Are there parts of Mays’ experience that don\u2019t resonate with your students?<\/h5>\n