Born to Rebel: An Autobiography (Brown Thrasher Books Ser.)
(Born the son of a sharecropper in 1894 near Ninety Six, S...)
Born the son of a sharecropper in 1894 near Ninety Six, South Carolina, Benjamin E. Mays went on to serve as president of Morehouse College for twenty-seven years and as the first president of the Atlanta School Board. His earliest memory, of a lynching party storming through his county, taunting but not killing his father, became for Mays an enduring image of black-white relations in the South. Born to Rebel is the moving chronicle of his life, a story that interlaces achievement with the rebuke he continually confronted.
Benjamin Elijah Mays was an American statesman, author, teacher, activist, also he worked for the Office of Education, served as chairman of the Atlanta Board of Education, preached in a Baptist church, acted as an advisor to the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and was a church historian.
Background
Benjamin Mays was born in Epworth, South Carolina, United States in 1894, and raised on an isolated cotton farm. The youngest of eight children. His parents were tenant farmers and former slaves.
At that time, the maximum school term for black children was only four months - November through February - so he and his brothers and sisters spent most of the year helping with the planting and picking.
"As a child my life was one of frustration and doubt, " he recalled in Born to Rebel. "Nor did the situation improve as I grew older. Long before I could visualize them, I knew within my body, my mind, and my spirit that I faced galling restrictions, seemingly insurmountable barriers, dangers and pitfalls. "
Education
Mays was an avid student, however; thanks to early lessons from his elder sister, Susie, by the time he arrived at the one-room Brickhouse School at the age of six, he already knew how to count, read, and write. He quickly became the star pupil there and wept whenever bad weather kept him at home. Church provided another outlet for his talents. At the age of nine he received a standing ovation from the Mount Zion Baptist congregation for his recitation of the Sermon on the Mount.
Eventually Mays overcame his father's objections, however, and enrolled at the high school of South Carolina State College at Orangeburg. He graduated in 1916 as valedictorian.
Determined to prove his worth in the white man's world, Mays resolved to leave his native South Carolina and continue his education in New England. Mays spent a year at Virginia Union University and obtained letters of recommendation from two of his professors before gaining admission to Bates College in Maine. He began his studies there as a sophomore in September 1917. Summer work as a Pullman porter-as well as scholarships and loans from the college-helped him pay his way. At Bates, where he was one of only a handful of black students, Mays was surprised and heartened to find himself treated as an equal for the very first time. After graduating with honors in 1920, Mays completed several semesters of graduate work at the University of Chicago.
He returned to the University of Chicago in 1924 to complete work on his master's degree, and ten years later received his doctorate in ethics and Christian theology.
He was awarded 40 of them during his lifetime and as of April 2017, he has received 56 honorary degrees.
Career
Mays's positive experiences as a student at Bates College had filled him with a new sense of pride and optimism. But the Atlanta he encountered in the early 1920 was a tense and angry place, where streetcars, elevators, parks, waiting rooms, and even ambulances were segregated; where Ku Klux Klan rallies and lynchings were everyday facts of life; where people of color were prohibited from voting; and where the only high school education available for African Americans was provided by private academies connected to the all-black colleges. The return of black soldiers from Europe at the end of World War I had only served to heighten racial tensions in the city.
Mays wrote in Born to Rebel. "It was in Atlanta that I was to find that the cruel tentacles of race prejudice reached out to invade and distort every aspect of Southern life. " After completing his master's degree at the University of Chicago in 1925, Mays spent a year teaching English at the State College of South Carolina at Orangeburg. He moved to Florida, where took over the position of executive secretary for the Tampa Urban League. Two years later, he was named national student secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), based in Atlanta.
In 1930 Mays left this post to direct a study of black churches in the United States for the Institute of Social and Religious Research in New York City. He and a fellow minister, Joseph W. Nicholson, spent 14 months collecting data from some 800 rural and urban churches throughout the country in an effort to identify the church's influence in the black community. Among the subjects addressed were the education and training of ministers, the churches' financial resources, and the kinds of religious and social programs offered. The results of the study were published in 1933 under the title The Negro's Church. In a review for the periodical Books, NAACP executive secretary Walter White described the report as "one of the few examinations of this sort" and "an important achievement in its understanding of all the social, economic and other forces which have made (the black church) what it is. "
In 1934 Mays became dean of the School of Religion at Howard University. During his six-year tenure, he succeeded in strengthening the faculty and facilities to such an extent that the school achieved a Class A rating from the American Association of Theological Schools. This made it only the second all-black seminary in the nation to receive such accreditation.
During this period, Mays traveled widely, attending church and YMCA conferences around the world and earning an international reputation for academic excellence. Mays was named president of Morehouse College in July of 1940, exactly 19 years after he had begun his teaching career there. While president of Morehouse, Mays fought for the integration of all-white colleges but remained an outspoken advocate of predominantly black institutions, such as Morehouse and Howard. His steadfast devotion to academic excellence helped Morehouse become one of only four Georgia colleges to be approved for a chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.
Perhaps Mays's greatest influence was on the individual students he encountered both in the classroom and through the college chapel. His greatest honor, he later said, was having taught and inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. , the college's most celebrated alumnus. During Morehouse commencement ceremonies in June of 1957, Mays honored Dr. King for his leadership in the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott by conferring upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. King later became a member of the Morehouse College board of trustees. Mays also convinced two of Georgia's brightest African American politicians, Andrew Young and Julian Bond, to seek public office.
Mays became even more directly involved in the civil rights movement in 1960 when he agreed to help students from Morehouse and other Atlanta colleges organize peaceful protests throughout the city-an action which, after 18 months, resulted in the integration of the Atlanta public school system.
After his retirement from Morehouse College in 1967, Mays served as a consultant for a variety of governmental, educational, civic, and religious organizations, and in 1969 he became a member of the Atlanta Board of Education. He remained on the board until 1981. During this time he also produced his powerful autobiography, Born to Rebel. In his preface, Mays described the book as "the story of the lifelong quest of a man who desired to be looked upon first as a human being and incidentally as a Negro, to be accepted first as an American and secondarily as a black man. "
Prior to his death in 1984 at the age of 89, Mays wrote dozens of scholarly articles on racial, educational, and religious issues.
Achievements
During his 27 years as president of Atlanta's Morehouse College, one of the country's leading black educational institutions, he worked to provide African American students with the academic and social opportunities for which he had fought so hard. Among the many distinguished Morehouse graduates he inspired were former mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young; Georgia state senator Julian Bond; and civil rights legend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
During the early 1960, having entered the third decade of his presidency of Morehouse College, Mays played an important role in the integration of Atlanta by helping students organize sits at lunch counters and other segregated facilities. He later held a prominent position on the Atlanta Board of Education.
In 2002, he was listed among the 100 Greatest African Americans and is one of the 12 inductees in the Schomburg Honor Roll of Race Relations.
During the Kennedy administration, southern members of the Senate blocked Mays’ appointment to the United States Civil Rights Commission by accusing him of being a Communist. Mays denied the charges. His relationship with President Jimmy Carter was marked with "warmth" and "hospitality. " Carter wrote to Mays on a monthly basis during his presidency asking him about humans rights, international affairs, and discrimination.
Views
Throughout his life, Mays maintained that education, personal pride, and peaceful protest were the most effective weapons in the war against racial bigotry.
Quotations:
"To me black power must mean hard work, trained minds, and perfected skills to perform in a competitive society, " he wrote in his critically acclaimed autobiography Born to Rebel, published in 1971.
"The injustices imposed upon the black man for centuries make it all the more obligatory that he develop himself. .. . There must be no dichotomy between the development of one's mind and a deep sense of appreciation of one's heritage. An unjust penalty has been imposed upon the Negro because he is black. The dice are loaded against him. Knowing this, as the Jew knows about anti-Semitism, the black man must never forget the necessity that he perfect his talents and potentials to the ultimate. "
"If white America really wants to improve Negro higher education, it would do well to recognize the fact that it will not be adequately done by allowing black colleges to die the slow death of starvation, " he wrote in Born to Rebel.
Personality
Both his academic gifts and his enthusiastic participation in different activities quickly made him a leader. Mays had a distinctive personality and style. He was known as being very demanding yet understanding.
He often helped students pay their bills by offering work or finding it around campus.
Quotes from others about the person
According to Frank J. Prial of the New York Times, King once described Mays as his "spiritual mentor and . .. intellectual father. "
J. B. Cullen called Born to Rebel a "condemnation of the white treatment of the blacks in the United States" and "a story that should be read by everyone. "
He was known to Dillard University president Samuel Dubose Cook as "(one of the) great architects of the civil rights movement. Not only in training individuals but in writing his books, leadership in churches, as a pastor, college president. He set the standard. And he was uncompromising. "
Connections
Shortly after graduating from Bates, he married his first wife, Ellen Edith Harvin, on July 31, 1920 in Elizabeth City County, Virginia. The two met when Mays was still in South Carolina and wrote to each other frequently. She was a home economics teacher at a local college before she died after a brief illness two years after they married at age 28. Later he married Sadie Grey, a teacher and social worker, whom he had met in Chicago. His wife accompanied him on most of his trips.
