The afterglow of Reconstruction had almost faded by 1894. In that year Benjamin Elijah Mays was born, about four miles from the crossroads settlement of Rambo (now Epworth) and ten miles from the town of Ninety Six, South Carolina. The rights of African Americans—especially the precious right to vote—had been seriously curtailed, although two African Americans sat in the General Assembly and one represented the state in Congress. Some thirty years after the Civil War, most African Americans in the South depended on white landowners for employment as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and wage laborers. The chains of racial...

My chief problem in this introductory essay—which I am terribly honored to write—is to try at once to do justice to the man and his book and to remain a half-step this side of idolatry. Success in the endeavor is not easy. I unabashedly revere Bennie Mays for his genuine contributions, strength of character, gifts of mind, vision, ability to grow and courage to change, creative restlessness and zest for life, stubborn moral courage, prophetic imagination, deep commitment to social justice, boundless energy and eagerness to tackle new tasks, devotion to academic excellence, capacity for independence of thought...

I remember a crowd of white men who rode up on horseback with rifles on their shoulders. I was with my father when they rode up, and I remember starting to cry. They cursed my father, drew their guns and made him salute, made him take off his hat and bow down to them several times. Then they rode away. I was not yet five years old, but I have never forgotten them.

I know now that they were one of the mobs associated with the infamous Phoenix Riot which began in Greenwood County, South Carolina, on November 8, 1898,...

There wasn’t much going for the Negro in the world in which I was born. The shades of darkness were falling fast upon and around him. The tides of the post-Reconstruction years were being turned deliberately and viciously against him. The ballot was being taken away. Segregation was being enacted into law. Lynching was widespread and vigorously defended. Injustice in the courts was taken for granted whenever a Negro was involved with a white man. Discrimination and inequity in education were accepted as morally right. Books and articles were being published, sermons preached, and anti-Negro speeches made, all saying in...

As a child my life was one of frustration and doubt. 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. I had to find answers to two immediate and practical problems: 1) How could I overcome my father’s immutable opposition to my insatiable desire to get an education; and 2) Even if I succeeded in changing Father’s attitude, how could I get the money to go away to school? I knew that my...

Within a year I was to go to Bates College against the advice of President George Rice Hovey of Virginia Union University, and against the advice of friends. Certainly I was growing in self-confidence and self-reliance, but my problems were far from solved. Financially, I still had to “make bricks without straw.” There was so much that I had to discover, to demonstrate, to validate.

I wanted to go to New England primarily for one reason: My total environment proclaimed that Negroes were inferior people, and that indictment included me. The manner in which white people treated Negroes; the difference...

How fortuitous is the life of man! A simple contact may be decisive in determining one’s career. It is highly improbable that I would have spent thirty years at Morehouse (three as teacher and twenty-seven as president) had it not been for that summer day in 1921 when John Hope, then president of Morehouse College, came to the library of the University of Chicago and invited me to teach college mathematics and high school algebra in his college.

John Hope tempted me by offering me the “lucrative” salary of $1,200 for a teaching year of eight months, to begin in...

When I first came to Atlanta there were, besides the public elementary schools, six institutions of learning for Negroes: Atlanta University; Clark University (now Clark College); Morris Brown University (now Morris Brown College); Morehouse College; Spelman College; and Gammon Theological Seminary (now a member of the Interdenominational Theological Center, made up of the Morehouse School of Religion, Turner Theological Seminary, Phillips School of Theology, Gammon, Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary, and The Charles Harrison Mason Theological Seminary).

Of necessity, each of the colleges, and even Atlanta University, had an academy or high school. Atlanta itself did not provide a high...

Dropping out of school to work before completing graduate or professional study is risky business. I went to Morehouse in September, 1921, expecting to stay one year. I stayed three. I was eager to return to the University of Chicago to complete the requirements for the Ph.D. degree. When I enrolled at the university again in September, 1924, I still was thinking of the church as my vocation and decided to qualify for the master’s degree in the New Testament. A Ph.D. was still my goal, but I had decided that it was the better part of wisdom to acquire...

Tampa was not the “city of our dreams”; we went there because we had to have jobs. I have never seen blacker clouds than those that hovered overhead as we rode on the train from Jacksonville to Tampa, wondering whether we had made the right decision. It was a dark and dreary day when we arrived, but the picture brightened somewhat when John Hall, a distinguished Negro citizen, met us at the station and gave us a glowing account of life in Tampa. A few days later a reception given in our honor seemed to confirm his sanguine report.

The...

I had fully intended to go straight through for a Ph.D. once I entered the University of Chicago in 1921, but one detour after another detained me: Morehouse, South Carolina State, the Tampa Urban League; thereafter, the National YMCA, and then the Institute of Social and Religious Research.

My detours were made easy, for I always had good positions offered me. My problem was not “what job can I get?” but “which shall I choose?” Leaving Tampa, I had to choose between a General Education Board Fellowship and a position in Atlanta with the National YMCA as student secretary serving...

Having completed all course requirements, I had no reason to remain at the University of Chicago beyond the summer quarter of 1934. I was ready now for work in a church, or in a college or university. I had had some correspondence with church officials about a pastorate in St. Louis. President Thomas E. Jones had offered me work at Fisk. A little later in the summer, Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University in Washington, D.C., invited me to accept the deanship of Howard’s School of Religion. President Johnson’s offer came after I had accepted the offer to work at...

All my life the race problem had been as close as the beating of my heart, circumscribing my thoughts, my actions, my feelings. A black man must not only meet the problem publicly, but invariably when Negroes are by themselves the conversation drifts to some phase of Negro-white relations. It is omnipresent; it creates a physical and spiritual climate from which there is no escape. I thought that for three and a half months, as I traveled around the world, I would be able to forget color, race, and prejudice; that I could be just a man among other men;...

I had been back in Washington only a few days when I was chosen to attend the Church Conference on Church, Community, and State to be held in Oxford, England, in the summer of 1937. I attended the Oxford Conference as a co-opted delegate, representing no particular denomination. Naturally, I was deeply concerned with the problem of race outside the United States. So my reactions to the Conference were largely in terms of what Oxford had to say about race. Most of the five sections dealt with race, but the section “Church and Community,” to which I belonged, made the...

In early 1940, when John Hervey Wheeler, a member of the Board of Trustees of Morehouse College, and now president of the Mechanics and Farmers Bank of Durham, North Carolina, interviewed me in my home in Washington, D.C., about the possibility of my coming to Morehouse as its president, I did not take him seriously. On leaving, Mr. Wheeler made it clear that I might hear no more about our conversation. I assured him that I understood, and added that I loved my work at Howard and was not looking for a job. Sadie, with a woman’s intuition, predicted that...

To be president of a college and white is no bed or roses. To be president of a college and black is almost a bed of thorns. The ever-present necessity of raising funds is particularly difficult for the Negro college, since money owned and controlled by whites flows more freely and more abundantly from white to white than it does from white to black. Moreover, the Negro president of a Negro college is almost daily confronted by stumbling blocks, hurdles, and personal embarrassments that rarely if ever clutter the path of his white counterpart.

The proud and sensitive Negro, if...

For decades much of the white South argued that Southern Negroes were satisfied with their plight. They said this when lynching was widespread, segregation was “God,” discrimination was rampant, and Negroes in large numbers were migrating North in order to escape the crippling circumscriptions which held them in bondage. It was said so often, so long, and so loud that I believe that much of the white South accepted this myth as law and gospel. All too many times I read in the press and heard from the platform—that if white Northern liberals and radical Northern Negroes would leave...

When Ellis Arnall defeated Eugene Talmadge in 1942, Negroes in Georgia were disfranchised. Therefore neither Arnall nor Talmadge had any reason to worry about the Negro vote. Nevertheless, the racial problem was injected into the campaign. Although Arnall was played up as having won with a more liberal stance on race than Talmadge, this was hardly the case. Talmadge declared in the July 19, 1942, issue of the Atlanta Constitution that “as long as I am Governor of Georgia Negroes and whites will never go to the same school.” Since Talmadge was accusing certain professors at the University of Georgia...

At Howard University, we had succeeded in developing the School of Religion into a first rate seminary which gained membership in the American Association of Theological Schools in December, 1939. Prior to the School of Religion’s admission, Gammon was the only predominantly Negro seminary that had attained membership. For many years Gammon had been the most outstanding theological seminary among Negroes. Howard was now ready to join Gammon in a program to improve further the theological education among Negroes, although the doors at both Gammon and at Howard had never been closed to students of other racial groups.

Shortly after...

I believe that throughout my lifetime, the local white church has been society’s most conservative and hypocritical institution in the area of White-Negro relations. Nor has the local black church a record of which to be proud. The states, schools, business enterprises, industries, theaters, recreation centers, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, trains, boats, waiting rooms, and filling stations have all played their ignominious roles in the tragedy of segregating the black man and discriminating against him; but at least none of these enterprises claims to have a divine mission on earth. The church boasts of its unique origin, maintaining that God, not...

Before the Ford Foundation inaugurated its Early Admission Program, Morehouse had instituted one of its own. The Second World War was playing havoc with the College, for our students were being drafted in large numbers. In this crisis, we decided to take into the freshman class students who had finished only the eleventh grade. Among the eleventh grade students admitted to Morehouse in September, 1944, was Martin Luther King, Jr. At that time, he was just one freshman among many others. Only an omniscient God could have predicted his future.

One never knows what it is that triggers a response,...

I have never been able to sing “Dixie.” I cannot sing “Dixie” because to me Dixie means all the segregation, discrimination, exploitation, brutality, and lynchings endured for centuries by black people. It means the riots I have seen, the personal insults I have suffered, and the mobs I have barely escaped. It means a system that disfranchised me until I was fifty-two, denied my worth as a person, attempted to clip the wings of my aspirations, and deliberately and relentlessly sought to crush my spirit so that I would be ashamed of being black.

If Dixie were Atlanta or Atlanta...

When the Morehouse students began to talk about doing something about the intolerable situation in downtown Atlanta, where merchants gladly took black people’s money but would not allow them to buy a cup of coffee, I knew that demonstrations were not far off.

On February 1, 1960, four students from A & T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, went to a white store in that city, seated themselves at the lunch counter and requested to be served. They were refused service, and they refused to leave. They were arrested, and the sit-ins were on. As in the Rosa Parks case in...

For seventy years, I have been keenly aware of the continuing crisis in Negro-white relations. To see a mob of white men bent on lynching Negroes before one is five years old etches an impression on the mind and soul that only death can erase.

Since my boyhood days, I have longed for a solution to the Negro-white problem. At one time I was willing to consider the problem solved if only lynching and the brutalities inflicted upon Negroes by white people could be forever abolished. Unyielding resistance to these injustices was deeply woven into the very fabric of my...