Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement

A Biography

Randal Maurice Jelks

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807869871
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

In this first full-length biography of Benjamin Mays (1894-1984), Randal Maurice Jelks chronicles the life of the man Martin Luther King Jr. called his "spiritual and intellectual father." Dean of the Howard University School of Religion, president of Morehouse College, and mentor to influential black leaders, Mays had a profound impact on the education of the leadership of the black church and of a generation of activists, policymakers, and educators. Jelks argues that Mays's ability to connect the message of Christianity with the responsibility to challenge injustice prepared the black church for its pivotal role in the civil rights movement. From Mays's humble origins in Epworth, South Carolina, through his doctoral education, his work with institutions such as the National Urban League, the NAACP, and the national YMCA movement, and his significant career in academia, Jelks creates a rich portrait of the man, the teacher, and the scholar. Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement is a powerful portrayal of one man's faith, thought, and mentorship in bringing American apartheid to an end.

– 1 –
My Earliest Memory Was a Mob

Not even an omnipotent God can blot out the deeds of history.

—MAYS, Quotable Quotes of Benjamin E. Mays

“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.”¹ So began Benjamin Mays’s description of his coming of age in an era of fear and terror. Mays was born in 1894 as the curtain of Jim Crow fell over the American South, violently segregating worlds into black and white.²

The mob terror that had so thoroughly shaped Mays’s earliest memory and imagination stemmed from the Phoenix riot of 1898, a politically calculated mob action by the supporters of South Carolina governor Benjamin Tillman to eliminate the last vestiges of black political activity.³ What was worrisome to Tillman and his acolytes was the possibility that their rivals within the Republican Party might use black votes to realign the party against their political initiatives.⁴ Ostensibly, the justification for the riot existed because of the Republican political activism of the Tolbert family. The Tolberts were a well-off, formerly slaveholding family that had lived in Greenwood County since the Revolutionary War era. Although they had opposed secession, four Tolbert brothers fought on the side of the Confederacy, but then they endorsed Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 presidential election. During Reconstruction, the Tolbert family, allied with blacks in Greenwood County, controlled the black vote and exercised substantial control over the Republican Party. By 1894, the Tolberts’s alliance was strong enough that they decided to run Red Tolbert as the Republican candidate for Congress. The alliance encouraged black males to vote at the polls in the rural town of Phoenix, South Carolina.⁵ The Tolberts, it was alleged, hoped to use their votes to challenge Tillman’s proposed changes to the South Carolina State Constitution in 1895, which fueled the potential of reactionary violence by the Democrats. By 1898, the local Democratic Committee chair assured a violent response if black men came out to vote.⁶ As Election Day neared, vigilantes terrorized black residents of Edgefield, Abbeville, and Greenwood counties. Twelve black men were shot dead (“two or three” of them were Mays’s father’s close friends), and one rural church in Greenwood County was set on fire. The terror was so extensive that Mays later remembered his father saying, “Negroes were hiding out like rabbits.”⁷ On the afternoon the vigilantes road into Epworth, the then four-year-old Mays had scurried under a nearby white neighbor’s porch and tearfully viewed his father being terrorized. Mays’s father was lucky to have survived the attack. The marauding offenders, many of whom were known in the region, were never held responsible for their actions.

In response, many local black residents either moved to other regions within the state or deferred to local white political rule.⁸ The tragic irony of this “riot” was that the Republican Party had not been a significant political threat in South Carolina since 1882, the year when the Democrats (under Tillman’s leadership in the state House) wrested control of the South Carolina legislature from the Republican majority. Upon completing their takeover of the legislature, the Democratic lawmakers moved to change all the laws governing voter registration and balloting to curtail black political participation.⁹ Outbreaks of violence like the one that took place in Phoenix were aimed at eliminating the black vote.

Violent political maneuvers such as the Phoenix riot were justified by a civil religiosity known as the Lost Cause.¹⁰ The propaganda of the Lost Cause created an effective narrative that redefined white southern life and historical reality. Its proponents alleged that the real victims of terror were white planters and yeomen who had been unfairly victimized by the rapacious North during the Civil War. Advocates of this theory argued that the war was fought over states’ rights rather than the entrenched interests of slave owners. The premise of this theory was that white southerners were actually the heroes of the war for defending states’ rights and believed that southern heroism needed to be enshrined. Monuments and statues of Confederate figures were constructed across the states of the old Confederacy—from Richmond to Edgefield to New Orleans. This characterization of white southerners as victims and heroes eventually unleashed a ritualized barbarism against the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Lynchings and execution-style murders were strategic and very effective. The advocates of the Lost Cause successfully disguised their undemocratic usurpation of political power by creatively inventing a civil religion that was congruous with the deeply felt religious pieties of the white South. As a result, mob political violence flourished.¹¹

By Mays’s fourth birthday, the sectional tensions between the North and South resulting from the Civil War had begun to ease.¹² Mays, though not fully aware of all the ramifications at the time, was an eyewitness to the congealing of white supremacy in the American South, which blatantly insured that the citizenship rights of blacks, Chinese, and Native Americans would be diminished throughout all parts of the United States. Further, Americans would naively assuage the national collective conscience and unite through militarism in the global south in the Spanish American wars in Cuba and the Philippines. Mays’s localized experience of racial terror in the South was concurrent with the political transformations occurring throughout Asia and Africa.¹³

Mays’s memory of political terrorism shaped his Christian intellectual imagination during his lifelong fight for social justice and democratic freedoms. Throughout his adult life he would constantly strive to create an antiracist theological framework to eradicate Jim Crow’s affects on black people. He dedicated himself to studying, preaching, and teaching to counter the humiliating scars that segregation inflicted on black Americans. He strived to do this by laboring tirelessly to acquire a formal education and by advancing theological education among black students. Mays’s quest for education was grounded in notions of middle-class respectability and what it meant to be a middle-class man, but he also believed that theology could serve black people as they pursued their citizenship claims. Central to his intellectual pursuits was the black Baptist Church, one of the paramount institutions in the day-to-day lives of black people.

Throughout his life Mays was anchored in the black Baptist Church. Mount Zion was the first church to provide Mays a reaffirming space for his humanity. It was a place that reinforced the idea that, as his mother, Louvenia Mays, put it, “you are as good as anybody!” “This assurance,” Mays recalled, “was helpful to me even though the white world did not accept my mother’s philosophy.”¹⁴ One need only scrutinize his childhood remembrances to realize that at the center of his South Carolina upbringing was a complex network of families anchored by local Baptist churches.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, small black Baptist churches sprang up like wild flowers throughout the rural South.¹⁵ Black people survived slavery and the violent politics of Jim Crow by virtue of both familial and religious networks. Historian Steven Hahn has thoughtfully observed that, following the Civil War, the anchors of black political life were black congregations.¹⁶ Rural churches, he explains, “were bound unmistakably to local lattices of kinship, work, and obligations.” Rural congregations in the South were “community centers, assuming the range of vital functions. Almost invariably they established Sunday schools and welcomed other educational activities, disseminated important community news and information, helped resolve disputes among members, defined collective norms, and brought sanctions against their transgressors.”¹⁷ For blacks living in South Carolina, family, religion, and education were a holy triumvirate. Baptist churches were indeed the center of life for black and white families alike.¹⁸ For Mays, being a Baptist was akin to being born with black skin. “The truth of the matter is,” he wrote, “I was born and brought up in a Baptist community with no other denominations close around, and the Baptist Church was the center of things.”¹⁹ In fact, black membership in the Baptist church exceeded that of any other denomination in South Carolina.²⁰ As one state historian has noted, by 1906, 55 percent of black South Carolina residents were Baptist.²¹ “Negroes,” Mays explained, “had nowhere to go but to church. They went there to worship, to hear the choir sing, to listen to the preacher, and to hear and see people shout. The young people went to socialize around and talk. It was a place of worship and a social center as well.”²²

Small rural congregations such as Mount Zion had a long and complex history serving black southerners.²³ However, the most important thing they did was to provide space where black Baptist congregants received religious instruction that taught them about freedom and equality before God. This kind of education was always a counterbalance to terror. As religious historian Albert Raboteau explains, “At the core of this [Baptist] piety was the Reformation insight that salvation was based not on external observance and personal merit, nor on the intercession of church and clergy, but on the relationship of the individual sovereign will of God. With this view of the religious life the person inevitably turned inward and searched his or own heart to discern the workings of God’s Spirit there.” This type of theological understanding “encouraged individual autonomy in matters of religious conscience, an autonomy difficult to control, as the fissiparous tendencies of Protestantism have frequently shown.” Even in slavery, black Baptists, especially, “institutionalized the spirit of Gospel freedom by insisting on the autonomy of each congregation.” It was precisely this emphasis on “independent church polity” that “offered more opportunity than any other denomination for black members to exercise a measure of control over their church life.”²⁴ If this were true under the condition of slavery, it was all the more true under the harshness of violent political repression and segregation. This Baptist theological emphasis deeply influenced Mays’s outlook on the meaning of community and freedom.

Mays’s devotion to these concepts was nurtured by two people, his mother, Louvenia Carter Mays, and his pastor at Mount Zion Baptist Church, the Reverend James F. Marshall. He cited his mother innumerable times in his writings as teaching him piety—especially prayer. “My belief in God,” Mays recalled, “reaches back to my early childhood. As early as I can remember my mother called the children to prayer each night just before we retired for bed. God was very real to my mother. So, I caught her spirit and relied heavily on God and prayer.”²⁵

But there was more to his mother’s “spirit” than Mays gave credit. He was reared in a community with rich cultural practices tied to West Africa, which influenced the cultural flavor of the entire state of South Carolina. In colonial America, slaves of African descent outnumbered British descendants. And following the Civil War, roughly 50 percent of the population of the state was black.²⁶ Although Mays grew up in a heavily black populated region of South Carolina, he was too young and too ignorant to understand his own connections to any African ancestors or to be aware of the rich cultural legacy of West and West Central Africa present all over South Carolina. He admitted he knew “virtually nothing” about “his ancestors.” His mother’s deep religious piety, however, was a by-product of the Atlantic world’s new religiosity.

Louvenia Mays’s pious teachings were rooted in a rich past that she was unlikely aware of either. It was a past full of the “cut and paste” and the mixing of cultures of Africans and Europeans who arrived in the lower southeastern part of the colonial United States.²⁷ There were the circle dances—or the ring shout, as it was called; there were bodily convulsions and catatonic stiffness found in ceremonial spirit possession rites; and there was exuberant flaying of hands and ecstatic screeches of joy and sorrow—the shout—all combined with the folkways of English and West African worlds as Protestant revivalism crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean.²⁸ Historian Mechal Sobel has suggested that enslaved Africans adapted and reshaped West African belief systems and the English Baptist version of Christianity to serve their particular needs.²⁹ She notes that it was common for “slave children to experience religion in the family circle.” And even more, children “saw their mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, and uncles die and be reborn. They heard shouts and ‘moans’ as a routine part of their family lives. They were prayed over as children and they ‘knew’ their own religious commitment would play a central role in shaping their” lives. Baptism, Sobel has observed, was the “ticket” for black family members to be joined together beyond death.³⁰ Although Mays was born nearly thirty years after the end of slavery, the cultural pattern described here resonated in his home.³¹

Mays’s religious experience fit well into the cultural pattern of evangelical conversion found among his slave forebears. He would recall in later years, with a rather subdued tone,

One Sunday morning when I was thirteen I was sitting in the church listening to the sermon and the morning began to be different from any other. I can’t tell about it or describe it, because I don’t know what happened. . . . When the appeal came, I got up and went down front and gave the minister my hand. I cried a little and I felt lifted up and it was a new kind of feeling. I was a boy and did not understand what had happened, but there was something within me that I had never known before and I felt a little excited and happy and very safe.

“This was back in 1908,” he continued. “That same week I was baptized, but baptism did not produce any special feeling in me. I had already had my experience, and baptism was just something that came after.”³² It may be that Baptism was no big deal to Mays as an adolescent, but in his mother’s eyes, Mays, whom she affectionately called “Bubba,” had done what was right in the eyes of God and his community.³³

Mays never quite understood the emotive behavior of Mount Zion congregants and in rural black southern religion. He attributed his mother’s “outbursts” as solely tied to his father’s alcohol abuse and his family’s impoverishment. Indeed, her church served as an emotional outlet for her in coping with domestic trials, but ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION: I Have Been a Baptist All My Life
• 1 My Earliest Memory Was a Mob
• 2 I Set Out to Learn How the Sixty-Six Books of the Bible Were Produced
• 3 In Search of a Call
• 4 The Negro's God
• 5 The Most Neglected Area in Negro Education
• 6 Schoolmaster of the Movement
• 7 Seeking to Be Christian in Race Relations
• 8 I Have Only Just a Minute
• 9 This Is Not a Short War, This Is a Long War
• EPILOGUE: Lord, the People Have Driven Me On
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index