The Magnificent Mays

A Biography of Benjamin Elijah Mays

John Herbert Roper, Sr.

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781611171846
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialwissenschaftliche Biographien

A comprehensive biography of a dedicated civil rights activist and distinguished South Carolinian

Civil rights activist, writer, theologian, preacher, and educator, Benjamin Elijah Mays (1894-1984) was one of the most distinguished South Carolinians of the twentieth century. He influenced the lives of generations of students as a dean and professor of religion at Howard University and as longtime president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. In addition to his personal achievements, Mays was also a mentor and teacher to Julian Bond, founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; future Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson; writer, preacher, and theologian Howard Washington Thurman; and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. In this comprehensive biography of Mays, John Herbert Roper, Sr., chronicles the harsh realities of Mays's early life and career in the segregated South and crafts an inspirational, compelling portrait of one of the most influential African American intellectuals in modern history.

Born at the turn of the century in rural Edgefield County, South Carolina, Mays was the youngest son of former slaves turned tenant farmers. At just four years of age, he experienced the brutal injustice of the Jim Crow era when he witnessed the bloody 1898 Phoenix Riot, sparked by black citizens' attempts to exercise their voting rights.

In the early 1930s Mays discovered the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi and traveled to India in 1938 to confer with him about his methods of nonviolent protest. An honoree of the South Carolina Hall of Fame and recipient of forty-nine honorary degrees, Mays strived tirelessly against racial prejudices and social injustices throughout his career. In addition to his contributions to education and theology, Mays also worked with the National Urban League to improve housing, employment, and health conditions for African Americans, and he played a major role in the integration of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA).

With honest appreciation and fervent admiration for Mays's many accomplishments and lasting legacy, Roper deftly captures the heart and passion of his subject, his lifelong quest for social equality, and his unwavering faith in the potential for good in the American people.

1

SEED OF JAMES, BRANCH OF PROPHETS AND JUDGES

1894–1898

He was the son of slaves. His mother, Louvenia Carter Mays, was born into slavery in Virginia, and his father, Hezekiah Mays, was born into slavery in South Carolina. His mother, called Vinia, did not really remember slavery, but his father Hezekiah did, as Benjamin Mays reported in Born to Rebel. His parents’ stories of the valley of the Saluda are frustratingly vague at crucial points, but this much can be recovered: Hezekiah and Vinia Mays—and the patriarch James Mays before them—saw and felt the worst of slavery, including the peculiar institution’s violent intrusion into family life. More focused memories of his parents show a married life marked by great turmoil between Vinia and Hezekiah inside the home, but they also show a home even more violently intruded on by white people.

The Mayses lived in a beautiful valley; they loved the land and often marked the “rainbow ’round their shoulder.” They also marked the “blood on the Carolina moon.”¹

The Hebrew chronicler of Judges in the Bible wrote admiringly and longingly of a promised land “washed by nether springs”; and the black song master inspired by such Hebrew images sang of a “goodly land.” Surely the verses describe the valley of the Saluda, a goodly land washed by springs in Greenwood, which was part of Edgefield District in the Piedmont of South Carolina in 1894, when Benjamin Elijah Mays was born. Men of color had come, and they had settled this land generations earlier, perhaps as long ago as when Jesus Christ walked the earth. These bronze men were called “Cherokee” by the European settlers who found them, and European scholars have called the forefathers of these Cherokees “Mississippians.” The land was rich with topsoil that was thin but fertile. The soil was bright red, the color of blood, and it made its mark on people. Some of their clothing was always red, no matter how long they soaked things in boiling water: red soil and bronze people, themselves often dyed red.

Then white men had come from En gland and had displaced these men of color. They were new folk with new techniques, new beliefs, and new systems; it was an old red land with new white people. Following the patterns established in the low country of South Carolina, themselves patterns established in Barbados in the Caribbean, these En glishmen pushed northwesterly into the Piedmont frontier, cleared the land, and began to raise cash crops. The most important of the crops became cotton: King Cotton, short-staple cotton. This short-staple cotton had bolls with thickened fibers enmeshing many seeds, and only Eli Whitney’s cotton gin could pull the seeds out quickly enough to make it a cash crop fit for the world markets. Once ginned, however, this short-staple cotton was sold by the boatload to the lords of the mills in Old En gland and in New En gland. Still following the patterns they had learned in Barbados, the En glishmen imported black folk from Africa, who were bought and brought forward to work the cotton fields in that land. The enterprise made the En glishmen at once lords of the land and lords of the labor, and these fellows who were lords of this red land and lords of this black labor became rich indeed. Yet they spared little of their silver and none of their gold for the black people who were the slaves plowing, sowing, weeding, hoeing, and picking the cotton, and then bringing the jute bags stuffed with it to the cotton gin.²

Black men and women found themselves “strangers in a strange land,” as the psalmist wrote. They found themselves obliged to sing songs for their overlords in the strange land. They sang their songs; they worked their work; and at least a portion of their songs they sang for themselves, and at least a portion of the work they did for themselves. The young child Benjamin Elijah Mays learned about the seed of James, his own black people, from his grandmother Julia, wife of James, and from her daughter and his mother, Vinia Mays. He learned too that this same red soil had produced men who became judges, even over the white folk, and—more important—prophets who reminded people of all colors—black, red, and white—about the right way to live.

Julia and Vinia Mays both told him to be proud of being black, and both told him to be cautious around all white people, but especially the lords of the land and the lords of the labor. From his father, Hezekiah Mays, son of James, Bennie Mays learned a few facts and many emotions. When Hezekiah Mays was in his liquor, he cursed the absent white lords and then cursed and struck at his current wife, Vinia, and his present children. In his drunken anger he recalled the cruelties he had suffered from his master in the days of slavery. In his sober moments he recalled the kindnesses bestowed on him by the master’s son. In other sober moments Hezekiah Mays marked the kindness of William H. Mays, the man who rented land to the children and grandchildren of James after freedom came but before the prize was reached. Bennie Mays saw with his own eyes and heard with his own ears the kindnesses of William H. Mays.

Bennie Mays did not write it, but the record seems clear: The cruel master was Henry Hazel Mays, the kind son was William H. Mays. After the cruel master was forced by soldiers in blue to free his slaves, it was the kind son who rented out the same goodly land to his old playmate Hezekiah Mays. The unnamed kind son of the unnamed cruel master and the named kind lord of the land were one and the same: William H. Mays.

In the eyes of Benjamin Mays, believer and preacher, such an abomination as slavery could have been permitted by the Lord God only for some purpose of testing, refining, and toughening a people whom he loved. Hezekiah Mays’s father, James, was a man of dark skin who was born to a family of slaves who lived and worked in the Saluda Regiment of the old Edgefield District, in the portion that later became part of Greenwood County. Following custom, James’s family had no last name. James was born in a place called Rambo, a Finnish name suggesting that the white “tribes” who settled the area were not exclusively from En gland and Scotland as was generally claimed. There were two Rambos, A. J. and Joseph Rambo, and these Rambo families owned fifty-four slaves in the area. In keeping with the custom in antebellum days, the Rambo surname became the name of the neighborhood in this tiny corner of the huge and sprawling Edgefield District.³

A family larger and more spread out than the Rambos was the Mays family. Had they arrived earlier, the same area might have been named Maysville instead of Rambo. There were at least seven white lords of the land and the labor who were named Mays, and these people were all related to each other. William, Henry, Henry Hazel, S. W., John, B. F., and George R. Mays formed an extended family, which controlled a total of 137 slaves in the final decade before the Civil War, when it seemed that every slave-owning family in Edgefield District was busy trying to buy more slaves. The most likely owner of James was Henry Hazel Mays. This Mays is not recorded by name in the memoir prepared by Benjamin Mays, but he does seem the most likely owner. Henry Hazel Mays had land in the area, and he had 14 slaves. In the course of enumerating slaves in the slave lists, the census takers did not even list the first name of the enslaved people, but they did list by age and complexion (black or mulatto), and they did group by families. One of Henry Mays’s slaves was exactly the right age, twenty-five, to be James and was listed as “black,” not “mulatto”; next to this man was listed a woman, age unknown, who was “mulatto,” and next to these two was listed a boy slave, then three years old, who was also called black, not mulatto. James and his son Hezekiah were famously black, and Julia, of undetermined age, was famously light skinned. Julia said that she had four children, all girls, before Hezekiah, and one son after she bore Hezekiah. The four sisters, who were Francie, Roenia, Janette, and Polly, should have been old enough by the time of the 1860 census to be out on their own, perhaps even coupled with male slaves to begin producing their own children. No female slaves are listed next to this unnamed couple, but there are four other female slaves listed as the possessions of Henry Hazel Mays. The youngest man child, Isaiah, should have been barely one year old when the census taker came round, and there is a one-year-old black male child listed with this couple. These are coincidences, but the coincidences do not line up in the same way with the other six Mays lords of land and lords of labor whose slaves are enumerated.⁴

Better proof that Henry Hazel Mays was the owner of James and Julia and of Hezekiah is seen in the white family. Henry Hazel Mays had a child, William H. Mays, who was the same age as the unnamed black child who was the son of the unnamed twenty-five-year old slave. In Benjamin Mays’s memoir Hezekiah is said to have recalled great cruelty visited on him by the master but great kindness from the master’s son. Among other things it is written that the unnamed master forced his slaves to eat from a trough on the ground, much as he fed his livestock. Yet the unnamed son of the master began to teach Hezekiah to read and write as soon as the son himself began to learn these skills. In the days of slavery no more than one in twenty slaves could read and write, and here was Hezekiah learning to do so under instruction from the master’s own son. This instruction was done in secret, for the law of the white lords said that a slave could not be so taught. Indeed across the Savannah, a white man had been hanged because he was found to be teaching black children to read and write. So frightening was the prospect of punishment for slave student and free teacher in such cases and so much did the matured Hezekiah distrust and despise white people, that decades after the fact of freedom Hezekiah continued to tell census takers that he could not read and write even though family testimony makes it clear that he certainly could.⁵

Hezekiah could tell this story of the master’s kind son, but Hezekiah could tell other stories too. On balance, whether Hezekiah was drunk or sober, the stories told of cruelty and not kindness. The much more talkative Julia and Vinia much more consistently told stories of cruelty and even terror. While his father, Hezekiah, might have kind words for William H. Mays, Bennie Mays the child and the young man heard tales aplenty to convict all southern white people, and likely all white people, as usurpers of the goodly land and as dastardly masters of the good black people; but he also early took hope that the unjust rule was not divinely sanctioned and thus was not fated to last forever. The call and response of the song master from the psalm “How long, O Lord?” elicited the fervent and deeply believed response “not long, not long,” whether the call and response were sung by people of color in their pews, by work crews chopping cotton in the field, or rhetorically by their ministers of color standing tall in the pulpit at a Sunday service or a Wednesday evening prayer meet and sing.⁶ Even, and especially, in his mature years as distinguished academic, Benjamin Mays tasted the bitter draft of sorrows when he referred to the self-proclaimed “lords” among the white people, but he spoke with sincerity about the real Lord.

It is recorded in the memories of the white lords and the memories of their slaves that James worshipped the real Lord as did all his seed. At some time during seven fat years in the 1850s, James was given Julia, and she became his wife as recognized by the Mayses’ slaves and by the real Lord—but the white lord of this land did not call their marriage a union, insisting instead that he had given Julia to James in the same way that he had taken Julia from another “common husband” from another “custom marriage” in Virginia. No one has named the husband from the custom marriage back in Virginia.

This Julia was lighter skinned than James, enough so that dark people in Rambo often asked if she might have a white parent or at least one white ancestor. Julia had high cheekbones, which led the same dark folk to ask if she might have an Indian parent or an Indian ancestor. People outside Rambo sometimes said that Julia had a white parent, and sometimes such people said that Julia had an Indian parent, but of course they did not know. Among James’s people, to whom Julia came, it was declared that she was neither from the white world nor from the Indian world, and they took her as one of them. They told their children to quit asking about her forebears. Recalling their teaching in his own later years, Benjamin Mays wrote, “I do not recall ever hearing her or my parents make any reference to any white ancestry.”⁷

Julia did not tell James or his people much at all about her days in Virginia. She told him that there were three daughters and three sons in her family there; her brothers were Abner, Harper, and John, and her sisters were Sarah and Susi. No one among James’s people remembered her telling the names of her parents in Virginia, and none of James’s line ever met these parents of Julia, Sarah, Susi, Abner, Harper, and John. There was more not known than there was known about Julia.

What was known—from Julia—is that she came from somewhere in Virginia, that she had had a common husband there in a custom marriage, and that they had two children. Her girl child had died young, perhaps in infancy. Her boy child had been killed in the fields where he worked, working as a man, slain as a man, but still a child. A white man had killed him. What she could tell James about her late Virginia family is what he could tell her about any Carolina family: the babies never had enough to eat or the right clothes to wear, and when they became children, they were set to work and they worked hard “from day clean to first dark.”⁸ And James could tell her that her white lord in Carolina, who had bought her from her white lord in Virginia, was just as likely to slay one of their offspring in these red fields.

But there was still the real Lord, who would not let the travail last for all time. Another day would come. Their day would come, a day of “Jubilo,” and they could see the prize up there, and they had to keep their eyes on the real Lord’s prize.

So James took Julia to him and begat their six children, who were born into this travail, and these six lived to see freedom but not the prize. Julia and James’s Hezekiah, born next to last in 1856, took Vinia for his wife. Hezekiah could remember what James and Julia had told him, and he had seen and felt the lash and the knout of slavery, for he was working as a man in the fields before slavery at last ended.

In taking Vinia to his side, Hezekiah was following James and his tribe. Vinia too came from somewhere in Virginia and from a past in which more was not known than was known. She was born in 1862, during the Civil War, and she remembered almost nothing of the time of slavery, for she was only three years old when it ended. She also remembered little, or in any case told almost nothing, about her own family. Hezekiah and all James’s people did not know the names of her parents. She, like Julia before her, became a part of James’s family and took that family’s story as hers. There were some differences in the story, however. Above all Vinia was not given to Hezekiah by some white lord, and they were not common husband and common wife in a custom marriage. Indeed the marriage of Louvenia and Hezekiah Mays was written down in books and accepted by people of all colors, even the white ones, in Carolina.⁹

Hezekiah took the surname “Mays” because he wanted it. He did not want it because he had happy memories of white lord William H. Mays, although he did like Bill Mays, and Bill Mays did like him, just as Bill’s wife, Nola Barmore, liked Hezekiah’s wife, Vinia. Hezekiah took the name “Mays” because it named all those 137 people of color in that fine land where “he lived and moved and had his being.” Nor did he take Vinia from anyone but herself, and when they married, they recorded it not only before the real Lord but in the same book now open to black people as well as white people.¹⁰

Those white lords had lost their war, and they had lost it thoroughly, but they had not lost their land. Hezekiah and other young newly freed men recognized this Canaan for what it was, a land of such richness that a man ached to look at it. Perhaps someday the land would be Hezekiah’s and would belong to the seed of James, but for now the seed of James had to share this land with other peoples, including the once and future white lords of the land, who had lost the war and lost their slaves, lost so much—but not their land.¹¹

Hezekiah could leave, as Joseph in the Bible had once left to find favor with a pharaoh in rich land with better weather in a dry season. Perhaps across the Savannah River there was some such postbellum pharaoh. But a stranger in a strange land would be no less a servant across the Savannah, and pharaoh’s favor in a strange land was no better than the favor of a “cotton snob” in the red clay of the land Hezekiah knew. So Hezekiah stayed, and he worked land that was not yet his, but he was not slave now. When the cotton crop came in, Hezekiah gave part of the harvest to the lord of the land, but he kept a portion too. In that way he was like a sharecropper. Most of James’s seed were sharecroppers, but...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Seed of James, Branch of Prophets and Judges, 1894–1898
• 2 The Ravening Wolf, 1898
• 3 A Rambo Boy after the Riot, 1898–1911
• 4 The Student, 1911–1917
• 5 Wisdom in Northern Light, 1918–1919
• 6 For Every Time There Is a Season, 1920–1924
• 7 My Times Are in Thy Hands, 1924–1926
• 8 New Negroes on Detour, 1926–1934
• 9 The Great Commission and Its Filling, 1934–1936
• 10 In the Nation’s Capital, 1936–1940
• 11 In My Father’s House, 1940–1947
• 12 “To your tents,” 1948–1967
• 13 “Myne owne familiar friend,” 1968
• 14 Leave Me a Double Portion, 1969–1984
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index