A Long Journey: Dr. Benjamin E. Mays: Speaks on the Struggle for Social Justice in America

By Freddie C. Colston

This volume contains twenty-one speeches on the long and enduring struggle for equal rights, from one of Americas finest scholars and orators on race relations in American history. Dr. Benjamin E. Mays. He witnessed race relations (1920s 1980s), and the transformation of America from a rigidly segregated society to a desegregated social structure.
Mays is often referred to as the Godfather of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, since he mentored many of the leaders of the movement. And he is acknowledged as the spiritual and intellectual mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr. the selfless leader of the most important social movement of the twentieth century, and the Nobel laureates birthday is a national holiday celebrated on the third Monday in January annually. Outside of Kings immediate family, Dr. Mays influenced his spiritual and intellectual maturation more than anyone else.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456847227

Freddie C. Colston

Freddie C. Colston edited, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays Speaks: Representative Speeches of a Great American Orator (2002); and he has published essays in professional journals. He received his B.A. in political science in 1959 from Morehouse College; M.A. from Atlanta University in 1966 and the Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1972. He has taught at several colleges and universities. In addition to his university teaching, Professor Colston served for seven and one-half years as an associate director at the Executive Seminar Center, U. S. Office of Personnel Management in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is currently a retired political science professor.

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A LONG JOURNEY

Dr. Benjamin E. Mays Speaks on the Struggle for Social Justice in America

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Edited by:

Freddie C. Colston

Copyright © 2011 by Freddie C. Colston.

Library of Congress Control Number:          2010919627

ISBN:                      Hardcover                      978-1-4568-4721-0

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                                 Ebook                            978-1-4568-4722-7

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Contents

PREFACE

FOREWORD

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

EPILOGUE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ENDNOTES

PREFACE

My research on the life and career of Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, which began after his death in 1984 and continues to date, has led me to libraries and archives around the country, including the Mays Collection housed in Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center in Washington, D.C. I have found an amazing saga of an American life that made monumental contributions to American society in education, religion, and race relations. His commitment and courage in fighting for social justice continues to inspire new generations. Dr. Mays was a multidimensional personality who applied his passion for excellence to every task he undertook. He was both an idealist and a pragmatist; he had a burning desire to make America and the world better. And he did.

This book stems from comprehensive research on Dr. Benjamin E. Mays. While it discusses several phases of his life and career as a college professor, academic dean, college president, and school board president, the central focus of the book is on his speeches on the struggle for social justice, which spans over several decades, beginning in the 1920s and continuing into the 1980s. In reference to his lifelong preoccupation with equality in America, he once used a compelling image: he came out of his mother’s womb fighting for social justice. On another occasion, he maintained that he championed civil rights before it was called civil rights. Thus in studying the speeches of Benjamin E. Mays, we get a firsthand glimpse of a man who witnessed race relations and the transformation of America from a rigidly segregated society to a desegregated social structure. As a member of a minority that the dominant society once considered as a collectivity of inferior beings, Mays experienced segregation and discrimination. Yet we get to see these experiences from the perspective of a scholar and theologian who didn’t let social constraints beat him down. Instead, he used it as a stepping stone to reach for the stars. He marched, demonstrated, counseled civil rights leaders, and wrote about his environment in an effort to make sense of majority-minority relations and to provide pragmatic prescriptions for improvement.

The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction that covers Mays’s professional career along with his involvement in the struggle for social justice. Chapter 2 discusses the pervasiveness and rigidity of segregation and Jim Crow laws in the South, which were predicated on the so-called separate-but-equal doctrine. Chapter 3 treats the massive civil rights movement that swept the South during the 1960s under the charismatic leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., employing the tactics and philosophy of nonviolent resistance. Chapter 4 centers on the aftermath of the civil rights movement, which resulted in a transformation into the desegregated society. Chapter 5 draws conclusions. The Epilogue discusses the election of Honorable Barack H. Obama as the first African American president, a milestone in the history of American democracy, which can be best understood as the highlight of the long journey outlined in Mays’s speeches.

The volume contains twenty-one speeches on the long and enduring fight for equal rights, from one of America’s finest observers and orators on race relations in American history, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays.

Numerous persons have contributed to the completion of this book. First and foremost, enormous credit is due to Mrs. Joellen Elbashir, curator of the Mays Collection at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, Washington, D.C. Her professionalism, courtesy, expertise, and compassion in honoring my many requests over the years for materials from the collection will never be forgotten. She made a memorable contribution to the success of this project. She is a jewel at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Lavonne D. Golden of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, provided valuable assistance in formatting the document. I am indeed grateful for her skills and cooperation whenever I needed her expertise. Dr. Mercy Cannon, assistant professor of English at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, provided expert proofreading to make this book more lucid and readable. She is indeed the best proofreader I know. To her I remain extremely grateful.

Special thanks are also extended to Christina M. Rodriquez, Audiovisual Department, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas, and Catherine Robertson, research staff, and Stephen Plotkin, reference archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Columbia Point, Boston, Massachusetts, for services rendered.

Again, thanks to all.

FOREWORD

Benjamin E. Mays and the Divine Struggle for

Social and Racial Justice

Samuel DuBois Cook, President Emeritus,

Dillard University

This is a rich, exciting, wide-ranging, informative, and remarkable book. It is the product of sustained and exhaustive research in a variety of libraries and other places. A wide variety of significant and previously unpublished and inaccessible material is brought together in a single convenient and easily accessible volume. The book is an amazing contribution to the exposition, analysis, understanding, and appreciation of the vast contributions, ideas, vision, character, integrity, decency, indefatigable labors, and tireless efforts of a great legend and humble and determined servant of the divine, long, and continuing struggle for social and racial justice and equality in America—Dr. Benjamin E. Mays.

Dr. Freddie C. Colston, a distinguished scholar, author, political scientist, teacher, and a quiet, restless, and inexhaustible researcher, has done it again. He has increased and deepened our knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the vast and unique contributions of Dr. Benjamin E. Mays to the long, difficult, complex, and continuing struggle for social and racial justice and equality in the American commonwealth, thus reducing the gulf between the American creed and deed, dream and reality, promise and fulfillment. This significant and multidimensional book increases our great debt to Dr. Colston for his pioneering and groundbreaking book, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays Speaks: Representative Speeches of a Great American Orator. This book was an original and unique major contribution. It whetted our appetite for more. His new book helps to satisfy our deep hunger and thirst for more of Dr. Mays’s wisdom de profundis.

In the preface, Dr. Colston asserts that the central focus of the book is on his [Dr. Mays’s] speeches on the struggle for social justice which spans over several decades, beginning in the 1920s and continuing into the 1980s. But it involves much more than Dr. Mays’s speeches. It is wide-ranging in breadth and depth. This book is a gold mine and treasure of Dr. Mays’s philosophy, institutional involvements, variety of interests, and total contribution to American life and culture. Involved, for example, are several speeches and essays on segregation, public school integration, black power, white power, Dr. Mays’s election (upon his retirement after twenty-seven years as President of Morehouse College, the alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) to two terms as president of the Atlanta Board of Education, continuing concern for the need for blacks to develop skills, cherish education, develop trained minds, and have a love affair with excellence. He insisted on the pursuit of excellence and skills by blacks. Blacks will not receive breaks, favoritism, or consideration for 246 years of slavery and 100 years and beyond of segregation and the myth of separate but equal.

Of special significance was Dr. Mays’s wisdom for blacks to avoid excessive romance about integration and desegregation that made them forget their heritage, roots, and vital self-interest and blindly abandon their institutions and self-interests under the illusion of desegregation, integration, and a postracial and color-blind society.

Significantly, Dr. Mays was in his eighties (including his late eighties, he died at the age of eighty-nine) when he delivered these eloquent, perceptive, and powerful speeches and wrote these scholarly essays. He was intellectually alive and productive until death was at his doorsteps. He kept asserting and emphasizing that there is no substitute for skills and a trained mind. He urgently said to black churches that they ought to motivate young people the way unlettered members of Old Mount Zion Baptist Church had motivated and inspired him when, as a kid, he delivered a speech and the members went wild with applause and other forms of encouragement.

Furthermore, the black church ought to maintain connection with blacks who live in the poorest section of the community. Benjamin Elijah Mays never forgot or neglected the poor, the weak, the disinherited, the people farthest down yearning and crying for a helping hand.

In typical style, one can almost hear him proclaiming with great eloquence and deep conviction: A brief word to black students. We live in a competitive society. We will compete in that society or forever remain at the bottom. In this competitive society, the man in power will give you no consideration for the fact that our ancestors were slaves for 246 years, and for another 100 years, we were slaves again under segregation. These are facts which God himself cannot change. Whether we like it or not, we cannot violence ourselves into equality; we cannot Black Power ourselves into skilled surgeons.

Dr. Mays was a proud black man! He was never ashamed of his color and for good reasons. After all, God made him black. His religious faith informed him that black humanity, like white humanity, was equally created and loved by God. God has no favorite race. One of his basic criticisms of racism is that it blasphemously assumed that God made a mistake in the creative process in terms of black humanity.

Dr. Mays asserted, "Let us not be swept off our feet by the glamour of a desegregated society. Enjoy the best white hotels in Atlanta—the Marriott and the Biltmore. But let us not forget Paschals. Buy high priced food at the Top of the Mart, but never forget the food at Paschals and Frazier’s, which is cheaper and just as good. Join the white churches if your soul feels, but don’t forget Ebenezer and Wheat Street and other Negro churches in Atlanta. Use white doctors—that’s your privilege—but don’t forget Negro doctors. The patients of white doctors die as rapidly as the patients of Negro doctors.

Go to Emory, Agnes Scott, and Harvard, but don’t forget Morehouse, Clark, Spelman, and Morris Brown. You are not better because of Harvard. Let us go into a desegregated society standing on our own feet." A basic theme of the philosophy and vision of Benjamin E. Mays was the idea and ideal of a free mind. Let nothing enslave the mind. A free mind is an absolute ethical, personal, and intellectual imperative and instrument of progress, growth, and self-realization.

This book by Dr. Colston on the vision, thought, and life of Dr. Benjamin E. Mays in the quest for social justice is of timely and timeless meaning, significance, value, relevance, and power.

Finally, perhaps the reader will forgive me for a final personal observation steeped in history, meaning, and memory. This significant, heartwarming and challenging book has perhaps been in the making on some level of consciousness, memory, and anticipation since Dr. Colston was a bright, gifted, humanistically caring, ambitious, and sensitive student at Morehouse College from which he graduated in 1959. A few years after his graduation from Morehouse, he applied for admission for graduate study in Political Science at Atlanta University, now Clark Atlanta University. At the time, I was Chairman of the Department of Political Science at Atlanta University. The applicant had an excellent academic and personal record at Morehouse. Fortunately, in addition to an outstanding academic record and other standards, Atlanta University had a requirement that applicants had to write an essay on a significant topic dealing with his or her philosophy of life or something of the sort. Dr. Colston wrote a superb essay dealing, as I recall, with his philosophy of life. His essay referred to and quoted his college president, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays. He quoted Dr. Mays on being inspired by and following an ideal or goal. As one progressed, the ideal or goal moved on higher and higher, challenging and goading the person to follow the higher and higher possibilities. The goal or ideal was a constantly moving target—pushing, pulling, nudging, haunting, and driving the individual onward and upward in an ascending order and scale. The voice of higher possibilities would not let the individual rest. He had to keep climbing and climbing higher and higher. He had no time to rest, waste, or become complacent and satisfied. The voice of higher possibilities kept him on the go in search of higher and higher achievements and possibilities of a free and open universe. This was half a century ago. Dr. Benjamin E. Mays continues to inspire Dr. Colston and keep him intellectually restless, aspiring, and climbing higher and higher in the sacred world of the life of the mind. Dr. Mays is happy with Dr. Colston’s continuing intellectual progress, restlessness, and ascendancy.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Dr. Benjamin E. Mays and the Struggle for Social Justice in America

Dr. Benjamin E. Mays was, for most of his adult life, an unyielding and eloquent advocate for social equality. He made hundreds of speeches and wrote scores of articles and essays in support of racial equality for all people and thereby contributed immensely to the transformation of America in the twentieth century from a rigidly segregated society to a desegregated one. He fought for the dignity and worth of all individuals: rich and poor, black, Hispanic, Asian-American, Native American, and white, Jews and Gentiles, men and women, Catholics and Protestants, northerners and southerners, young and old, haves and have-nots. He is referred to by many as the Godfather of the Civil Rights Movement since he gave wise counsel to many of the leaders of the civil rights movement. Mays was the spiritual and intellectual mentor of Martin Luther King Jr., the greatest civil rights leader in American history, who, by using the technique of nonviolent resistance, led massive demonstrations during the 1960s and broke the back of Jim Crow laws in the South. For his selfless and visionary leadership and monumental contribution, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and became the only African American to have a national holiday in his honor celebrated annually since 1982 on the third Monday in January. Outside of Martin Luther King’s family, Dr. Mays exerted the greatest influence on King’s spiritual and intellectual development, beginning with King’s student days at Morehouse College (1944-48) and continuing to his death in 1968. They established a prodigious friendship that is a model to be emulated.

Martin Luther King Jr., in 1957, when he was awarded the first of his honorary degrees, the L.H.D., by his alma mater, Morehouse College, confided to the commencement speaker, Dr. Frank Graham, United Nations Mediator to Pakistan, that he derived his inspiration from the teachings of Jesus, his technique from Gandhi, and his guidance and encouragement from his teacher and advisor, Dr. Mays.¹

King’s admission is vivid testimony of the impact Dr. Mays had on the civil rights leader and on the movement that changed American life and the world in the twentieth century.

The Early Years

In order to understand the motivations of the multidimensional Benjamin E. Mays, who applied his passion for excellence to everything he undertook from his childhood throughout his life, one needs to take a look at his formative years. Mays was born on August 1, 1895, to tenant farmers and former slaves, Hezekiah and Louvenia Carter Mays. His father was born in slavery in 1856 and his mother in 1862. The house in which Mays drew his first breath of life was an old wooden shack on a tenant farm, with no electricity, no running water, and no indoor plumbing. He later recalled that some of the family members even slept on the floor. Because of the international fame Mays brought to his native South Carolina, his birthplace has been restored² to its original structure and is on the register of historical sites for visitors to Greenwood County, South Carolina.

The Mays family like most sharecroppers of that era earned only subsistence wages, while residing on a rural farm in Epworth, South Carolina, ten miles from the nearest railroad.

In November 1898, before he was four years old, Mays had his first traumatic racial experience. While walking with his father one afternoon near his home, a mob of white men rode up on horseback with rifles drawn; they made his father bow down and salute them. Young Bennie was terrified at the possibility of harm being inflicted on his father, but the mob eventually rode off, looking for Negroes to lynch. This terrifying event remained etched in Mays’s psyche. He could never forget the humiliation by the white mob, and he referred to it in speeches and writings many years later. Marcellus S. Collins of the class of 1941³ at Morehouse College and a businessman and civic leader in Dania Beach, Florida, told me on one occasion that Dr. Mays remarked in the chapel in 1940 that he was lucky to be here in reference to the mob encounter. Samuel D. Cook, friend and former student of Dr. Mays, made an important assessment of the mob encounter: Every reflective and sensitive black man is haunted by the symbolic mob of racism perpetually flashing on the screen of consciousness and sensibility; the picture is inescapable—just as Dr. Mays cannot escape the memory of the physical mob during his childhood.⁴

Benjamin E. Mays was a precocious child. He often asked questions about the environment in which he was born. He wanted to know why blacks were treated as inferior beings by whites. He questioned adults at church and at home about the Bible and religion. His mother, a devoutly religious woman, believed fervently that God answers prayers. He traces his own religious convictions back to his mother, who assured her children that they were as good as anyone else.

The white mob, experienced by many blacks of the era, psychologically destroyed a number of them, but for Mays, it, along with other indignities he encountered later, was a motivating force to embrace the struggle for social justice as a lifelong mission.

At a tender age, Mays was searching for something, but he did not know which direction he was going—he wanted to be something and do something to improve the lot of black Americans. His passion for learning and the encouragement he received from teachers and adults in his community motivated him significantly.

He was the star student in the one-room Brickhouse School⁵ that required him and other students to walk seven miles one-way to school. Before he entered the school in 1901 as a first-grader, his sister Susie taught Bennie the alphabet and how to count to one hundred and to read a little. He was thus far ahead of the other students in his first grade class, and the praise of his teacher motivated him to develop a thirst for knowledge he later found to be an instrument of liberation, enabling him to question white supremacy, Jim Crow laws, and the stereotyping of blacks as collectively inferior. Mays began his interest in public speaking by appearing in school programs at the end of each year. And he continued to exhibit his public speaking talents while appearing on a Children’s Day Program at his church, Old Mount Zion Baptist, about four miles from his home, when he was about nine years old. The adults in the church gave him a clamorous ovation after his speech, predicting the young lad would go far in life. And he did.

When Mays finished the elementary grades at the Brickhouse School, his mother and Reverend James F. Marshall, the pastor of Old Mount Zion Baptist Church, persuaded his father to permit young Mays to attend the Association School in McCormick, South Carolina, to continue his education, and he finished his study there—the equivalent of a junior high school. In 1912, at age seventeen, Mays entered the high school department at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, South Carolina, against the wishes of his father who wanted him to stay home and work on the farm. But Mays had his eyes set on achieving higher goals that only an education and faith in God would allow him to accomplish. It is important to note that Mays was a diligent worker on the farm, working daily from sunup to sundown. He constantly competed with his brother Hezekiah to see who could pick the most cotton in a day. One day, the competition between the two intensified, and at the end of the day, the cotton was weighed to see which of the two brothers had picked more. Hezekiah, known as HH, had picked 424 pounds, and Bennie had picked 425 pounds.⁶ Herein was the beginning of the spirit of competition that became characteristic of Mays throughout his life. He always aimed to be first in whatever task he undertook. The farm experience helped to cultivate his trademark as an indefatigable worker that served him well in achieving goals he set for himself later in his life.

While a student at South Carolina State, Mays often returned home when school was not in session. One Sunday, as he waited on the sidewalk outside a local store for someone to hand him the family’s mail, a local white doctor, known to be mean to blacks, walked up to the neatly dressed Mays and abruptly slapped him so hard that Mays felt temporarily blinded. The doctor remarked, Move out of my way, you black rascal. You’re trying to look too good anyway. If Mays, not then a convert to nonviolence, had fought back, he probably would have been brutally beaten or lynched. For at that time, a black person had no rights—social, political, or economic—that white society was bound to respect. A black person could be lynched for little or nothing, and no court of law would convict the perpetrator. Lynching was not a crime then.

Mays experienced another memorable racial incident while he was a high school student at South Carolina State in Orangeburg. He was told by a friend that there was a house painting job at a white residence. Mays went over to apply, knocked on the front door, and indicated that a friend had told him there was a painting job opening there. The man answered the door and angrily asked Mays, What do you want? He called Mays a black SOB and instructed him to go to the back door since Negroes were not allowed to enter a white residence from the front door but were only allowed to enter from the back door in the South.⁷ Mays left the house promptly rather than suffer such humiliation and discrimination. Job or no job, he would not compromise his personal dignity by going around to the back door.

Mays, through diligent study and serious work, finished high school at South Carolina State in 1916, having excelled in his studies and public speaking. He won first prize in the oratorical contest his sophomore year, and was the valedictorian of the class of 1916. In the fall of 1916, he entered Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia, for his freshman year. He earned all As at the institution. While at Virginia Union, he was the ranking freshman in scholarship, and because of his outstanding ability and talent, he was accorded the distinction of serving as an assistant in mathematics.⁸ Afterward, he continued his quest to enter a white institution of higher learning in the North. He wanted to study and compete in an interracial environment. Two of his professors at Virginia Union, Roland A. Wingfield, 1916, mathematics, and Charles E. Hadley, 1914, YMCA faculty adviser, were graduates of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. They wrote letters of recommendation to President George Colby on behalf of Mays, and he was accepted.⁹ Mays had applied to other colleges in the east but without success because of his race.

Bates College was founded in 1855 by people who strongly believed in freedom, civil rights, and the importance of a higher education for all who could benefit from the college experience. Bates always admitted students without regard to their race, religion, or national origin.¹⁰ The first African American to graduate from the college was Henry Chandler in 1874.¹¹

Mays entered Bates College in the fall of 1917. He was required to pass a test to maintain his standing as a sophomore. He passed the test. Mays excelled at Bates in academics and public speaking, and he honed his debating skills, allowing him to become a formidable opponent in fashioning convincing arguments in support of the struggle for social justice. The highly motivated Mays participated actively in extracurricular activities, and his professors and white classmates were amicable—a stark contrast to his experiences in his native South. His experiences at Bates College enlightened him as he better understood interracial relationships that avoided racist stereotypes and viewed humans as one collective race. Mays graduated with honors in 1920¹² after having matriculated on scholarships and money earned by washing dishes in the dining hall and working as a janitor in one of the buildings on campus and other campus employment. He had fond memories of his experiences at the school. A month after he graduated from Bates, he married his high school sweetheart, Ellen Harvin, who had remained behind in South Carolina, continuing her education and working as a teacher.

Early Professional Career

Mays decided to pursue his graduate studies at the University of Chicago upon the advice of one of his former teachers at South Carolina State College, N. C. Nix. After Mays had studied for three quarters at the University of Chicago, Dr. John Hope, president of Morehouse College, visited in an attempt to recruit more faculty for the small liberal arts institution. He convinced Mays to join the faculty to teach the first course in calculus at Morehouse, along with courses in psychology and religious studies. Dr. Hope offered Mays a salary of $1,200 at $150 per month for an academic year that lasted eight months to begin in September 1921.¹³ In Atlanta, he found a city that embraced segregation and discrimination in all aspects of community life. He found the Ku Klux Klan encouraging hostility and violence against Negroes in the area as well as throughout the South. The Klan then had a headquarters in nearby Stone Mountain, Georgia. On the other hand, he found that the Atlanta Commission on Interracial Cooperation was attempting to bring the races together in a spirit of mutual understanding. Years later, Mays would become a member of this organization. Mays noted that for Atlanta in 1921, as for the entire South, segregation was God—the absolute ruler worshiped not only in secular affairs but also in the church. Mays eventually became one of the most critical opponents of segregation in the South, speaking and writing about it widely in the region and across the country.

In addition to his teaching responsibilities at Morehouse, he coached the debating team and served a stint as Dean of Men. Concurrently, he became licensed to preach in 1921 and became a pastor at Shiloh Baptist Church a few blocks from the campus of Morehouse College. Most of his church members were unlettered and unskilled workers engaged in menial service occupations. But they responded appreciably to his sermons and his pastoral counseling, which met their numerous daily emotional and spiritual needs as an oppressed minority faced with the myriad problems of segregation, discrimination, and dehumanization they experienced throughout Jim Crow Atlanta in the 1920s. Due to his rural upbringing and his childhood experiences at Old Mount Zion Baptist Church, along with his ability to connect with people regardless of status or educational achievement, Mays exhibited a talent for speaking to a variety of audiences. He was always able to identify with the needs and aspirations of the individuals to whom he spoke, a rare quality for any orator since speech is essentially communication between speaker and audience.

During Mays’s tenure at Morehouse College, he wrote an essay regarding his views on the urgent need for social justice. He proclaimed:

The great masses of our people must look to high school and college graduates for guidance and leadership along all lines. If we fail them, to whom are they to go? . . . In some sections of America, we must ride in a Jim Crow street car. We must ride in a stuffy crowded coach. Many times half of this coach is a baggage car and oftentimes we have only one lavatory for men and women. And yet we pay the same fare that our white friends pay… We are discriminated against in Economics and Politics. In many sections, we cannot vote. Jobs and positions are often denied us, not because we are insufficient, but because we are black… We should never compromise. We must take a vigorous and positive stand, and wage a legal and righteous battle, until every right that the Constitution grants us is ours in practice, as well as in theory.¹⁴

Mays’s first tenure in Atlanta lasted from 1921 until 1924. In the interim, his first wife Ellen died in 1923 from complications from an operation in an Atlanta hospital. He went on a leave of absence from Shiloh Baptist Church to return to the University of Chicago to finish his work toward the Master of Arts, which he received in 1925.

After receiving his M.A., he accepted a job at his alma mater, South Carolina State College, as a professor of English. While there, he met his second wife, Sadie Gray, from Gray, Georgia, who also taught at the college in the social sciences. They were married on August 9, 1926, in Chicago.

While Mays was still holding on to his pastoring job at Shiloh Baptist Church in Atlanta, he sought to purchase a ticket at the segregated window at the train station, and he was bold enough to ask for a Pullman berth from Atlanta to Orangeburg, South Carolina. The white ticket seller lied, saying there was no space available.

The conversation was overheard by Ralph W. Bullock, Boys Secretary for the National Council of the YMCA, who walked up to Mays and indicated he wanted to meet the Negro who was bold enough to ask for a Pullman berth in Atlanta. It was in the fall of 1925, and Ralph was on his way to Columbia, South Carolina, to plan for the upcoming Older Boys Conference. He wrote Mays after returning to New York, inviting him to speak at Benedict College in February 1926. Speaking on the topic, The Goal, Mays stated:

Were I white, and held a professor’s chair at the University of South Carolina; were you white and represented the best white schools of the commonwealth, my task would not be