Researching Benjamin Mays

Mays was born in the Jim Crow South on a repurposed cotton plantation to freed sharecroppers. He traveled North to attend Bates College and the University of Chicago from where he began his career in activism as a pastor in Georgia's Shiloh Baptist Church. After a brief career as a professor, he was appointed the founding Dean of the School of Religion at Howard University in 1934 which elevated him to national prominence as a proponent of the New Negro movement. Six years later, Mays was tapped to lead Morehouse out of its financial insecurity. Over his tenure from 1940 to 1967, the college's financial endowment doubled, enrollment quadrupled, and it became academically competitive. By the 1960s, Mays established the college as a feeder school for "African-American firsts" in the United States.

Due to the college's small student body, Mays personally mentored many students, most notably King; the two first met in 1944. King was known as Mays' "spiritual son" and Mays his "intellectual father." After King's "I Have A Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, Mays gave the benediction. Five years later, upon King's assassination and death, Mays delivered the eulogy where he described King in his "No Man is Ahead of His Time" speech. Mays stepped down from the Morehouse presidency in 1967 continuing to work as a leader in the African American community through national social tours. He presided over the Atlanta Board of Education from 1969 to 1978, where he initiated the racial desegregation of Atlanta.

Mays' contributions to the civil rights movement have had him credited as the "movement's intellectual conscience" or alternatively the "Dean [or Schoolmaster] of the Movement". Historian Lawrence Carter described Mays as "one of the most significant figures in American history". Memorials include hundreds of streets, buildings, statues, awards, scholarships, grants, and fellowships named in his honor. Numerous efforts have been brought forward to posthumously award Mays the Presidential Medal of Freedom as well as feature him on a U.S. postage stamp. Mays has, since 1995, been entombed on the campus of Morehouse, with his wife, Sadie Gray, after an initial burial in Augusta.