Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: A Biography

Selected Bibliography

Selected Bibliography Benjamin E. Mays’s papers are rich and vital for any scholar studying religion, education, and the civil rights movement in the United States. Housed at various locations, they are especially strong from 1940, the year Mays became president of Morehouse College, until his death in 1989. The collection at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, a valuable body of letters, articles, and correspondence, is the place to begin for any study on Mays. The only drawback to the Mays papers is that, although they are organized, they have never been fully processed and cataloged as an archival collection. The other important collection of Mays’s papers is housed at the archives of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded so much of the activity of historic black colleges. The archives are treasure trove of material on Mays’s earliest years at Morehouse. The other great collection of materials on Mays is the YMCA collection housed at the University of Minnesota. Mays, a lifelong member and participant in YMCA activities, is thoroughly chronicled in its materials on African Americans in the YMCA, especially in the 1920s. The collection of letters between John R. Mott and Mays in the Mott Papers at the Yale University Divinity School library was quite illuminating regarding the ecumenical movement and Mays’s connection to leaders in the Protestant establishment. Also in this regard, this study was significantly enhanced by the Presbyterian Historical Society’s collection of the papers of the Federal Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches, in which Mays and numerous other black religious intellectuals and activists were heavily involved. The George Kelsey Papers housed at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey were particularly helpful, as were the fabulous papers of the NAACP and the National Urban League Papers housed at the Library of Congress and available on microfilm. Unfortunately, the materials of the Morehouse College Board of Trustees were not available for this study. When they do become available, they are likely to shed new light on Mays’s activities altogether. There is a paucity of material on Mays at the Regenstein Library Special Collection of the University of Chicago. Chicago produced the most African American Ph.Ds before World War II. Professor Danielle Allen, formerly a University of Chicago faculty member and currently a faculty member at the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton, did an outstanding job of recovering aspects of this little-known black history in her web exhibit, “Integrating the Life of the Mind: African Americans at the University of Chicago, 1870–1940,” http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/webexhibits/Integrating TheLifeOfTheMind/. 299 300 : selected bibliography primary sources Archival and Manuscript Collections Atlanta University Center, Robert Woodruff Library Archives, Atlanta, Georgia Harry V. Richardson Papers Columbia University Archive, New York, New York United Negro College Fund Oral History Collection Drew University Archives, Madison, New Jersey George Kelsey Papers Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minnesota Channing Tobias Papers Young Men Christian Association Papers Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Nannie Helen Boroughs Papers National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers National Urban League Papers Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas Presidential Papers of Lyndon Johnson Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Manuscript Department, Howard University, Washington, D.C. Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection John Britton, Oral History Interview with Benjamin Mays Benjamin E. Mays Papers Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois Pullman Company Papers Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America Records, 1894–1952 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America– Division of Home Missions Records, 1950–1964 Rockefeller Foundation Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York University of Chicago Divinity School, Department of Special Collections, Chicago, Ill. University of North Carolina, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, Chapel Hill, North Carolina Oral History Interview with Hylan Lewis Arthur Raper Papers Yale University Divinity School Library, Special Collections, New Haven, Connecticut John R. Mott Papers Theological Discussion Group Papers selected bibliography : 301 Newspapers and Periodicals Atlanta Constitution Ebony Atlanta Daily World New York Times Atlanta Inquirer Norfolk’s Journal and Guide Atlantic Monthly Pittsburgh Courier Baltimore Afro-American Washington Post Chicago Defender Selected Writings of Benjamin Mays Mays, Benjamin Elijah. “After College, What Next for the Negro?” Crisis 37 (12) (1930): 408–10. ______. “Realities in Race Relations.” Christian Century 48 (12) 1931: 404–6. ______. “The Education of Negro...