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A14B Leave Me a Double Portion 1969–1984 The late springtime of 1969 was depressing indeed. Campuses were in tumult, and Nixon’s southern strategy reinforced the power of senators such as Strom Thurmond, Richard Russell, and James Eastland while at the same time elevating to nationally respected status the old-time segregationist radio and television commentator Jesse Helms. The Eleanor Roosevelt liberals were ineffectual, and indeed the term largely disappeared. In fact—with New Left campus critiques from one side and the surprisingly powerful right-wing backlash from the other side—“liberal” had become a dirty word no matter how it was modified or however softly it was pronounced. To the backlash reactionists, “liberal ” denoted softness and foolishness and connoted something in the way of apostasy to the white middle class. To the New Left and other self-styled radicals on the campuses, “liberal” denoted hypocrisy and connoted a Trojan horse for imperialism and racism. Such new terms and new usages made his writing projects quite challenging for Bennie Mays, despite the fact that in this same cruel springtime he had published a new collection of “single concept sermons ,” Disturbed about Man.1 At the end of April, Dick Rich, in his liberal and expansive mood, had arranged a reading and an autograph session for Disturbed about Man at his department store, Rich’s, which was now fully integrated. A kind and appreciative crowd of friends and well-wishers had congregated there to celebrate the publication with the Mayses. The site was the same Magnolia Room, whose onetime segregation had occasioned some distancing between Rich and other business progressives from the integrationists, but whose eventual integration, when it came, had been dismissed as “too little and too late” by more thoroughgoing reformists who even called Daddy King “Tom” and sent the prophetic Martin Luther King, Jr., away in frustration and distress. Now things were different. Dick Rich and the self-styled progressives of the community were 1969–1984 285 anxious to display their liberalism to a black downtown Atlanta. Given the new political realities in Georgia and the nation, Rich was acting with a certain amount of courage, and his gestures were appreciated. After all, the current governor of Georgia was none other than the virulent and bitter segregationist restaurateur Lester Maddox, who had defeated the champion of the progressive alliance, Ellis Arnall. The hatchet-wielding racist Maddox was emerging as a folk hero to the backlash, and the very symbol of the new racial realities in Richard Nixon’s America. In such a new Georgia, it was a pleasure to stand and read about social justice and then to sit and sign books in Rich’s integrated Magnolia Room.2 In his reading that day and in his published reflections, Bennie Mays still declared that there were white Christians who hoped for a better society and who would respond to the echoes of the old social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch , Reinhold Niebuhr, William Stuart Nelson, and Howard Thurman— and of the elderly Bennie Mays. He had revised yet again his eulogy for Martin Luther King, Jr., had revised some other sermons and reflections, had added a concluding discussion of racial and ethnic tensions in the context of Christian responsibility, and then assembled the pieces into a modest collection whose title—Disturbed about Man—seemed to catch his mood and the mood in much of the country. He dedicated the book to the slain King—“who too was disturbed about man” in this day. Despite the title, the style was optimistic and encouraging, reflecting Mays’s preaching and teaching style. He was still the social scientist in his detached analysis of data and his awareness of recent archaeological and manuscript findings among historicist theologians; yet at the same time he was quite folksy in casual and down-home references to everyday southern life. He did a superb job explaining the difficult and controversial theological concept that God and man are linked so that God suffers when man suffers—especially today, especially after the ascension of Jesus and the full development of the relationship between man and the Holy Spirit. Furthermore Mays explored the concept that “God is in need when Man is in need,” that God and man are “inseparably tied together,” and that this personal relationship is at its most poignant among the desperately poor, the sick, the disabled , the abandoned, “the least of these.” Some critics even “got it” that this dark-complected man lately accused of...

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