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189 —8— I Have Only Just a Minute Every man and woman is born into the world to do something unique and something distinctive and if he or she does not do it, it will never be done. —mays, Quotable Quotes of Benjamin E. Mays During his tenure as president of Morehouse College, Mays constantly recited to his students an anonymous poem titled “God’s Minute”: I have only a minute. Only sixty seconds in it, Forced upon me—can’t refuse it. Didn’t seek it, didn’t choose it, But it’s up to me to use it. I must suffer if I lose it, Give account if I abuse it. Just a tiny little minute— But eternity is in it.1 He consistently encouraged them to use time wisely, because time was fleeting. For Mays, the ephemeral nature of time required that each person be deliberate and wise. Throughout the 1950s he used his own “minute” to vigorously promote his Christian vision of American society. He promoted religious and civic engagement in the struggle for human rights in the United States, as well as in South Africa, and he continued to invest himself in building the institutional infrastructure of theological education for black clergy. Time was precious. Nothing captured the moment for Mays more than the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, on May 17, 1954.2 Mays had been president of Morehouse College for fourteen years, and he, like everyone, highly anticipated the ruling. In February 1954, just three months prior to the ruling, Mays wrote an article on the case for New South, the journal of the Southern Regional Council, titled “We Are Unnecessarily Excited.” In it he analyzed the legal and social ramifications of the case from a global and ethical perspective. “We here in the deep South are unnecessarily excited over what the decision the 190 : i have only just a minute United States Supreme Court may hand down in the cases before it involving segregation in the public schools,” Mays wrote. “I believe we are confusing the issue. Some of us think that the chief issue before the Supreme Court is whether or not Negro and white children will be allowed to attend the same public school.” Of equal importance was the “moral issue” underlying the case. Brown was “not [just] a local issue affecting only those of us who live in the deep South.” The Supreme Court’s decision held global implications, “either for good or for ill.” The case, he asserted, would either win or lose the allegiances of “the peoples of Africa and Asia.” Even with a positive Supreme Court ruling, Mays continued, the process of desegregation would be “much slower than we think.” Mays cited four reasons why implementing this ruling would be slow. First, the ruling would apply only to the local cases lumped together under the rubric of Brown v. Board of Education—cases in Clarendon County, South Carolina; Prince Edward County, Virginia; the District of Columbia; Topeka, Kansas; and a case in Delaware . After the ruling, he believed, some states would immediately outlaw segregation as they had already done in higher education, and the remainder of the states might have to be ordered by the courts to comply. Second, black parents would be cautious about the decision: “They will not risk their children being embarrassed and for that reason they will not rush in just because the Supreme Court has voted against segregation.” It would, in Mays’s estimation, take a while for black parents to be comfortable even after formal segregation was declared unconstitutional. “We all know that legalized segregation is a badge of inferiority,” he wrote, “imposed by one group upon another. It stigmatizes the Negro as being unfit to move about as a free human being. The Negro wants the stigma removed so that he, too, can walk the earth with dignity. No man wants to be penalized for what God made him. The Negro wants equality before God and equality before the law.” However, the legal stigma of being a racial inferior would be removed. Third, even though blacks desired integration , they would not feel pressured to integrate because they enjoyed their own institutions. An example was the famous Riverside Church of New York City, which had “been opened to Negroes for decades and yet the Negro churches in Harlem are packed to capacity with only a few Negroes in the membership at Riverside.” He...

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