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241 EPILOGUE Lord, the People Have Driven Me On We ought not to seek greatness; we ought to seek to serve and when we seek to serve we will bump into greatness along the way. —mays, Quotable Quotes of Benjamin E. Mays When Born to Rebel was published, Mays was nearly seventy-seven. Though aged, he never relented in his struggle to achieve full democracy for black Americans. Segregation in American society was simply wrong religiously or otherwise. He had written journal articles, newspaper columns, and books urging both blacks and whites to rethink their understanding of Christianity in order to end white supremacy. He thoughtfully engaged with and challenged American society. Along with his black theological peers, he helped to reformulate American civil religious discourse to aid black freedom struggles. “Benjamin Mays is one of those persons in America who understood long ago that racial prejudice and discrimination were problems of the human spirit,” wrote Mays’s friend theological ethicist George Kelsey in an unpublished paper. Kelsey observed in Mays’s ideology that if answers were to be found for the problem of racism then the “human spirit must be taken into account.” For Mays, Kelsey assessed, God, first and foremost, cared about the person, and it was up to the individual to freely accept or reject God’s love. God’s love held the possibility of heroic action for everyone. As a result of God’s love, each person had the potential to achieve and serve in spite of difficult circumstances of life. Kelsey concluded, “If one should inquire as to what the fundamental ground of Christian moral decision in the thought of Benjamin Mays is, his search will lead to a faith that is trust. Faith is first, last, and always act. When it is not act, it is not alive and therefore is not.”1 As Kelsey critically reflected, Mays’s emphasis on faith as action proved to be an intellectual joist in civil rights mobilization. By the late 1960s, however, Mays’s theological idealism seemed outdated to a new generation of black Americans activists who challenged the intellectual pieties of Christian theology that grounded his thinking. His viewpoint on racial injustice and exclusion did not speak to the level of resentment and discontent that young black Americans felt, particularly after the assassination of 242 : epilogue Martin Luther King Jr.2 He believed that the ends of religion and democratic politics were always human freedom and spiritual unity. Black religious intellectuals and their nonreligious counterparts parted company on whether notions of the spirit or love had anything to say in addressing political power structures. Religious thought as social critique was politely dismissed and became relegated to a handful of seminaries and divinity schools where strands of liberation theology—Latin American, Black, and Feminist—were being taught. How strange, because Mays argued consistently that religion and religiosity were crucial to shaping black political actions. He knew that black people found solace, hope, and joy in faith, church, and religious institutions. It was therefore paramount for him that all black intellectuals attempt to analyze and appreciate the significance of black religious faith. Yet, consistently, scholars and critics understate the religious dimension of black life and its influence on the civil rights struggle and black activism.3 In 1971, the writer Ishmael Reed reviewed Born to Rebel for the New York Times Book Review. Reed wittily observed that Mays’s life “exemplifies a tradition of excellence, illustrated elsewhere by Ralph Ellison’s ‘Long Oklahoma Eye,’ Satchel Paige’s ‘Hesitation Pitch,’ the legendary black man who built a whole town with 5 million handmade bricks, and Marcus Garvey’s tenacity.” Reed continued, “In this book, Mays directs his message to a young generation of Americans. What he seems to be saying is, ‘You’re not the first to come along with black pride and a quest for dignity. My generation possessed all of these qualities and what is more we had it worse.”4 Reed pointed out that the generational differences that were publicly heralded in the news media were not as substantive as headlines screamed they were at the time.5 Reed picked up on Mays’s point that black life was more expansive than contemporary commentators would have one believe it was. He noted that Born to Rebel was a helpful reminder to the “younger generation that ‘the black experience’ is a galaxy and not the slave-pen many whites and blacks desire it be.” Overall, Reed was...

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