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1 INTRODUCTION I Have Been a Baptist All My Life On April 9, 1968, Benjamin Elijah Mays had the burdensome honor of delivering a eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr. on the campus of Morehouse College. Time magazine photographer Flip Schulke captured the somber moment: the retired college president faced a crowd that stretched as far as the eye could see. They were looking to Mays for words of comfort and inspiration as they tried to comprehend the civil rights leader’s assassination and to summon the courage to continue the struggle. Of all that Mays accomplished in his life, he would be remembered primarily as King’s mentor.1 Yet Mays had a long career as a distinguished educator, liberal theologian, and unwavering advocate of civil and human rights. Through most of his life, he had worked in the South, led black institutions, and advocated a commitment to social justice among American Protestants. Mays stood out among the black leaders who sustained the struggle against segregation for decades before African Americans’ drive for full citizenship burst into the national spotlight. His teachings and example inspired generations of African American students and clergy to develop their intellectual talents and calibrate their ethical compass in order to challenge injustice. Looking at Schulke’s photograph more than forty years later, we realize that Mays was eulogizing not only his spiritual son but also the civil rights mass protest that had emerged in the South during the postwar years and sparked a massive political rebellion on city streets across the nation. Mays’s own life took him from the nadir of Jim Crow in the Deep South, to the long march of civil rights agitation and education, to the culmination of the Black Freedom struggle in the late 1960s. Long before King began his ministry in Montgomery , Mays had advocated that black churches become centers of civil rights activism, and he was delighted when they nurtured a democratic movement that brought down the walls of racial segregation in the United States. He had seen his dreams fulfilled by King’s rise to national prominence from the ranks of Morehouse graduates and black Protestant clergy. The irony of that funerary occasion was not lost on him: Jim Crow had finally been vanquished, but King, along with many other leaders and activists, had been struck down. Mays stood not in triumph but in grief before a crowd as large as the one present in the last days of the 1965 march from Selma to the state capitol of Alabama. Soon a new generation of elected politicians and civic activists would take responsibility for the issues of citizenship, economic justice, and peace that remained unresolved. On that day, though, Mays was the man of the hour, drawing on his hard-won wisdom, long-term perspective, and unshaken faith in order to explain what King’s life meant to the nation and the world, then and in the future. His funeral oration emphasized the theological foundations and ethical dimensions of this democratic movement for social change. Mays’s long career serves as a window on African American life in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. Born in 1894 in rural Epworth, South Carolina, to parents who were ex-slaves and who toiled as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, he experienced firsthand the degradation and terror of the Jim Crow South. He grew up in the Afro-Baptist tradition that had melded the Atlantic world’s revivalist movement with the folk theology and spiritual practices of African-inspired slave religion. For Mays, this form of Christianity emphasized the “otherworldly” dimension of faith. Its teachings were highly moralistic, and clergy with little formal education led it. Mays saw the Afro-Baptist faith tradition as a survival mechanism that enabled blacks to endure social evils rather than as a way to change them. In his young adulthood, Mays recognized that southern racism itself was rooted in biblical literalism and Christian fundamentalism. He believed that both white and black religious ignorance contributed to the maintenance of the antidemocratic spirit that underpinned social injustice. Having grown up in this milieu, Mays felt both a calling to the ministry and a passion for higher education. His determined quest led him through networks of white and black Baptist institutions from black schools in South Carolina to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. At Bates Mays first encountered modern biblical scholarship and began to espouse the Social Gospel as expressed in the writings of Walter...

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