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A8B New Negroes on Detour 1926–1934 Mr. and Mrs. Mays spent the years 1926–32 at work in Tampa and Atlanta with some interesting northern trips. The husband and wife defined themselves as New Negroes working according to station and training to improve the lives of young African Americans throughout the lower South. The work kept each close to the academy. Indeed by 1931 Sadie Mays had earned her master’s degree in social work at the University of Chicago, and Bennie Mays had completed most course requirements for the Ph.D. in religion there. This work was not a career, however, for the two were as often away from the academic campus as they were on the campus, and Bennie Mays looked back on the entire period, 1924–32 (including his service as professor of English at South Carolina State College) as a time of “detours” from their appointed academic route. Above all, these were years of economic privation set in motion by a sharp agricultural recession in the rural South in 1925 followed by the more profound and more infamous Great Depression that took the urban South and even the prosperous Northeast down to the level of the already prostrate South Carolina.1 Throughout these “years of detour,” the Mayses walked paths some distance removed from the thoroughfare traveled by most academics, especially the way followed by most black professors and educators. These paths were rough, and the trip on occasion became lonely for the couple. Bennie Mays understood and accepted the reason for the difficult detour, and he often quoted the Protestant reformist Henry Van Dyke, who had written in “The Story of the Other Wise Man”: “It is better to follow even the shadow of the best than to remain content with the worst. And those who would see wonderful things must often be ready to travel alone.”2 The train trip to Tampa in 1926 was marked by hopeful predictions at its terminal point and by glad tidings at its genesis. Tampa, the Mayses were told, was 132 New Negroes on Detour not like the rest of the South but was instead a community guarded by “White Angels” who rewarded “Good Negroes”—terms Mays recorded in Born to Rebel. Older black people were said to be protected and indeed rewarded for their “Good Negro” behavior by the “White Angels,” and younger black people who bade fair to become faithful “Good Negroes” were given opportunities because of the cooperation between mature “Good Negroes” and the ruling “White Angels.” Only a few discordant cries against the all-white Tampa police force broke the reassuring and bright notes in the litany of praises sung for the city.3 The terms “Good Negroes” and “White Angels,” always problematical, were used in largely satirical sense by Bennie and Sadie Mays among themselves, but they used them in a simple and straightforward fashion in front of the white benefactors and the mature and local African Americans, for all of whom “White Angel” and “Good Negro” described real people in a real place and not caricatures. Some black people in Tampa might or might not understand the full meaning of “White Angel” and “Good Negro,” but almost none of them would have understood that the New Negroes Bennie and Sadie Mays were on this scene only during a detour. The black folk in Tampa thought that the Mays couple had settled in for a long campaign for justice there. The Urban League, whose full title was the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes, was in those days the practical and focused Martha to the biblical sister Mary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As historian John Hope Franklin marked it, “The NAACP included in its program a plan widening the industrial opportunities of Negroes, [but] it did not find time to do much in this area” as the NAACP “concentrated its crusade to destroy lynching, to secure the franchise for Negroes, and to put an end to all forms of segregation and discrimination.” The task of finding jobs for young black people—especially those newly arrived in large urban centers—and the task of training them for industrial opportunities , even the lowly and mundane but vital task of getting rural black folk accustomed to the foreign ways of cities, all these chores fell to the Urban League. Formed by the merger of three black self-help organizations in 1911, the Urban League as Bennie and...

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