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A12B “To your tents” 1948–1967 “To your tents!” is a refrain of the tribe of Benjamin recorded in most translations of 1 Kings and 2 Samuel in the Bible. The speaker was the Benjaminite Sheba, and his words were exciting, affecting—and blasphemous. It was the worst part of having the name “Benjamin” and thus owning Benjaminite history in the Bible. By 1948 Bennie and Sadie Mays no longer used images of “tribes,” and this passage helps to explain why. The northern “tribes” all but disappeared, and their leave taking so weakened the southern “tribes” of Judah that the Hebrew kingdoms could not stay together to defend their disparate portions against enemies. Finally the Jews were carried off into Babylonian slavery . What the Mayses wanted instead was a stirring cry to fight for all God’s people and not only one race. “Call forth the mighty men,” King David had responded to Sheba. Bennie and Sadie Mays wanted to call forth the mighty men on behalf of God’s mission on earth. In chapel on Tuesdays, at Georgia churches on Sundays, and at interracial conferences on Saturdays, Bennie Mays called the Morehouse men out of their tents and into the fray: “All men are brothers,” and “all men must fight injustice without a gun.”1 As he spoke in chapel, as he prepared the men of Morehouse for civil rights marches and for lives of activism, as he counseled interracial groups, as he planned in his study, Bennie Mays throughout the period 1948–67 talked about consequences. He noted two things. First he told audiences that no one can control the consequences of his actions. Second he said that a man ab solutely must be responsible for facing the consequences of his actions. The contradicting and ironic juxtapositions of the otherwise simple statements were known to the Stoics, to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius; and they had been understood by W. E. B. Du Bois when that great scholar accepted full-blown Marxism and the Soviet expression of Communism as his personal resolution 232 “To your tents” of the dilemma. Bennie Mays and Sadie Mays wanted a Christian—therefore non-Communist and probably anti-Communist—resolution of the old Stoics’ dilemma, and they found it in the Gospels, especially as Aubrey and Case applied Walter Rauschenbusch to the Gospels. According to the Chicago modernists , there really is a controlling God with a largely inscrutable plan; and a Christian must struggle for justice knowing he will fail often, and he must be content that an honest struggle itself is redeeming and confident that finally God will work justice out of the many conflicts between good and bad men. Mays’s amendment to this old resolution was Gandhian: war cannot be an agent of justice, and the consequences of war cannot be worked out—even by the Divine—into a just end. Bennie and Sadie Mays had thought World War II would be an exception, but its consequences had only demonstrated the uncontrollable , even demonic, aspect of war.2 World War II had unleashed a wild nationalism, and the Cold War was now boiling up a kind of “supranationalism” that bade fair to destroy God’s plan for a unified and just kingdom. For a few months during the days of the United Front with all the talk of the “Good War” and “Double V,” Bennie and Sadie Mays had put Gandhi on a shelf and ceased talking about nonviolent resistance in international issues. But the firebombing of Dresden and wholesale butchery of civilians in German and Japanese industrial cities had set the agenda for the sheer horror of the two atomic bombs dropped on more than one hundred thousand civilians. The consequences of entering World War II were so evil that even God could not work it out: “Not even an omnipotent God can blot out the deeds of history,” Bennie and Sadie Mays quoted from an eighteenth-century popularizer of the Stoics. There must never be another world war, and Gandhi absolutely must come down off the shelf. Christians must apply Gandhi. Furthermore there could be no isolationism, no retreating to the American tents by noncombatant pacifists. Bennie and Sadie Mays insisted on the sternest of commandments: all conflicts everywhere must be joined and none can be avoided, but none can be responded to with military force. Everyone must be saved—and all together in a pacifist’s version of a mighty worldwide campaign. After a season of abandonment, the...

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