Benjamin E Mays Accomplishments

Benjamin E. Mays was born August 1, 1894 in Epworth, South Carolina. He was the youngest of 8 children born to former slaves. From an early age, he had a hunger for more even though he didn't finish high school but he later finished when he was 19 years old. Mays didn't limit himself due to his circumstances. Mays beat all the odds against him by finishing his schooling because in his time schools weren't for blacks. Whites tried to keep the black people illiterate. Being that he was raised in an afro Baptist tradition its wasn't a surprise that he went into religion. Mays went on and attended bates college in Lewiston, Maine he also went to university of Chicago then later got his PhD in the school of religion. With his education, he was dean

By challenging the humiliating system of segregation, however, the Mays’ angered many whites. Expecting to be fired for failing to abide by the status quo, they resigned from the Urban League in 1928. The couple moved to Atlanta, where Mays assumed a position as the secretary for the National Young Men's Christian Association, working with African-American students in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida. One of Mays's outstanding accomplishments was the partial integration of the YMCA in the North and the South. In 1930 Mays left the YMCA to accept an offer from the Institute of Social and Religious Research, a Rockefeller-affiliated agency, to conduct a study of African-American churches in the United States. Mays and a fellow minister, Joseph W. Nicholson, researched 609 urban congregations and 185 rural churches and in 1933 published the results as The Negro's Church. The intellectual rigors of research renewed Mays's lifelong quest to earn a doctorate; in 1931, he returned to the University of Chicago. In addition to studying, Mays protested discrimination on campus by fighting for equal seating at public events and equal housing in the dormitories. In the summer of 1934, after finishing his coursework, he accepted a position as the dean of the School of Religion of Howard University in Washington, D.C. His success there brought him recognition and invitations to various speaking engagements, permitting him to travel overseas for the first time in his life. Traveling taught Mays that prejudice was a worldwide problem, as he observed discrimination against people of color in other countries. With foreign leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi of India, Mays discussed strategies to effect nonviolent social change and reduce discrimination. In 1935, at the age of forty, Mays earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago School of