For Reginald Floyd ’86, driving nearly three hours across South Carolina to witness the unveiling of the Dr. Benjamin E. Mays Statue was a small act to honor a civil rights giant.

As Floyd approached Greenwood on the Benjamin Mays Highway, he thought about how his generation stands on “the shoulders of the giants who paved the way for our opportunities. I would not have missed this for the world.”

Video by Theophil Syslo of the Mays Statue unveiling on Nov. 4, 2017.

Designed and created by Jon Hair, the statue was unveiled Nov. 4 at the Dr. Benjamin E. Mays Historical Preservation Site, located a few miles from Epworth, where Mays was born in 1894.

Mays, a 1920 �ֲ���ý graduate, became a celebrated theologian, civil rights leader, and president of Morehouse College.

“We thank God for the life of Benjamin Elijah Mays, a prophet of freedom.”

He was known as “the schoolmaster of the movement” for “inspiring generations of African American students and clergy to develop their intellectual talents and calibrate their ethical compass in order to challenge injustice,” wrote biographer Randal Maurice Jelks. One of Mays’ students at Morehouse was Martin Luther King Jr., who called Mays “my spiritual mentor and my intellectual father.”

The Rev. Otis Moss, a Mays protege, delivered the keynote address at the unveiling.

“We thank God for the life of Benjamin Elijah Mays, a prophet of freedom,” Moss told his audience. “He fought for freedom with every fiber of his body and being, all of his life. We celebrate a life and a legacy, remembering the greatness of an individual who blessed this nation and the world.”

The Mays Preservation Site, which opened in 2011, features Mays’ birthplace and home, which was relocated from a pasture in Epworth in 2004; a 19th-century one-room schoolhouse; and a barn-like structure that serves as as museum and theater.

�ֲ���ý was well-represented at the unveiling by more than a dozen alumni, parents, and staff, including James Reese, associate dean of students for international student programs at �ֲ���ý.

“His life is a legacy that we can all continue to learn from.”

“Mays always stated that �ֲ���ý was an incredibly special part of his life, in addition to his education,” Reese said.

Through a bequest, Mays established the Benjamin E. Mays Scholarship Fund at �ֲ���ý. Benjamin Robinson ’86, a Mays Scholar, said attending the unveiling was “a tremendous honor.”

“His life is a legacy that we can all continue to learn from,” Robinson said. “I am thankful I’m here and honored to be in the presence of his greatness.”

Alicia Hunter Warner ’94 said the symbolism of the unveiling offers an important historical counterpoint.

“South Carolina has done a lot recently to pull down statues and memorabilia of the Confederacy,” said Warner, who is a member of the Alumni Council. The Mays statue sends an important message for “civil rights and human rights in our country right now.”

Joining Reese and Warner as official �ֲ���ý representatives were John Amols ’72, a past member of the Alumni Council, and Sally Ehrenfried ’89, past president of the Alumni Association and member of the �ֲ���ý Fund Executive Committee.

In one single year in the United States, “102 unarmed black men, women, and children were shot and killed by police in this country,” Shaun King told a �ֲ���ý audience on Oct. 11.

The year was not during the violent depths of 20th-century Jim Crow racism, either. It was 2015.

And that number, 102, “is why they’re taking a knee,” said King, a journalist and justice activist.

King was referring, of course, to Colin Kaepernick and other athletes, including some at �ֲ���ý and its NESCAC peers, inspired by the San Francisco 49ers quarterback to kneel, in protest against racial injustice, during the national anthem at the start of games.

Senior social justice writer for the New York Daily News and a leading voice in the Black Lives Matter movement, King spoke to a capacity audience in the Gomes Chapel, offering an overview, punctuated with penetrating detail, of the current fractured state of U.S. race relations.

A graduate of Morehouse College, King opened his talk with a few words about longtime Morehouse president and �ֲ���ý graduate Benjamin E. Mays, Class of 1920. “At Morehouse, literally, he is like a god on our campus,” King said.

King described Mays as “probably one of the two or three most important people” in the life of Morehouse graduate and civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.

Black Lives Matter activist and New York Daily News justice writer Shaun King speaks in Gomes Chapel on Oct. 11, 2016. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

“When you think about the roots and the origins of the modern-day civil rights movement, you will always hear Dr. Mays’ voice, because he was the guy behind the scenes…that leaders were consistently going to” for guidance and validation.

“So �ֲ���ý is tied up in that. And that’s a powerful thing, and I hope all of you understand, it should be a point of pride that Dr. Mays not only attended here, but was embraced and loved here. And so I’m honored to be here,” he said.

Central to King’s address was the idea that — despite great thinkers’ erstwhile belief that human morality was always improving — the quality of human behavior has its downs as well as its ups. And right now, America is living on the downhill slope.

As King put it, “We’re in a dip.”

He got this concept during the fall of 2014 — “a really pivotal time in my life” — when he and many other Americans were reeling from the summer’s spate of police shootings, many of which were caught on video. At the same time, King was suffering through an eminently droppable graduate-school course in historiography.

A theme central to racial justice activist Shaun King’s talk at �ֲ���ý was that American society has lapsed into a “dip” in morality and behavior. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

But that course introduced him to Leopold von Ranke, a 19th-century scholar regarded as the father of modern historiography. Von Ranke discovered the variability in moral progress by creating a massive timeline of historic events and searching it for basic trends.

“Sometimes human beings are amazing, and sometimes they’re really terrible,” King said. “Sometimes the quality of humanity goes up, and sometimes it goes really far down.”

Moreover, it’s often hard to know where we are in the cycle: “When you wake up, brush your teeth, and get ready for class, you’re just thinking, ‘I want to be on time for class,'” King said. “You’re not thinking about the history of the moment.”

Supported by slides and video, King had plenty of evidence for the dip theory, from the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide to the rise of Donald Trump.

He pointed out that the June 2015 killings of nine African Americans by a white man during a Bible study session in a church in Charleston, S.C., was the deadliest U.S. hate crime against blacks in at least 85 years.

And that massacre “took place on our watch last year,” King said.

He noted that in 1902 the number of lynchings of blacks also reached 102. “It jars me that we have to go back over 100 years to find a single year when as many African Americans were lynched as were shot and killed by police” in 2015.

A rapt audience listens to racial justice activist Shaun King in the Gomes Chapel on Oct. 11, 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“I say that particularly — I say that with love — for the white folk in the room [who are] listening with love, who are having a hard time processing the anger, the frustration, the protests, having a hard time making sense of it,” said King.

“It’s disturbing. I’m not even saying that lynching and the killings by police are a one-to-one parallel, but they’re pretty close, and that we would have to go back to 1902 — it’s a problem.”

“This system was created to deliberately prosecute African Americans for low-level drug offenses and nonviolent offenses.”

Citing Douglas Blackmon’s book Slavery by Another Name, King talked at length about the perversion of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment was originally intended to abolish slavery unconditionally, but was rewritten to accommodate slave labor for convicts.

This gave rise to new laws that essentially criminalized being black in order to ensure a steady labor supply in the prisons. That strategy took a new twist during the 1970s and 1980s with drug laws that ensured different standards of criminal justice for blacks and whites — leading to U.S. incarceration rates that are as much as 1,000 percent higher than other developed nations’.

“That there are stores where you can buy marijuana legally, and then my friend Brandon is serving a 10-year prison sentence [for marijuana possession] is ridiculous,” King said. “He’s serving a 10-year sentence because this system was created to deliberately prosecute African Americans for low-level drug offenses and nonviolent offenses.”

With a Q&A to follow, King closed his formal address with a look at The Atlantic Monthly‘s decision to endorse Hillary Clinton for president — only the third such endorsement in the magazine’s 159-year history. The others were for Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson.

“We have never found our way accidentally out of a dip in the quality of humanity.”

“I actually campaigned very heavily for Bernie Sanders and I’ve been a huge critic of Hillary Clinton,” King said, but he found himself “very moved” by The Atlantic‘s action.

What the endorsement says to King is that this dip that we’re in ranks in momentousness with only two other inflection points in American history: the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860; and, in 1964, a time of pivotal choice between civic progress and stability under Johnson, or the undoing of such progress under Barry Goldwater.

Prior to his evening talk, Shaun King visits the course “#blacklivesmatter,” taught by Yannick Marshall, a visiting instructor in African American studies. “When I speak at colleges, this is what I look forward to the most,” he said of meeting �ֲ���ý students. “And this is one of the few Black Lives Matter classes in the country.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“Bigger than the endorsement is the realization that, OMG, we are living in one of those times,” King said. “And it made sense to me, deep in my soul, because many of us have felt like it was one of those times.

“What I want you to understand is, we will not get out of that dip by accident. We have never found our way accidentally out of a dip in the quality of humanity.”

He said, “It’s going to take enormous efforts, nationwide reforms, and, I’m very afraid, major sacrifices.”

The concluding Q&A was nearly as meaty as King’s formal address. Smart questioners gave him opportunities to discuss the financial motivations that drive a racist criminal justice system, such as the revenue from fines and bail that was so important to the municipal bottom line in Ferguson, Mo.; and to assess the accomplishments of Black Lives Matter.

Another questioner wondered how to best allocate one’s activist energy with so many social justice problems confronting us. King quoted Martin Luther King Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

King allowed that “most of my life, I’ve only fought for issues that directly affected me and my circle. But for the past two or three years, I have tried to practice fighting against xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment in this country,” as well as LGBT rights, “even though it is not my life.”

He said, “For all of us in the room, there’s something really powerful about fighting for a problem you don’t have.”

�ֲ���ý’ Office of Equity and Diversity brought King to campus with support from the Athletics department and the programs in African American studies and American Cultural studies.

�ֲ���ý College’s distinctive Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance — in lieu of classes, a day of workshops and discussions with expert guests, all highlighted by a college gathering and keynote — owes much of its character to cataclysmic, yet coincident, world events 25 years ago.

That would be the beginning of the Persian Gulf War on Jan. 16, 1991, the U.S.’s first major armed conflict in a generation. Occurring in the world’s most volatile region, the outbreak of war rocked the �ֲ���ý community in the days leading up to MLK Day, Jan. 21.

Students, particularly, were a mess.

Writing in The �ֲ���ý Student, Steve Hochstadt, then a �ֲ���ý history professor and, since 2006, professor of history at Illinois College, described a “depressed and disoriented” student body with an intense “hunger for information” (this was pre-Internet, remember).

Following the start of the Persian Gulf War in January 1991, a sheet hangs, likely in Chase Hall, offering community members the chance to write the names of people they know in the Middle East. (�ֲ���ý Communications)

The �ֲ���ý faculty moved quickly to help students make sense of the chaos, a desire springing from their core mission as educators. “We felt we had the pulse of the student body,” Hochstadt wrote.

“As educators, we have a fundamental responsibility to continue educating,” said then-Dean of the College James Carignan ’61, who died in 2011.

Two key figures in the development of the college’s MLK Day tradition, Marcus Bruce ’77 (left) and James Reese, listen to the 2015 MLK Day keynote address. Bruce is the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, and Reese is an associate dean of students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In a special meeting on Jan. 18, the faculty voted to cancel classes on MLK Day, Monday, Jan. 21, “in honor of and to reflect upon Dr. King’s contributions to world peace, and to reflect upon the issues of peace and justice in the Middle East,” in the words of religion professor Marcus Bruce ’77.

Carl Benton Straub, then dean of the faculty, proposed an all-college convocation to begin the day’s programming. An ad-hoc faculty committee planned a series of events, discussions, and workshops, many of which would use Martin Luther King’s life and legacy as a means to understand the myriad issues at play.

Among the topics were “Is This a Just War?” “The Science and Technology of War,” and “The Mideast War and Jews in America.”

Flyers and messages during the Persian Gulf War hang, likely outside Ladd library, including one about the movie “Parenthood” being shown at Frye Street Union, noting that “if people prefer to watch the news, that’ll be fine too.” (�ֲ���ý Communications)

Bruce is now the college’s Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies. As educators, he says today, “we are always engaging our students” in both the “practice and cultivation of freedom and conscience.”

Twenty-five years ago, he adds, the coincident timing of the Gulf War and MLK Day created the ultimate teachable moment, giving the �ֲ���ý community the chance to reflect on “what it meant to practice freedom and conscience in that specific moment, to pause and allow students to breathe and consider their response to events.”

During the Persian Gulf War, the slogan “support the troops” emerged alongside anti-war messages, like these, likely in Chase Hall Gallery. (�ֲ���ý Communications)

Donald Harward was in his second year as �ֲ���ý president. In his first year, 1990, he had led �ֲ���ý in elevating its MLK Day observance with a weeklong program called “Raise Every Voice.”

That program built on an already long tradition of MLK Day observances at �ֲ���ý created in large part by Carignan and James Reese, then, as today, a dean in Student Affairs and an active member of the college’s MLK Day Planning Committee.

Recalling the events of 1991, Reese talks about the “ominous” feeling on campus in the days leading up to the war, and how the more politically minded students had asked their professors whether cancelling classes would be possible. “Their suggestions and the momentous momentum shown by the faculty were striking and memorable,” he says.

A peace protest passes by Chase Hall in the days following the start of the Persian Gulf War in January 1991. (�ֲ���ý Communications)

In 1991, against the backdrop of the faculty’s nearly unprecedented vote to cancel classes, Harward opened the all-college convocation and set the tone both for that day and for many future observances of King’s birthday at �ֲ���ý.

Extraordinary events affecting moral and political life, Harward said, demand equally exceptional responses.

“Not to pause and to assist student understanding of these events, their causes, and their implications, would, in the judgment of the faculty, be a failure to meet an extraordinary student need,” he said.

He added:

Seventy-five years ago, Benjamin E. Mays ’20 sat where you sit, his intellectual and moral resources shaped by his teachers and his colleagues here at �ֲ���ý. His commitment to the cathedral of ideas, and the primacy of respect for human worth, were carried to his student, Martin Luther King Jr., whose own life and commitment we honor as a nation today.

In his articulation of the principles of nonviolence, Dr. King called for the development of the technologies of peace; he asked that its roots and causes be studied; he challenged us to work at making peace. Nonviolence, he argued, was the application of ethics to worldly politics….

“The easy, empty rhetoric of slogans and jingoism will not help.”

We are connected — teachers, students, Dr. Mays, Dr. King — and the realities that we must confront are connected — peace and war, justice and inequalities, human worth and human suffering.

Restructuring the educational events of this particular day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in the context of the realities of the Middle East is, in the judgment of the faculty, an educational opportunity which can make clear such connectedness….

[The topics discussed today] are consistent with the insistence that the context, the attitude, and the justification of our efforts be that the nature of this community is to be an arena for the examination and the conflict of ideas and values. The easy, empty rhetoric of slogans and jingoism will not help.

If there is a metaphor of healing and comfort within a community, the balm for that healing is that our connectedness is strengthened by attention to our individual, moral, and intellectual independence, and by the encouragement provided here.

Benjamin Mays biographer Randal Maurice Jelks.

Benjamin E. Mays was a civil rights theorist, educator, preacher, Morehouse College president and mentor to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Mays was also one of �ֲ���ý College’s most influential graduates, a member of the class of 1920. The college presents award-winning Mays biographer Randal Maurice Jelks, a member of the University of Kansas faculty, in a talk at 7 p.m. Monday, March 25, in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St.

Sponsored by the college’s Office of Intercultural Education, the lecture is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-8376.

Jelks is the author of Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), the first full-length biography of the man King called his “spiritual and intellectual father.”

In recognition of Schoolmaster of the Movement, Jelks recently received the 2013 Literary Award for Nonfiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, one of several awards with which the organization salutes excellence in works by African-American authors.

Mays was born in 1894 to sharecroppers in rural South Carolina. His first memory was of a white mob threatening his father. From an early age, Mays was determined both to get the best education and to break the grip of Jim Crow laws on the South.

In 1917, he entered �ֲ���ý as a 23-year-old sophomore after a year at Virginia Union University, where two �ֲ���ý alumni on the faculty encouraged him to try their alma mater. He came to Lewiston not only for a better education than a person of color could reasonably expect down South, but to prove his intellectual equality to whites.

Proof abounded. Mays won a speaking award in his first year at �ֲ���ý, finished his senior year as captain of a triumphant debate team and was one of 15 in his class to graduate with honors, among other achievements.

Central to Schoolmaster of the Movement is Jelks’ argument that by connecting the substance of Christianity with the responsibility to challenge injustice, Mays prepared the black church for its central role in the civil rights movement.

And it was at �ֲ���ý, Jelks writes, that Mays laid the groundwork for “a new biblical interpretation that could mobilize black communities to take action against Jim Crow’s enforced apathy.” Mays’ studies in religion steered him toward an intellectual structure for both his Baptist faith and his personal mission “to uplift his people,” in Jelks’ words.

Mays and �ֲ���ý had a profound and enduring effect on each other. As Mays famously summed up his experience in Born to Rebel: “�ֲ���ý College did not ’emancipate’ me: it did the far greater service of making it possible for me to emancipate myself, to accept with dignity my own worth as a free man.”

Those words are echoed in the college’s mission statement, which begins: “Since 1855, �ֲ���ý College has been dedicated to the emancipating potential of the liberal arts.” Mays exemplifies commitments to social justice, individual worth and access to education that have always been bedrock values for �ֲ���ý.

Jelks is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Kansas, with a joint appointment in African and African American studies. He is co-editor of the journal American Studies and a co-founder and editor of the Michigan-based blog , which covers politics, culture and social activism.

He received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Michigan, a master’s of divinity from McCormick Theological Seminary and a doctorate in comparative black histories from Michigan State University. He is an ordained clergyman in the Presbyterian Church.

Jelks also wrote the award-winning African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

The Benjamin �ֲ���ý Society

E. Robert Kinney ’39, LL.D. ’85, has been awarded �ֲ���ý’ highest alumni honor, the Benjamin Elijah Mays Medal, for distinguished service to the College and to the larger community worldwide. Kinney, a former CEO of General Mills, received the honor from the Alumni Council Nov. 8 in Minneapolis, at the third gathering of the Benjamin �ֲ���ý Society, philanthropists who have given $1 million or more in lifetime gifts to the College.

The Benjamin �ֲ���ý Society recognizes the extraordinary philanthropy and personal commitment of �ֲ���ý donors who have made the College a primary priority, and includes donors with $1 million or more in lifetime gifts to the College. Membership is the highest distinction conferred upon benefactors of the College and is given in the spirit of �ֲ���ý’ first benefactor, Benjamin �ֲ���ý, whose gifts were instrumental in the earliest days of the College.

To learn more about the Benjamin �ֲ���ý Society, please contact Kelly Kerner, Vice President for College Advancement at 207-786-6247 or kkerner@bates.edu. [More…]

View slide show: 'We Can Relate'

Lisa D’Oyen ’09 of Kingston, Jamaica, holds her cell phone in one hand and two open boxes of Hostess crème-filled chocolate Zingers in the other. Standing beside a table lined with edible snacks, lubricated latex condoms, and fact cards, D’Oyen and her psychology classmates share information about HIV/AIDS with students heading to lunch. Their sound system broadcasts hip-hop as a Yale Divinity School recruiter also vies for student attention.

A standard Chase Hall tableau? Not today. This afternoon, D’Oyen stakes her ground in Manley College Center at Spelman College, the historically black women’s college in Atlanta, where she and Mbali Ndlovu ’09 of New York City are spending their fall semester.

Like any of the College’s myriad off-campus study offerings, the exchange program with Spelman and Morehouse hopes to offer students the right experience at the right time: during their junior year, when students are equipped to dig deeper into their intellectual, social, and emotional beings.

For D’Oyen and Ndlovu, part of this exploration will involve race, for at Spelman and Morehouse, the nation’s two premier historically black liberal arts colleges, “the courses and the context provide a sensitivity and awareness of racial issues that,” says Steve Sawyer, associate dean of students and director of off-campus study, “is impossible to replicate on a small New England campus — no matter how well-intentioned.”

As part of her pschology course, Lisa D'Oyen works at an HIV/AIDS awareness table in the college center at Spelman College, the historically black women's college in Atlanta.

Another overlay is gender. Spelman wants visiting students like D’Oyen and Ndlovu to leave the school with a “stronger sense of self, their place in the world, and what the Spelman ‘sisterhood’ is all about,” says Desiree Pedescleaux, who oversees the institution’s domestic exchange programs.

Ndlovu and D’Oyen get a sense of the sisterhood from “The Black Female Body in American Culture,” taught by M. Bahati Kuumba, associate professor of women’s studies. The professor discusses how the human body is a system of symbols and how, for black women in U.S. society, those symbols can suggest a political struggle.

After class, Ndlovu schedules an appointment with Kuumba, wanting the professor’s advice on designing a senior thesis topic for her �ֲ���ý majors in African American and women and gender studies.

Everything about the professor resonates with the two young women. “She’s an activist. She’s been out there. And she’s very political,” D’Oyen says. True, there are political activists on the �ֲ���ý faculty, she says, but at Spelman “we get the black perspective from black women. We can relate.”

“Like for the first time in my college career,” Ndlovu adds.

Mbali Ndlovu ’09 (left) and Lisa D’Oyen ’09, who studied at Spelman College during the fall, join Claudeny Obas ’09, who spent spring 2006 at Morehouse College, at the Benjamin E. Mays National Memorial at Morehouse. Mays graduated from �ֲ���ý in 1920.

One morning in late November, D’Oyen and Ndlovu head across the street to Morehouse to see the Benjamin E. Mays National Memorial. At once, the �ֲ���ý-Morehouse connection seems real, though they’d heard about it all fall. “Every Morehouse student we met automatically knew what �ֲ���ý was,” Ndlovu says.

At the monument, the women are joined by Claudeny Obas ’09 of New York City, who’s in Atlanta visiting friends he made while studying at Morehouse in 2006.

Obas, a veteran of mostly white educational environments, talks about what might be gained from a semester at Morehouse, particularly by someone who’s never been in a minority situation — racial, sexual, religious, or other: “an understanding of what it’s like not having as many people to lean on in terms of your peers, and [having to go] outside of your comfort zone just to make the effort to reach people.”

For Obas, the semester started with getting “stuck in a room for two hours learning the school song,” he recalls, but the indoctrination into the Morehouse mystique paid off. “I felt I was joining a long line of prestige,” he says. Obas’ semester at Morehouse deepened his understanding that he “works better” in the multifaceted social milieu of an urban college. “I’ve always known that, but it was made much more apparent to me at Morehouse.”

He experienced one particularly glittering facet of Morehouse life thanks to Roland Davis ’92, assistant dean of students at �ֲ���ý.

Davis, whose father chairs the Morehouse board of trustees, said that if Obas was accepted for the Morehouse semester, Davis would get him tickets to the school’s “Candle in the Dark” gala.

And that February, Obas was indeed in black tie at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta to see famed photographer Gordon Parks and Tony Award–winner Geoffrey Holder receive their Candle awards for excellence in their fields. Obas also witnessed several Morehouse alums receive their “Bennie” awards for service, achievement, and trailblazing.

“It was quite the experience,” Obas says.

Photographs and text by Phyllis Graber Jensen

�ֲ���ý, Morehouse, Spelman

The connection between �ֲ���ý and the nation’s two premier historically black liberal arts colleges — Morehouse for men and Spelman for women — dates to 1940, the year Benjamin E. Mays ’20 began his 27-year Morehouse presidency.

The �ֲ���ý-Morehouse-Spelman Exchange Program was established in 1994, the centennial year of Mays’ birth. While the program has had modest student participation from both sides over the years, �ֲ���ý is now focusing greater attention on this and similar initiatives, part of redoubled efforts to incorporate a wider spectrum of people, perspectives, and disciplines within the �ֲ���ý experience.

A pioneer in the field of African American women’s history and chair of the Department of African American Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, Professor Sharon Harley is the keynote speaker for the 2006 Martin Luther King Jr. Day observances at �ֲ���ý College. Classes at the college are canceled and special programming is scheduled throughout the day with an emphasis on the theme “The Noble Road to Peace: Storming the Battlements of Injustice.”

Scheduled for 10:45 a.m. Monday, Jan. 16, in the �ֲ���ý College Chapel, Harley’s address is part of a celebration of King’s life and work that includes performances, workshops and a debate between �ֲ���ý and Morehouse college students. All events are open to the public free of charge. For more information, call 207-786-6400, or see for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

“The noble road to peace is not just a matter of not having war,” says John McClendon, associate professor of African American and American cultural studies at �ֲ���ý. “More importantly, peace must be joined to justice.” Chaired by McClendon, the �ֲ���ý committee that organizes the annual observance of King’s birthday chose to recognize King’s ardent opposition to the Vietnam War as it damaged lives abroad and diverted resources from social ills in the United States. “At this time in history we see a very similar situation, especially after Katrina, where 30 percent of the National Guard equipment that could save lives in New Orleans was used to take lives in Iraq,” McClendon says.

The college also co-sponsors an annual MLK Day Read-In where faculty, staff, students and members of the community will share a picture book with Martel School students in grades 4-6 at 1 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 19, and Friday, Jan. 20. Those interested in volunteering should e-mail Katie Seamon at this kseamon@bates.edu or call 207-786-8351.

The King Day observance begins on the eve of the holiday, at 7 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 15, with a memorial service of worship in the College Chapel, College Street. The Rev. William R. Jones, Florida State University Professor Emeritus, a pathfinder in the field of African American philosophy, delivers the sermon, ” Martin Luther King’s Noble Path to Peace: Pioneers, Pedestals, and Perils,” followed with musical performances by �ֲ���ý students.  The Multicultural Center hosts an 8:30 p.m. reception with Jones after the service at 75 Franklin St.

The author of Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology, the landmark critique of the black church’s treatment of evil and the nature of suffering, Jones is an internationally recognized scholar in the fields of liberation theology, African-American religion, religious humanism and multicultural education. Best known for his contributions to the theory of oppression and conflict resolution, Jones has written more than 100 articles about oppression, justice, black theology, counter-violence and the role of the church in social change.

Student debaters from �ֲ���ý and Morehouse colleges kick off King Day itself when they argue the topic, “On the Immediate Withdrawal of Troops from Iraq: Noble Road to Peace or Accommodation to Terrorism?” The debaters will be introduced at 9 a.m. in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

The debate will begin at 9:30 a.m. The match has historic resonance for the schools, which share a continuing commitment to collaborative projects. The nation’s largest liberal arts college for men, Morehouse was Martin Luther King Jr.’s alma mater. One of its longtime presidents was a 1920 �ֲ���ý graduate and accomplished debater Benjamin Mays, a lifelong adviser to the great civil rights leader. Mays  and the eulogized King in 1968.

Professor Sharon Harley delivers her 10:45 a.m. keynote address, “Race Women, Race Man: Imagined and Real Conversations Between Louise Thompson Patterson, Gloria Richardson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” in the �ֲ���ý College Chapel.

“Known throughout the world for his steadfast convictions and pursuit of racial equality, King’s nearly decade-long fight in the modern civil rights movement defined his legacy as a political activist and nonviolent protester,” says Harley.

“However, prior to and overlapping with King’s awe-inspiring marches, powerful speeches and seemingly endless patience in the fight for civil rights,” she says, “two women — Louise Thompson Patterson and Gloria Richardson — waged their own politically activist battles for not only racial but gender equality.”

Harley’s talk focuses on the work and lives of these two “race women” during the middle decades of the 20th century, and the imagined and very real conversations they (likely) had with King. “In an attempt to paint a more comprehensive mosaic of black men and women’s long and ongoing struggle for economic and racial justice in the United States,” says Harley, she will examine their activism relative to King’s.

An associate professor of African American Studies, Harley teaches courses on African American history, black culture, women’s history and women and work. She is the recipient of many scholarships and fellowships, including the 2003 Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship, the Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Rockefeller Fellowship for Minority Group Scholars, the American Association of University Women and the Ford Foundation. Her research has focused on the history of black wage-earning women and black women’s organizational activities in the District of Columbia. Harley received her doctorate in U.S. history from Howard University.

A prolific scholar and widely published essayist, Harley is editor of and an essayist for Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (Rutgers University Press, 2002), an interdisciplinary volume exploring the role of work in black women’s lives. Her essay titled “The Death Foretold: Gloria Richardson and the Radical Black Activist Tradition” appears in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (New York University Press, 2001), edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin. Harley’s major publication, Timetables of African American History: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in African American History (Simon & Schuster, 1995), was adopted as a selection for the History Book and Book-of-the-Month clubs.

Concurrent Monday afternoon workshops hosted by various academic departments and student organizations begin at 1:15, 2:35 and 3:35 p.m. in classrooms throughout Pettengill Hall. The workshops, featuring speakers and discussion, will focus on RE-STATE THEME. Topics range from King’s spiritual roots to the relationship between African American music and utopia, from the poetry of justice from around the world to recent shifts in Lewiston’s refugee population, from diversity in the sciences to the influence of Hegel on King’s political thought and practice. For more information about the workshops, call 207-786-6400.

The entire King Day observance concludes with a performance and Hurricane Katrina fund-raiser at 7:30 p.m. in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall featuring the New Orleans-based tenor Chauncey Packer, a rising young opera star who is a Ph.D. candidate at Louisiana State University. Packer offers a concert of African American sacred music.

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“Intellectual inquiry and a commitment to individual worth and equality of access are at the core of education and of a just community,” said �ֲ���ý College President Donald W. Harward in announcing the gift. “The establishment at �ֲ���ý of the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Visiting Professorship confirms these basic cultural and academic values – values made manifest in the work and legacy of Dr. Mays. Nothing could be more profoundly central to the college. We are deeply grateful to Jim Orr and his family for making possible this significant addition to the college.”

The Mays Distinguished Visiting Professorship will not be limited to one field but will support varying terms of appointment in different fields of inquiry for visiting faculty of national and international recognition.

“We are pleased to support the establishment of an ongoing commitment to the very best of what �ֲ���ý and a liberal education provides,” Orr said, “and to do so in a way that recognizes Dr. Mays — one of the most important leaders in society and in higher education.”

Orr is president and chief executive officer of United Asset Management Corp. of Boston. He currently chairs the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation, which is dedicated to improving the lives of the world’s poor through science, technology, research and analysis. He is former chairman and CEO of UnumProvident Corp. of Portland, Maine, and Chattanooga, Tenn. In his role as �ֲ���ý College trustee, Orr has co-chaired the current �ֲ���ý Presidential Search Committee.

Orr and his wife, Ann Langreth Orr, live in Falmouth, Maine, and Boston. Their daughter, Brooke, is a 1994 graduate of �ֲ���ý; their second daughter, Sage, is a 2001 graduate of Bowdoin.

President Harward said that Mays’ reflection on his �ֲ���ý experience in his autobiography could serve as a refrain for a liberal education. “�ֲ���ý didn’t emancipate me; I emancipated myself,” Mays said. “�ֲ���ý provided the much greater service of providing the context which supported my choice to be free.”