Benjamin Mays – News

Recalling the late Henry Aaron’s friendship with Benjamin Mays

�ֲ��ý News — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 21:27:33 +0000

A story in the Index-Journal of Greenwood, S.C., recalls the , Class of 1920.

Aaron died in Atlanta on Friday at the age 86.

Greenwood is the site of the Benjamin E. Mays Historical Preservation Site, which honors the �ֲ��ý graduate often called “the schoolmaster of the movement” for his mentoring of younger Black leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr.

Chris Thomas, director of the Mays site, tells reporter Greg Deal that Mays, who spent nearly three decades as president of Morehouse College, was “an ardent Braves fan and would clear his schedule” to see Aaron play at the former Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

In this undated photo, Benjamin Mays talks with the late baseball great Henry Aaron of the Atlanta Braves. (Photograph courtesy of Howard University.)

Aaron, the first African American player to play at a major Southern metropolitan city, according to Thomas, reached out to Mays early in his time in Atlanta, when he had “his share of tough times, early on, because of the racial climate.”

The two became friends. Thomas said that Aaron and Mays often had “high-level discussions about the world….(Aaron) said it made him want to be more than just a baseball player.”

Transformative: The �ֲ��ý Mission Statement at age 10

Doug Hubley — Thu, 28 May 2020 17:09:11 +0000

During one of the spring 2010 meetings that ultimately produced �ֲ��ý’ current mission statement, the working group hit a roadblock.

“People were going back and forth about ways to look at something, and we were not coming to a consensus,” recalls Leslie Hill, associate professor of politics and a member of the mission statement subcommittee.

Then a student, one of four in the 14-member group, spoke up. “He spoke passionately. He articulated the issue in terms that were clear to him and, I think, different for some of the rest of us, but that brought some insight into what we were talking about,” Hill says.

+The �ֲ��ý College Mission Statement

Since 1855, �ֲ��ý College has been dedicated to the emancipating potential of the liberal arts. �ֲ��ý educates the whole person through creative and rigorous scholarship in a collaborative residential community. With ardor and devotion— Amore ac Studio — we engage the transformative power of our differences, cultivating intellectual discovery and informed civic action. Preparing leaders sustained by a love of learning and a commitment to responsible stewardship of the wider world, �ֲ��ý is a college for coming times.

“And I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, it is terrific that this young person could really open this back up again.’ He created an opportunity for us to hear each other better. And I was so impressed by that.”

Adopted 10 years ago this month, the 77-word �ֲ��ý mission statement has become a touchstone for the college community. “Any college that leads its mission statement with an affirmation of the ‘emancipating potential of the liberal arts’ is a place I want to be,” Clayton Spencer said at the ceremony announcing her appointment as college president, in December 2011.

And as Hill’s story suggests, the statement resulted from a collaboration that, a decade later, remains a bright memory for the people involved. “Other than those wonderful moments I have with students, that process was the most delightful thing I’ve been associated with at �ֲ��ý,” says Rebecca Herzig, who chaired the Mission and Purposes Subcommittee that crafted the statement as part of �ֲ��ý’ decadal accreditation review.

“I’m continually struck by how frequently and how divergently �ֲ��ý people pull on the mission statement,” says Rebecca Herzig, who chaired the group that produced the statement. Professor of gender and sexuality studies, Herzig is shown in her Pettengill Hall office in 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

“The committee was wonderful,” says Herzig, a professor of gender and sexuality studies. “Just a marvelous, committed, smart group that represented a lot of facets of �ֲ��ý.”

Paul Gastonguay ’89, a committee member and the college’s tennis coach, agrees. “Everyone on the committee took great care to ensure that all of �ֲ��ý’ foundational and essential characteristics were authentically represented.”

Settling on a mission statement, whether existing or new, is an essential step in the college’s accreditation review. The statement is “the standard by which our performance on all the other standards is measured” during the review process, Herzig explains. (The 2000 review proceeded from the 1990 mission statement. And, yes, accreditation review is happening again now — but there are no plans to change the mission statement.)

Starting in February 2010 and facing a hard deadline — that May’s meeting of the Board of Trustees, whose approval would activate the statement — “we were working fast.” They had just three months not just to forge a draft, but to secure buy-in from “as many possible individuals and constituencies as we could,” Herzig explains.

“And we did it” — winning unanimous approval from the trustees.

Ads in The �ֲ��ý Student were a means of getting students’ views on the draft mission statement.

From start to finish, in fact, the process was painstakingly consultative. “We sought out expertise wherever we could find it,” says Herzig.

“We talked to poets about tone and rhythm. We talked to classicists about various interpretations of the motto,” the Latin Amore ac Studio (“with ardor and devotion”). “We talked to archivists about text we could mine for ideas, and to alumni about what stuck with them most about their �ֲ��ý educations.”

To reach students, the team held a “Mission Night” in Commons, put a draft of the statement on napkin holders in the Den, ran ads in The �ֲ��ý Student, and got air time on campus radio station WRBC-FM. They even showed the draft to prospective families visiting campus, who were surprised “that we might care what they thought,” Herzig says.

The speed of creating the statement is all the more striking when you consider the thematic burden the Mission and Purposes Subcommittee had to bear. First of all, of course, the statement needed to, er, state what �ֲ��ý does: It “educates the whole person through creative and rigorous scholarship in a collaborative residential community.”

But there were aspirational values to assert and to align with that academic function — imperatives of equity and inclusion and of environmental sustainability, for instance, not to mention the hoped-for ethical posture of �ֲ��ý graduates. And there were guiding voices to summon forth, notably those of �ֲ��ý founder Oren Cheney (whose “college for coming time” gained an “s” for clarity — “coming times”) and of educator and civil rights leader Rev. Benjamin Mays, Class of 1920.

“There was some real wrestling around the phrase ‘transformative power,’” recalls Leslie Hill, associate professor of politics. She is pictured leading a Martin Luther King Day workshop in 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Mays, in fact, inspired one of the most-cited phrases in the mission statement. In Born to Rebel, his autobiography, he credited the college with “making it possible for me to emancipate myself, to accept with dignity my own worth as a free man.” The mission statement, in turn, leads off with the college’s dedication to “the emancipating potential of the liberal arts.”

Equally powerful is “the transformative power of our differences,” which is not only a potent phrase in and of itself but, in its context in the mission statement, is revealed as the engine of the �ֲ��ý enterprise.

Not surprisingly, “there was some real wrestling around the phrase ‘transformative power,’” as Leslie Hill recalls. The subcommittee needed to reconcile �ֲ��ý’ historic invocation of diversity with a contemporary understanding of equity and inclusion. “It has a different meaning and, of course, different opportunities and possibilities,” Hill says. Moreover, they needed to make inclusiveness “more substantial — not simply to add ‘different faces’ to the community, but rather figure out how their presences enrich the community.”

Crafting the mission statement “gave us an opportunity to articulate and debate what we really think we’re trying to do.”

In short, there was a lot to load into a text that, the subcommittee believed, needed to be much shorter than its 283-word predecessor. “In its conciseness, the new statement gave us bite-sized values, priorities, and action steps that we could look at, understand, recite, and act upon,” says Marianne Cowan ’92, a member of the subcommittee who is now Associate Director of Program Design for �ֲ��ý’ Center for Purposeful Work.

“And it gave us something to talk about to an external audience — especially, perhaps, the 17-year-old high school student — so they understand who we are and what’s important to us.”

It’s a testament to the subcommittee’s powers of perception, distillation, and balance that, 10 years later, the �ֲ��ý mission statement is so present in the daily life of the college. It has been the basis for admission essays and has informed course design. And its language resonates in campus proclamations large and small.

The mission statement “seems like a sort of romanticized or idealistic vision of who we are, but it’s really much more than that,” says Professor of Religion Marcus Bruce ’77, shown leading a class in 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

“I’m continually struck by how frequently and how divergently �ֲ��ý people pull on the mission statement,” Herzig says. “People call on it as a tool to crack open conversations, to move forward with ambitions, projects, hopes. They use it to critique things that they find troubling. ‘Why aren’t we living up to the mission in this way?’”

Part of that utility, naturally, resides in those 77 words themselves. But the process itself of assembling them, she says, also influenced the �ֲ��ý culture. “It gave us an opportunity to articulate and debate what we really think we’re trying to do.”

One student on the subcommittee has carried insights from that process into his professional life. Now a postdoctoral research fellow at The New School for Social Research, Mikey Pasek ’12 earned a doctorate in social psychology at Penn State and now studies how people with different ethnic and religious identities cooperate or clash with one another across group lines.

Mikey Pasek ’12. (Courtesy of Mikey Pasek)

Thanks to his mission statement experience, “I pay acute attention to the way that organizations and colleges describe their mission,” Pasek says. “Understanding how a school sees itself tells me a lot about whether it is the type of organization I’d want to dedicate myself to.”

It’s a harsh irony that the �ֲ��ý mission statement’s 10th anniversary comes just as fate, in the form of COVID-19, is challenging the college and its guiding ethos in ways that could have hardly been predicted. For most of the past decade, for example, one of the statement’s concepts most taken for granted was �ֲ��ý’ essential nature as a “residential community.” But no one’s taking it for granted these days.

Still, as another member of the 2010 mission statement subcommittee points out, that statement itself carries the seeds of its own re-invention. “It seems like a sort of romanticized or idealistic vision of who we are, but it’s really much more than that,” says Marcus Bruce ’77, professor of religious studies.

“As we try to get oriented in the midst of crisis, especially one that impacts us on so many different levels, it’s important to have that mission statement as a guide in terms of our history and our vision of ourselves at a particular period of time and what we envision for the future.

“I think it’s really important.”

An announcement of the 2012 redesign of �ֲ��ý Magazine referenced the mission statement’s adaptation of words by �ֲ��ý founder Oren Cheney.

�ֲ��ý in the News: Oct. 25, 2019

Emily McConville — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 14:51:21 +0000

�ֲ��ý Football

How to tackle concussions? High schools get helmets with sensors — Portland Press Herald

Mike Lowe of the Portland Press Herald includes �ֲ��ý in a story about Maine schools outfitting football players with high-tech helmets that use sensors to record the location and intensity of blows to the head so coaches can monitor for concussions and teach players to tackle more safely.

Most �ֲ��ý players use the new SpeedFlex Insite helmets. “It’s helping us look at what we’re doing, how can we coach our players better,” said Nick Cooke, assistant athletic director of athletics for athletic performance.

Also in on the action is Howard Vandersea ’63, founder and president of the Maine chapter of the National Football Foundation, whose $2,000 grant helped Saco’s Thornton Academy buy new helmets.

Vandersea said it’s what the organization is looking for when it provides grants. “If it’s going to help young kids and make (football) safer,” he said, “that’s what we’re going to do.”

Read the story:

“,” Portland Press Herald, Oct. 20, 2019

Elizabeth Strout ’77

Elizabeth Strout’s view from the top — WNYC

Accompanied by WNYC’s New York Radio Hour reporter KalaLea, Elizabeth Strout ’77 returned to campus over the summer and climbed Mount David for the first time since senior year.

Strout grew up in small-town Maine and New Hampshire, and she was fascinated by the view of Lewiston that Mount David offered. “I just loved to see that array of buildings that meant there were people down there,” she told Lea. “It was my first city.”

Her experiences at �ֲ��ý and in Lewiston “enormously informed,” her work, she said. Reading Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, in Jim Hepburn’s course taught her how to write with a sense of place, while plays read in Martin Andrucki’s theater courses showed her dialogue.

“I learned a lot about dialogue reading those plays — Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, just reading and reading plays,” she said.

“But the experiences I had in town also informed my work,” she added. “When I was working as a waitress, I was working with people from Lewiston. They weren’t from �ֲ��ý. I waitressed at the first disco. That was amazing.”

Listen to the story:

“,” WNYC, Oct. 4, 2019

Benjamin Mays, Class of 1920

The late Rep. Elijah Cumming’s favorite poem linked to Benjamin Mays — multiple outlets

Following the Oct. 17 death of U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, a few news outlets recalled Cummings’ first speech on the floor of the House, in 1996, when he recited a favorite poem that has long been associated with Benjamin Mays, �ֲ��ý Class of 1920.

Benjamin Mays ’20, photographed in 1980 when he returned to �ֲ��ý for his 60th Reunion. (Jim Daniels)

Known as “God’s Minute,” the anonymous poem has a carpe diem theme:

I only have a moment
Only 60 seconds in it
Forced upon me
Can’t refuse it
Didn’t seek it
Didn’t choose it
But it’s up to me to use it
I must suffer if I lose it
Give account if I abuse it

Read the stories:

“,” Inc., Oct. 18, 2019
“” Oct. 17, 2019

Deshun Peoples ’17

Student lands place at top art college thanks to nine months training in China — Encounters in China

Deshun Peoples ’17 was featured on the YouTube channel China Icons in a film exploring the relationship between Peoples and Jiang Xingda, a ceramicist in Jingdezhen, the “capital of Chinese porcelain,” during the year that Peoples spent in China on a Fulbright U.S. Student award.

Peoples and Jiang met in 2016, when Peoples, himself an accomplished ceramicist on a study-abroad program in Jingdezhen. When Peoples returned to the city the next year for his Fulbright year, Jiang agreed to teach him what he knew about color and patterns in pottery, in exchange for English lessons.

“I learned a lot about culture,” Peoples said of his time with Jiang. “I learned a lot about friendship and about engagement with people. I can’t imagine my experience in Jingdezhen without him.”

Tessica Glancey Crampton ’12 and Robert Crampton ’13

Philadelphia weddings: Tessica Glancey and Robert Crampton — The Philadelphia Inquirer

Kellie Patrick Gates of The Philadelphia Inquirer told the �ֲ��ý backstory of Tessica Glancey Crampton ’12 and Robert Crampton ’13, who got married on Aug. 30 in Philadelphia.

The two met in a seminar on American political development and went on their first date at the Blue Goose, a popular bar among students. “Walking home, I realized I was completely smitten already,” Tess said.

Tess Glancey ’12 and Rob Crampton ’13 pose with �ֲ��ý friends at their wedding reception on Aug. 30, 2019 in Philadelphia.

During the wedding festivities, Tess, a media relations manager at Fox News, and Rob, who is earning an MBA from Dartmouth, took time to get a picture with the traditional �ֲ��ý banner.

Read the story:

“,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 10, 2019

Adriana Salerno

Episode 46: “Adriana Salerno” — My Favorite Theorem

Math podcast My Favorite Theorem featured Associate Professor of Mathematics Adriana Salerno, who is a big fan of Cantor’s diagonal argument, which states that “real numbers do not have the same cardinality as the natural numbers.”

The theorem has to do with counting the number of numbers. There are infinitely many integers, such as one, two, three, and so on. There are also infinitely many rational numbers, like one-half and three-eighths — and mathematicians say those types of numbers reach the same infinity (trust us on this one).

Associate Professor of Mathematics Adriana Salerno. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

But according to Cantor’s argument, there are infinitely many real numbers, like pi and the square root of four, but the infinity that those numbers reach is a different infinity than the infinity of the infinitely many rational numbers and integers.

“This theorem shows without a doubt — although some students still doubt me — that there are different sizes of infinity,” Salerno said. “It’s a very lovely succession of ideas.”

Listen to the podcast:

My Favorite Theorem, Sept. 11, 2019

Michael Morgan ’22

Michael Morgan continues to build on his creative legacy — The Gleaner

Keisha Hill of Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner profiled Michael Morgan ’22. A double major in politics and rhetoric from Kingston, Morgan has made waves as an artist and climate change activist.

Interested in international relations with an eye toward communications and outreach, Morgan completed a summer 2019 internship at the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network–Youth Initiative.

He returned to the UN on Sept. 21 to represent Jamaica at the United Nations Youth Climate Summit, attending meetings with world leaders and doing interviews with international media.

Michael Morgan poses on the Historic Quad before attending the United Nations Youth Climate Summit in September 2019. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

On the artistic side, Morgan is a graphic designer for student clubs and the lead painter on a mural at the Center for Global Education. At �ֲ��ý, “I got the chance to expand my thinking on topics such as politics, the arts, and the environment,” Morgan said.

Compared with his earlier schooling, “there was less rigidity surrounding grades and competitiveness and more time given to building a rounded individual keen on exploring their passion for a greater purpose.”

Read the story:

“,” The Gleaner, Sept. 20, 2019

Carine Warsawski ’07

Jewish summer camp with campfires, crafts, and no lights out — The New York Times

For The New York Times, Rachel Levin wrote about her weekend attending a summer camp for Jewish adults in California’s Simi Valley. Trybal Gatherings, founded by Carine Warsawski ’07, organizes the popular retreats in three locations.

Levin described a weekend of archery, horseback riding, kosher mess halls, an “Abe Weissman workout,” and challah making. The experience is rooted in “the shared nostalgia of a Jewish-American rite of passage,” Levin wrote.

“There is something easy and assuring about spending a summer weekend like I used to: with my people,” she added.

Read the story:

“,” The New York Times, Sept. 22, 2019

Anita Charles

Relationship-based practices for today’s students — Heinemann Publishing

On the blog of educational publisher Heinemann, Senior Lecturer in Education and Director of Secondary Teacher Education Anita Charles wrote about how teachers can build relationships with students in an increasingly diverse and technologically connected world.

Anita Charles teaches a course on basic concepts in special education in March 2018. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Instead of expecting students to adhere to “white, middle-class, able-bodied, English-speaking, cisgender” norms, Charles encouraged teachers to learn about the cultural backgrounds of each student and advocated for a variety of practices, including culturally responsive and trauma-informed teaching and restorative justice.

Overall, Charles argued that teachers should not think of students who differ from a particular norm as less-than. “A strength-based lens allows us to see every child as valuable to the classroom as a whole,” she wrote.

Read the story:

“,” Heinemann Publishing, Oct. 11, 2019

Hannah Morris ’96

Art review: “Waiting to Happen: Hannah Morris” — Seven Days

Vermont alt-weekly Seven Days editor Pamela Polston reviewed “Waiting to Happen,” a solo exhibition of gouache-and-collage works by Hannah Morris ’96.

Morris’ works evoke “the magical realism we remember from children’s books,” Polston wrote, as well as elements of the far-flung locales where Morris has lived. She “asks viewers to accept that the ground we walk on can be salmon-pink; that figures can appear in both color and black-and-white in the same scene; that dimensionality doesn’t have to play by the rules,” Polston added.

Read the review:

“,” Seven Days, Sept. 25, 2019

Justine Wiesinger

New climate change comedy uses laughs to tackle tough questions — WUNC

Frank Stasio of North Carolina public radio station WUNC spoke with Assistant Professor of Japanese Justine Wiesinger about her new play, Waters Rise, which premiered this month at the Women’s Theater Festival in Durham, N.C.

The play is set in a world where there is massive flooding, with government inaction and misinformation and little insight into the future. It’s a comedy.

Assistant Professor of Japanese Justine Wiesinger (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Wiesinger, who spent time in Tokyo just after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, focuses her research on the theater and film that emerged from the disasters.

The play explores individual people’s complicity in climate change. “It’s painful to ask ourselves in different ways how we are contributing, what we are doing to change the situation, and if our strategies are at all effective,” Wiesinger told Stasio.

Listen to the story:

“,” WUNC, Oct. 9, 2019

Kelli Armstrong ’86

Dr. Kelli Armstrong inaugurated as president of Salve Regina University — Rhode Island Catholic

Brian Fraga of Rhode Island Catholic covered the inauguration in September of Salve Regina University’s new president, Kelli Armstrong ’86, who brings to the university a long career in higher education, including as vice president for planning and assessment at Boston College.

Armstrong has been serving as president since July, but the university officially marked her inauguration with a Mass, a ceremony, a barbecue, and an inaugural ball.

“I’m humbled and honored to serve at such an exceptional institution,” Armstrong said. “What sets Salve apart from other universities is that in the great tradition of a mercy education, we help our students become their best selves and make a difference in the world.”

Read the story:

“” — Rhode Island Catholic, Sept. 26, 2019

What emancipation meant to Benjamin Mays, and what it means now

Emily McConville — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 13:21:20 +0000

In 1876, just as the post-Civil War Reconstruction stalled and white politicians began to roll back the rights of formerly enslaved people, the Emancipation Memorial was erected in Washington, D.C.

The concept of emancipation is more complex than the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., might suggest, says �ֲ��ý professor Charles Nero. (Photo by yeowatzup / CC BY 2.0 / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)

The statue, by Thomas Ball, depicts a shirtless black man, in chains, kneeling at the feet of a fully clothed Abraham Lincoln.

The history and ideology behind the word “emancipation” are complex, �ֲ��ý professor Charles Nero told an alumni audience at Reunion on June 7.

Did emancipation happen as depicted in the statue — as a white statesman benevolently freeing the slaves — or was it the result of a war of liberation in which black Americans won their freedom through their own struggle?

The Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies, Nero approached his talk — on the life of his professorship’s namesake, civil rights icon Benjamin Mays — with the rhetorician’s attention to the power of words and images.

The 50th Reunion Seminar, organized by the Class of 1969, centered on Mays’ most famous quote relating to �ֲ��ý, from his autobiography, Born To Rebel.

Mays wrote, “�ֲ��ý College did not ‘emancipate’ me; it did far greater service of making it possible for me to emancipate myself and to accept with dignity my own worth as a free man.”

Mays’ description of his �ֲ��ý education is “stylistically very elegant,” Nero said.

When Mays published Born to Rebel in 1971, he’d had many decades to think about emancipation. After graduating from �ֲ��ý and earning a doctorate from the University of Chicago Divinity School, he served for 30 years as president of Morehouse College.

At Morehouse, Mays mentored future civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., becoming known as “the schoolmaster of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Mays’ description of his �ֲ��ý education is “stylistically very elegant,” Nero said.

�ֲ��ý professor Charles Nero discusses the concept of emancipation and the life of Benjamin Mays during a 50th Reunion seminar on June 7. Nero is the Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

“He is rejecting this idea of emancipation, the idea of emancipation that is in this statue which surely he knew,” he added. “In other words, he is declaring his own agency, his own command of his future. �ֲ��ý College played a role in that.”

At the same time, “�ֲ��ý College is not Lincoln. That’s very important for an African American man to make a statement to that effect.”

Contained in Mays’ idea of emancipation, Nero said, were three additional heavy concepts: religion, gender, and citizenship — all of which Mays used to reject white supremacy.

Mays was a devout Christian minister, and his theology was similar to that of Latin American liberation theology, Nero said. In a 1966 edition of the �ֲ��ý Alumnus, now �ֲ��ý Magazine, Mays recalled how, even as a child, he had decided that if God had made black people inferior to whites, he would not pray to that god.

Benjamin Mays (right), with Martin Luther King Jr., was known as “the schoolmaster of the movement” for teaching and inspiring a generation of civil rights leaders, including King, who called Mays “my spiritual mentor and my intellectual father.”

“He is going to reject white supremacy, and if it requires him to reject his faith, he will do that,” Nero said.

Resisting white supremacy also meant asserting his manhood, Nero said. Here, Nero turned to the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and the sociologist’s famous definition of double-consciousness — the conflicting identities of black men as Americans and African Americans.

Du Bois wrote of feeling best when he could beat his white friends at school or sports. So did Mays — “I thought I would go north for college to compete with whites,” he wrote in the Bulletin. “If I do well there, that would be convincing proof that Negroes are not inferior to white men.”

At �ֲ��ý, Mays had the opportunity to read the Bible critically, in a way that supported his claim of equality with white men.

“I learned that God was no respecter of persons and that I was right in not believing what I had heard in my childhood — that Negroes were inferior,” he wrote in the Alumnus. He also excelled academically and graduated with honors.

A talented debater, Mays won an oratory award for reciting “Imaginary Speech of John Adams,” by Daniel Webster, a speech that emphasizes the divinity of the American push for independence. That Mays won an award for the speech was profound to Nero.

Benjamin E. Mays (middle, back row) poses with a 1919 debate team. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

“�ֲ��ý allowed him the testing ground to demonstrate his masculinity, his manhood, his right to not be an outcast or a stranger in his own house — that is, to be a citizen of the United States,” he said.

Nero then asked his audience to consider emancipation as it related to their time at �ֲ��ý. How did the Class of 1969 grapple with racism and white supremacy?

The late 1960s was, of course, a time when social structures of all kinds came under scrutiny. The Vietnam War was starting to attract widespread protest, and the Civil Rights movement was accompanied by the brutal assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and, earlier, the murders of Medgar Evers and four young girls in an Alabama church.

Depicting candidates Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace, this uncredited political cartoon appeared in The �ֲ��ý Student the week before the 1968 presidential election.

Student publications that Nero projected showed deep engagement with the 1968 elections. The campaign of George Wallace, though unlikely to find a friendly audience in the liberal Northeast, advertised in The �ֲ��ý Student. Comedian and activist Dick Gregory, then running as a write-in candidate, appeared on campus.

Students and faculty also wondered how to contend with racism on campus, and how to make �ֲ��ý more inclusive. Robert Chute, a popular professor of biology, wrote a thundering letter demanding radical changes in admissions, financial aid, and the curriculum.

Dick Gregory’s talk at �ֲ��ý in February 1968 was described as a “tour de force on civil rights today” by The �ֲ��ý Student.

One 1968 workshop, “�ֲ��ý College and the Disadvantaged Black Student,” raised questions about how African Americans were represented.

Chantal Berry Dalton ’69, a retired diplomat who was in the Reunion audience, was listed in the workshop’s program as a poetry reader. She said that, as the only black woman in her class, she went to many such workshops and conversations — and did not appreciate how black students were automatically assumed to be disadvantaged.

She said the institutional will to change was there, but it took a lot of work from her and other students of color.

“I spent a lot of hours in a lot of meetings talking about how we were going to change things at �ֲ��ý,” she said. “It was interesting. It was tiring.”

Chantal Berry Dalton ’69 recalls participating in many of �ֲ��ý’ efforts to make the college more inclusive. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Other, white, members of the Class of 1969 said they had little recollection of conversations about racism during their time in college. For some, the burgeoning women’s movement was more salient — at the time, women at �ֲ��ý lived under more restrictive social rules than men.

In fact, for a few, it was only years later that some white audience members understood how white privilege affected their lives.

“Was it your privilege as white people that made you unaware of the kind of labor that emancipation requires?” Nero asked them.

Many of those who spoke up during the talk agreed that emancipation, for �ֲ��ý, is ongoing.

Alicia Hunter Warner ’94 reminds the audience that questions of race and racism are not historical concepts. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

“Like many institutions and individuals, �ֲ��ý is growing into its own aspirations in a lot of ways,” said Alicia Hunter Warner ’94, a member of the Alumni Council of the �ֲ��ý Alumni Association.

“I think that there is hope for how we’re changing and what we’re doing as a community, but I do think that we cannot ignore what institutionalized racism in this country is. It is not just our institutions; it’s the fabric of the way we live and interact with each other that keeps self-perpetuating.”

Charles Nero talks with alumni following his Reunion talk on Benjamin Mays and the concept of emancipation. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Recalling when �ֲ��ý fought, yet benefited from, a racist debate organization

Emily McConville — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 20:33:18 +0000

In August 1926, John Preston Davis sent a letter to Louis Costello, a �ֲ��ý alumnus and former debater who was now a college trustee and Lewiston newspaper executive.

Davis himself had graduated that spring, leaving an impressive legacy as a debater. President of the Debating Council and editor of The �ֲ��ý Student, he competed internationally and was part of a team that defeated debaters from Oxford. After graduation, Davis moved to New York City, to put his written and oratorical talents to practice in the flourishing Harlem Renaissance.

“Delta Sigma Rho should not be allowed to continue as a �ֲ��ý organization.”

In New York, Davis decided to escalate his efforts to correct an injustice that he felt the college had not done enough to address. At the time, the highest honor a �ֲ��ý debater could achieve was induction into Delta Sigma Rho, the national debating honor society. Davis met every requirement except one: The society did not admit black members.

In 1926, recent graduate John P. Davis protested �ֲ��ý‘ membership in Delta Sigma Rho, a debating honor society that at the time excluded black debaters. Here, he is pictured, second from left, with H.H. Walker ’26, debate coach A. Craig Baird, Erwin Canham ’25, and Fred Googins ’27. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections)

In his letter to Costello — himself a Delta Sigma Rho member of the Class of 1898 — Davis said that “either Negro students should be frankly told before being mis-led into coming to �ֲ��ý that privileges which are open to other students are in their case to be abridged; or else, Delta Sigma Rho should not be allowed to continue as a �ֲ��ý organization.”

Davis’ letter was the latest to point out this stark conflict between �ֲ��ý’ ideals and the reality in which it operated. Correspondence, articles, and meeting minutes in �ֲ��ý’ Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library tell the story of the fraught and frustrating effort the college and its debaters made to get Delta Sigma Rho to admit black members.

Ultimately, it took two decades and a change in the national organization’s leadership before the society reversed its exclusion of black debaters.

Founded in 1906, Delta Sigma Rho’s central goal was to promote excellence in debating and raise the prestige of its members. The �ֲ��ý Student trumpeted the creation of a chapter at �ֲ��ý in 1915, even as it assured its readers that despite the Greek letters, it wasn’t that kind of fraternity.

“This is an honor reserved for colleges that have made their mark in intercollegiate debating contests, and is an honor that all �ֲ��ý people will prize,” said the Student.

When �ֲ��ý joined, Delta Sigma Rho did not have a formal rule excluding black debaters. But when �ֲ��ý advanced the nomination of one of its star debaters, Arthur Dyer, who was black, the team quickly found out that the national organization enforced an unwritten policy of segregation.

“This provision must be adhered to by all chapters,” wrote national secretary-treasurer Stanley B. Houck in 1916 to Harry Rowe, �ֲ��ý Class of 1912.

Rowe, the chapter’s secretary, was just beginning his long tenure as a �ֲ��ý administrator, and Houck, his correspondent, would be a fixture in the national organization for decades to come. To prevent integration Houck would, at least on paper, appeal to the cohesion of the organization.

Arthur Dyer (left), Class of 1917, was the initial African American debater from �ֲ��ý to be excluded from Delta Sigma Rho. He poses with fellow 1916–17 debaters Mervin Ames, Charles Mayoh, and Brooks Quimby. As �ֲ��ý’ director of debate, Quimby would later take up the fight to integrate Delta Sigma Rho. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

“The possible injury done to a few negroes by excluding them from membership would be offset by the good which the society could do in the South,” he wrote. “The welfare of the society required that there be no split between the Northern and Southern chapters on this issue.”

The �ֲ��ý debate council went ahead with solidifying its Delta Sigma Rho chapter and inducting members, but at its first annual meeting in 1916, Rowe was told to write again to Houck “concerning �ֲ��ý’ feeling in the matter of exclusion of negroes from membership,” according to the meeting minutes.

Rowe also sought other colleges’ support for a petition ahead of a National Council meeting in 1917, asking the University of Chicago for “your moral and active support in presenting a re-opening and re-consideration of the matter.”

“It seems to me,” Rowe wrote, “that if Phi Beta Kappa, an old and long established honor society makes no reservation as to race, color, creed, or sex, that Delta Sigma Rho might well follow this good example.”

Other Northern colleges seemed to be on the same page — Williams College asked �ֲ��ý to support its own measure at the national meeting. Their efforts failed. “I personally appeared before the National Council at New Haven and remonstrated on their ruling, and was told that Chapters were not admitting colored men,” Rowe wrote in 1920 to Arthur Dyer, who had graduated three years earlier.

In 1920, Rowe wrote to the national conference, again asking it to change the rule. That year, Benjamin E. Mays, the future civil rights leader who served as president of the Debating Council and would have been eligible for Delta Sigma Rho membership, had graduated.

As a longtime �ֲ��ý administrator, 1912 graduate Harry Rowe (left), a Delta Sigma Rho member, was the �ֲ��ý point person in efforts to change the honor society’s racist membership rules. He’s shown in 1912 with fellow debaters Wade Grindle and Gordon Cave. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Not only were those efforts unsuccessful, but the society doubled down, officially changing its constitution to prohibit black members. Delta Sigma Rho held another national council in 1922, but since it was in Iowa, �ֲ��ý could not send a representative. The chapter did, however, submit a petition to strike the phrase “not a negro” from the national constitution’s list of membership requirements.

The petition was less about taking a moral stand against racism and more about appeasing the chapters that did want to exclude black members; it emphasized that local chapters should have as much autonomy as possible. “The policy of local autonomy is very definitely limited by inability to elect negroes to membership,” the petition said. That petition, too, failed.

Meanwhile, �ֲ��ý enjoyed the prestige and the networking opportunities that the society afforded its white members. �ֲ��ý’ debating victories and its methods were covered extensively in Delta Sigma Rho’s publication, and debate faculty contributed articles. Around Commencement each year, The �ֲ��ý Student published the names of new inductees, along with those inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

In 1926, John P. Davis became eligible for membership in every way except his race. Meeting minutes in June of that year record that Marion J. Crosby, the chapter secretary-treasurer, was instructed to write to the national secretary, asking permission to induct Davis.

Houck, now the president of Delta Sigma Rho, replied with a firm, racist no. “Several negroes had been elected to membership with exactly the same result in each case, namely, the wrecking of the chapter and its practical non-existence as a functioning organization until the negro passed out of college and the memory of the members of the chapter,” he wrote.

(The society did not, as it happened, have a problem with women and with members of other minority groups becoming members).

“The �ֲ��ý College chapter of Delta Sigma Rho can officially bestow upon and accord Mr. John Davis any distinct and special recognition for his ability as a debater which it considers desirable or appropriate,” Houck wrote, “so long as the recognition does not take the form of membership.”

Three weeks later, Davis wrote his letter to Costello, prompting Rowe, debate coach and professor J. Murray Carroll, and �ֲ��ý professor and Delta Sigma Rho member Oliver F. Cutts to submit a statement to the college trustees.

“Some feel that �ֲ��ý should no longer retain her charter,” they wrote.

“Others believe that altho the attitude of the national organization is regrettable, it is not the fault of �ֲ��ý, but rather a part of the general disability under which negroes labor, and if �ֲ��ý takes this course it will only deny her students the advantages of affiliation with this honor society without in any degree furthering the rights of the negro.”

The question of racism “stirred us up a bit,” wrote Brooks Quimby, the 1918 graduate who would later become a college legend as director of debate.

In 1920, Benjamin Mays (standing at center, with members of the 1919 �ֲ��ý debate team) became the second �ֲ��ý debater to be excluded from Delta Sigma Rho. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Getting the segregation rule changed, however, only became more difficult. During the 1920s, Delta Sigma Rho changed two key procedural rules: Not only did meetings now take place every five years, but any constitutional changes required the approval of four-fifths of the local chapters.

So the �ֲ��ý chapter began, again, to gather support for a rule change ahead of the 1931 national council. Case Western Reserve University mounted its own campaign on behalf of one of its debaters, and the Wisconsin Legislature even passed a resolution urging Delta Sigma Rho to integrate so that a star University of Wisconsin debater could join.

“I see no credit in such logicians in a society like ours.”

Before the conference, Quimby wrote to Houck to let him know that �ֲ��ý’ delegate would again try to get the chapters to vote to change the rule. Houck replied that he himself would put the matter to a vote — but he didn’t do so.

“Our delegate felt that both Houck and [vice president Gilbert] Hall did all they could to prevent the vote,” Quimby later wrote. “Mrs. Hall made the most remarkable argument to our delegate; that the reason that negroes wanted to get into D.S.R. was so that they could marry white women!”

�ֲ��ý had not asked for full integration of Delta Sigma Rho, but that each chapter be allowed to make its own decision. “We shall be sorry if this causes any chapters to leave,” Quimby continued, “but, personally, I see no credit in such logicians in a society like ours.”

In the end, the 1931 national council did vote on whether to admit black members, and a strong majority voted yes — but not the four-fifths required for the measure to pass.

Delta Sigma Rho therefore remained segregated, but the damage to its leadership was done. Houck was re-elected president but, sensing a loss of support, resigned a couple months later. The new president was H.L. Ewbank of the University of Wisconsin, with Quimby joining the national leadership as vice president.

The groundswell of support for integration and the leadership shakeup did not translate into a sense of urgency — or perhaps procedural rules prohibited swift action. It was another four years before the prohibition against black members was finally lifted. Dyer, Mays, and Davis became eligible for Delta Sigma Rho membership.

By then, Davis had earned a law degree and was deep into a fight to ensure that African Americans were included in New Deal programs. In 1935, he helped found the National Negro Congress, an important civil rights organization, and became its executive director.

It seems Davis did not join Delta Sigma Rho. Over the next several decades, the organization would merge with a rival debating society. �ֲ��ý is no longer a member.

Likely taken in Washington, D.C., in April 1940, this photo shows �ֲ��ý alumnus John P. Davis (left), then executive secretary of the National Negro Congress, with Max Yergan (center) and U. Simpson Tate, congress president and treasurer, respectively. (Photo by Scurlock Studios/ Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History Archives Center)

Mays sent Brooks Quimby $17 for his membership dues. Soon to become the president of Morehouse College and earn the title “schoolmaster of the Civil Rights Movement,” he would be featured prominently as a distinguished Delta Sigma Rho member.

“It was my impression when I was in college that �ֲ��ý had tried to make it possible for Negroes to become members of the National Forensic society of Delta Sigma Rho,” Mays wrote. “It is gratifying to know that �ֲ��ý has kept on the job, and that after many years of effort she has won.”

Sources

For his senior honors thesis, Tom Connolly ’79 chronicled the history of �ֲ��ý debate, including an entire chapter on the Delta Sigma Rho controversy. The thesis includes materials and personal conversations that are not available elsewhere, and is an invaluable source for future histories. It is available in the �ֲ��ý archives.

The late Professor of Rhetoric and Director of Debate Robert Branham contributed a chapter about Benjamin Mays’ experience with debate, including the Delta Sigma Rho controversy, to Walking Integrity, a Mays biography. Branham, who died in 1999, also produced several documentaries, including one on John Davis ().

The Delta Sigma Rho issue is also addressed in the college history �ֲ��ý Through the Years, by the late Charles Clark ’51.

Meet six alumni from �ֲ��ý history as Black History Month concludes

�ֲ��ý News — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 16:36:41 +0000

They edited The �ֲ��ý Student and led the debate team. They taught, discovered, wrote, organized, and advocated. They spoke out against racism at home and discrimination and secrecy around the world.

During Black History Month, we shared on �ֲ��ý social media channels the stories of six African American alumni from �ֲ��ý’ past — famous firsts, national leaders, and unsung figures whose lives and legacies, of course, reverberate beyond February.

Henry Chandler, Class of 1874

Henry Chandler, Class of 1874, was the college’s first African American graduate. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

The college’s first African American students were recruited personally by �ֲ��ý founder Oren B. Cheney, including Henry W. Chandler of Bath, Maine, the college’s first African American graduate, in 1874.

After college, he earned a law degree from Howard University, then practiced law in Florida; he also edited The Ocala Republican and The Plain Dealer newspapers. In 1880, Chandler was elected to the Florida state senate and held office for two terms.

Stella James, Class of 1897

Stella James, Class of 1897, was the first African American woman to graduate from �ֲ��ý. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

In 1897, Stella James became the first African American woman to graduate from �ֲ��ý.

Born in Washington, D.C., she graduated from the historically black Storer School (later Storer College), an institution founded with the help of �ֲ��ý founder Oren Cheney.

At �ֲ��ý, she wrote for the school newspaper and, at graduation, earned second honor in physics (students did not major in subjects as we know it today).

After her graduation, she taught science and physics at Storer, Virginia Seminary, and Bluefield State College. She was a member of the National Society for Black Physicists.

Benjamin Mays, Class of 1920

Benjamin Mays, Class of 1920, photographed in 1980 when he returned to �ֲ��ý for his 60th Reunion. (Jim Daniels for �ֲ��ý College)

A giant of the civil rights movement in the U.S., Benjamin E. Mays was known as “the schoolmaster of the movement” for teaching and inspiring a generation of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., who called Mays “my spiritual mentor and my intellectual father.”

Mays delivered King’s final eulogy on April 9, 1968.

Mays’ statement that �ֲ��ý made it “possible for me to emancipate myself, to accept with dignity my own worth as a free man,” was incorporated into the �ֲ��ý mission statement.

In November 2017, his hometown community in Greenwood County, S.C., erected a statue of Mays.

John Davis, Class of 1926

John Davis, Class of 1926. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

Journalist, intellectual, and political organizer John Preston Davis made his name in the Harlem Renaissance and emerged as a powerful voice challenging racist federal programs during the Depression.

At �ֲ��ý, he was a formidable debater, yet was denied membership in Delta Sigma Rho, a national honorary debating fraternity, because he was black. �ֲ��ý fought this racist policy but was unsuccessful until DSR changed its exclusionary policy years later.

After graduation, Davis succeeded W.E.B. Du Bois as the literary editor of The Crisis. Working with such Harlem Renaissance authors as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, among others, he produced Fire!!, a magazine devoted to young African American artists.

He earned a law degree from Harvard, and in 1935 co-founded the influential National Negro Congress, a major civil rights coalition that was active in the late 1930s and 1940s. Under Davis, the NNC exposed “prejudicial assumptions that underlay many of the ostensibly liberal New Deal reforms,” according to �ֲ��ý history professor Hilmar Jensen.

Davis’ work with NNC “directly inspired” the next generation of civil rights leaders to found organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

In 1946, Davis was the founding editor and publisher of Our World magazine; in popularity, it was second only to Ebony in the black community.

William Worthy, Class of 1942

Reporting from Iran in 1980, William Worthy ’42 sets up a press conference in a Tehran hotel with spokespeople for Iranian students who held 52 U.S. hostages for 444 days. (Randy Goodman)

William Worthy ’42 was a fearless, globetrotting journalist who spent a career telling Americans “what’s going on in the world in their name.”

He reported from some of the hardest places for Americans to get to during the Cold War, including the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, as well as from post-revolutionary Iran, all the while being hounded by the U.S. State Department, the FBI, and the CIA, who tried to stop his reporting; he was also red-baited in the U.S. Senate.

In fact, a legal battle involving Worthy’s trip to Cuba inspired “The Ballad of William Worthy,” by folk singer Phil Ochs.

At his death, said that Worthy was a “reporter drawn to forbidden datelines.”

Peter Gomes, Class of 1965

The Rev. Peter Gomes ’65 marches with the Class of 1965 during the 2005 Alumni Parade at Reunion. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College.)

In 1991, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes ’65 took to the steps of Widener Library at Harvard to declare that he was “a Christian who happens as well to be gay,” an act of coming-out in response to gay bashing on campus.

A prominent national figure considered one of America’s greatest preachers, Gomes was Harvard’s Pusey Minister of Memorial Church and, during the last 20 years of his life, a prolific author and religious voice who advocated for a more inclusive interpretation of the Bible.

Gomes died in 2011; Harvard president Drew Faust said Gomes was “a living symbol of courage and conviction.”

In 2012, �ֲ��ý named the college chapel in Gomes’ memory.

Devoted to �ֲ��ý and to his classmates, Gomes received the college’s highest alumni honor, the Benjamin Mays Medal, and gave the Sesquicentennial address at �ֲ��ý in 2005.

Mays Medal to Ed O’Neil ’82 highlights alumni awards at Reunion 2017

�ֲ��ý News — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 17:10:14 +0000

At the Annual Gathering of the Alumni Association on June 10 during Reunion, three alumni were honored for their contributions to the college, including Ed O’Neil ’82, who has literally written the book on sustainable and efficient solutions to the problems of global health inequity.

O’Neil received the Benjamin E. Mays Medal, the Alumni Association’s highest award, honoring an alumna or alumnus who has “performed distinguished service to the worldwide community and been deemed a �ֲ��ý College graduate of outstanding accomplishment.”

Named for the 1920 �ֲ��ý alumnus, the Mays Medal has been awarded only 16 times since its 1982 establishment.

Edward J. O’Neil Jr. ’82: Benjamin E. Mays Medal

The citation for O’Neil’s award read, in part:

While treating patients in all manner of medical conditions and crises in Nairobi’s Nazareth Hospital, the gears began to turn as Ed conceptualized a guide for other doctors seeking global health opportunities. Awakening Hippocrates and A Practical Guide to Global Health Service are the culmination of more than a decade of Ed’s research and experiences.

Along the way, : an organization putting theory into practice as Ed and his colleagues seek solutions to insufficiencies and crises in health and health education across the world.

Ed O’Neill ’82 poses with President Clayton Spencer (left) and Alumni Association President Lisa Romeo ’88 at the Annual Gathering of the Alumni Association during Reunion on June 10. (Rene Roy for �ֲ��ý College)

Judith A. Marden ’66: Helen A. Papaioanou ’49 Distinguished Alumni Service Award

The citation for Marden’s award read, in part:

She saved her favorite position at �ֲ��ý for last — director of the �ֲ��ý–Morse Mountain Conservation Area, which comprises 600 acres of woods, salt marsh, and Maine’s last undeveloped barrier beach. Largely thanks to Judy’s early planning for what has become an iconic example of �ֲ��ý’ environmental work, it remains one of the most beautiful, unspoiled parts of Maine.

Judy Marden ’66 (center) poses with President Clayton Spencer (left) and Alumni Association President Lisa Romeo ’88 at the Annual Gathering of the Alumni Association during Reunion on June 10. (Rene Roy for �ֲ��ý College)

Robert E. Cramer ’79, P’13, P’14: Bruce Stangle Award for Distinguished Service to the �ֲ��ý Community

The citation for Cramer’s award read, in part:

As an executive with RBC Wealth Management and now with Oppenheimer, you have for many years provided �ֲ��ý graduates who are interested in the world of finance with invaluable advice. Beyond offering wise counsel that has set many young alumni on the path to career success and lives of meaningful work, you have also, in a number of cases, played a direct role in placing �ֲ��ý graduates at your firms.

Robert Cramer ’79 poses with President Clayton Spencer (left) and Alumni Association President Lisa Romeo ’88 at the Annual Gathering of the Alumni Association during Reunion on June 10. (Rene Roy for �ֲ��ý College)

Q&A: Marcus Bruce ’77 on Benjamin Mays, MLK, and the ongoing struggle for emancipation

Jay Burns — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 17:50:53 +0000

Religious studies professor Marcus Bruce ’77 began a recent interview about Benjamin Mays by noting a historic coincidence.

“Since we’re talking about Mays, I’d forgotten how significant this day is,” Bruce said.

The day was Dec. 5, the 61st anniversary of a seminal moment in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement: the start of the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks’ arrest and famously led by the young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

And at a pivotal moment in the boycott, Bruce says, “Mays was instrumental” in bolstering King’s confidence to continue his leadership.

Bruce should know: He’s the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, and last fall he taught a course on Mays, the 20th-century civil rights leader, theologian, Morehouse College president, mentor to King, and 1920 �ֲ��ý graduate.

How did Mays influence King during the boycott?

Sixty-one years ago, in the summer of 1956, King had left Montgomery midway through the boycott, first to appear at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., and then to visit his parents in Atlanta, where he learned that he would be arrested if he returned to Montgomery.

King’s father invited prominent African American leaders, including Mays, to the King home in Atlanta to help his son think through the consequences of staying in Atlanta rather than going back and being arrested.

Many in the group urged King to stay in Atlanta, but King said he would return to Montgomery. Silence followed, and his father burst into tears. At that moment, King later wrote, “I looked at Dr. Mays, one of the great influences in my life. Perhaps he had heard my unspoken plea. At any rate, he was soon defending my position strongly. Then others joined in supporting me.”

At a point critical to not just the boycott but to the movement itself, it was Mays’ voice and support that King felt.

Did you ever meet Mays?

I met Dr. Mays once when I was a student. I was a member of what was called the Afro-American Society at �ֲ��ý. We were having a potluck meal in the bottom of Parker Hall, and he surprised us. He just appeared out of nowhere. I don’t know why he was on campus but he just spent time with us and it was really wonderful.

For a long time, many of us at �ֲ��ý didn’t know much about him other than he was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mentor. In the 1990s, a few of us — the late Bob Branham, Beckie Conrad ’82, and myself — traveled to the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University to look at Mays’ papers for the 1994 Symposium at �ֲ��ý celebrating the centennial of his birth. I began to get a strong sense of Mays’ influence on American religious history and thought during that trip and the conference that followed.

When I look at Mays and think about his relevance or importance, I think it goes back to his phrase that “�ֲ��ý didn’t emancipate me, but it did me the greater service of helping me to emancipate myself.” That’s what stands out.

For Mays, emancipating himself meant competing with and doing better than white students in his studies and activities. What do you take away from his focus on competition to prove his self-worth?

He wanted to lay to rest any doubts that he, or anyone else for that matter, might have about his intellectual ability. Mays was born and raised in a segregated society where the prevailing idea was that African Americans were intellectually inferior.

He wanted to prove to himself that he could hold his own in any educational context. He thought �ֲ��ý was a place where he could do that — where he would be accepted but also where he could challenge himself and learn to overcome any anxieties or obstacles that might arise. And he did very well.

Do we know if that was a typical experience of Southern African Americans who went to Northern schools, to frame their goals in competitive terms?

Certainly, it was true of W.E.B. Du Bois, who was born in Great Barrington, Mass., yet earned a degree from Fisk University and then got a second B.A. at Harvard because he wanted to prove himself there — he wanted to see if he could hold his own.

There were a number of African Americans who did this, but quite often the schools they wanted to attend wouldn’t admit them. Individuals like Mays and Du Bois were determined to demonstrate their ability to succeed in any academic environment, again laying to rest for themselves and others the negative stereotypes and myths about the capabilities of African Americans.

Benjamin Mays, Class of 1920, photographed in 1980 when he returned to �ֲ��ý for his 60th Reunion. Photograph by Jim Daniels.

Mays begins his autobiography, Born to Rebel, at age 4 or 5 by describing his father being harassed by night riders. Instilled at an early age, that fear — of segregation, of the consequences of crossing the color line — was something that Mays fought against until his dying day.

For him, the color line wasn’t simply the cultural, social, or political practices of segregation. They were things that he didn’t want to internalize. He wanted to overcome them.

Since the presidential election, where are your students in their thinking?

They’re thinking about ways to remain engaged in the political process, ways to be heard. I keep holding up Mays as an example. I’ve said that Mays wasn’t able to vote until he was almost 52 years old. And from the moment he set out to get an education, Mays believed education would help liberate him from the fears and the normative ideas or practices around race and segregation.

Mays saw and experienced segregation in one form or another for his entire life. He was still preaching against different kinds of segregation until his dying day. So there’s this whole idea that you don’t give up the fight, that you never give up, that we’re always engaged in this struggle for emancipation.

So education still has the power to liberate students from fear?

That’s why Mays’ words are in our mission statement. We believe that education is emancipating. Mays looked at education as a way to liberate people from ignorance and fear and to help them to envision new possibilities for themselves and for society.

He said that he believed that everyone had something to give to humanity. And if they didn’t do the work that they were capable of, then that work wouldn’t get done.

That connects to Mays’ eulogy for King, when he said that there’s no such thing as someone, like King, being “ahead of their time” because the time is “always ripe to do that which is right and that which needs to be done.”

We’re reading the eulogy now. I always think that’s so powerful, that he was able to say that, to have this vision of King as being “of his time” and speaking to his time in a very specific way. King seemed to view his life in the same way. He really does talk about being in this place at this moment.

Mays delivers the final eulogy for the slain Martin Luther King Jr. on April 9, 1968, at Morehouse College. Photograph courtesy of Howard University.

King also gives you a sense of his journey. At the time of the boycott, he talks about how his journey connected with the local leadership and action, with the discontent among people experiencing the injustices of segregation. And how there was power in one small, seemingly insignificant gesture by Rosa Parks of just sitting down — it wasn’t the first time — and how her being arrested connected with people and ignited something. All of this played a part in the emergence and organization of the Civil Rights movement.

To stay engaged in the process — that’s the challenge!

I think something like that is happening right now. People are being challenged to think: What does it mean to be an American citizen? What does it mean to be free? What involvement and what place do I have in the political process?

Your candidate may not have won but does that mean that you walk away from the process and leave the responsibility to someone else? Or is there work you can continue to do to promote your idea of what it means to be free or an American? To stay engaged in the process — that’s the challenge!

Free Will Baptists founded �ֲ��ý. Is there something about how they interpreted their gospel and teachings that resembles what Mays and King were doing?

The Free Will Baptists’ social and political commitments — abolitionism, temperance, education — came from their religious convictions. They believed that it was their responsibility, their duty, to transform the world around them and to look at the Sermon on the Mount as their practical way: that you feed the hungry, you clothe the naked, you visit those who are in prison, and you take care of the homeless.

Mays, like King, believed and practiced a “social gospel” that applied to every aspect of individual’s life and involvement with others. If the gospel only meant something on Sunday mornings or in your private meditations, then that wasn’t really the gospel message. For Mays and Dr. King, the gospel had a social message, one of social reform, social change, and realizing the Kingdom of God in the world.

What should we know about Mays’ meeting with Mahatma Gandhi?

It shows that he was part of a small group of African American scholars and intellectuals who were looking at India’s struggle against imperialism and colonialism as a way to help their own strategies for addressing segregation in the U.S.

Mays engaged Gandhi around the whole question of nonviolent resistance. And when you see that happening in 1936, you see that he is thinking, “How can I use this same strategy, this same approach, in the U.S.?”

It also shows how he was becoming an international figure, too.

Was Mays ever criticized?

Sometimes people wonder just how involved he was in the civil rights movement. Well, he was very involved, educating the next generation of leaders, working behind the scenes, donating money, supporting the leadership and individuals within the movement, especially Dr. King and some others.

The only criticism that I do know of came later in the 1960s with a whole new generation of political activists. These were enormously important years in the consciousness of African Americans: black pride, Black Power, and a new kind of militant activism were emerging.

“Initially, my students just see Mays as someone ‘out there,'” says Marcus Bruce ’77, the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies. By the end of the course, they’ve begun to appreciate “the trials, tribulations, abuses he had to suffer.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Mays very firmly believed in the possibility of African Americans, but he wanted to go the route of education and help African Americans gain leadership positions in every field. Mays was seen by some younger activists as “old school” and out of step in this regard — as, on occasion, was King.

Recently I visited Paris and saw an exhibit called The Color Line at the Quai Branly Museum that looks at African American experience, from slavery to the Black Lives Matter movement, through the lens of art. When I came to the section on the 1960s, there were pictures of the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, and, in one glass case, Mays’ book Born to Rebel.

It struck me: Do they know the extent, intensity, and complexity of the differences and visions that existed between Mays’ and a new generation of African American activists? What we now celebrate as a period of rich diversity of ideas among African Americans was a painful and difficult period in Civil Rights history.

I have seen an interview with Mays where he talks about seeing the pro-KKK film Birth of a Nation in Lewiston, and afterward running back to campus because he feared for his safety.

He said it was the only time when he felt in danger in Lewiston. He felt real hostility and anger in that audience, and it frightened him. He saw the power of the medium to frighten people and generate mindless aggression and anger toward someone like him.

While he didn’t write specifically about Birth of a Nation, he wrote about another film, The Green Pastures, a popular Broadway musical in 1930 with an all-black cast that became a film with an all-black cast in 1936.

The movie depicts Bible stories through stereotypes of African Americans. It portrays God as a black man, “De Lawd,” speaking a black dialect — not correct or proper English speech — and scenarios that painted a quaint, folksy, stereotypically exaggerated image of African Americans and religious belief. Heaven is described as a fish fry.

Mays begins the book that is his dissertation, The Negro’s God: As Reflected in His Literature, by talking about The Green Pastures because he was bothered by the stereotypical depiction of how African Americans viewed God. He wanted his book to be a work of scholarship that recovered the richness and diversity of conceptions of African American ideas about God in their literature, in their scholarship, in their poetry.

Are there parts of Mays’ experience that don’t resonate with your students?

Many of my students raise questions about Mays’ particular attention to the role of race and gender in the education of young black men, especially the idea of Mays, when he was president of Morehouse, emphasizing the masculinity of young Morehouse men and their graduates.

I tell them that Mays taught the young African American men of Morehouse the “lessons” he had learned in his life and career, lessons in “how to be free in a segregated world,” how to define themselves by their “own terms in a world that offered no terms for their existence.”

Anna Marr ’17, an environmental studies major from Larchmont, N.Y., makes a point on Dec. 8 during the Benjamin Mays course taught by Marcus Bruce ’77, the Benjamin E. Mays Professor of Religious Studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Initially, my students just see Mays as a prominent and successful African American who attended �ֲ��ý. They’ve heard references to him at �ֲ��ý but they don’t know him. By the end of the course, they’ve become more intimate with him and begun to appreciate the decisions and choices and the life he led, and the trials, tribulations, and abuses he had to suffer.

And they begin to understand why he designed the Morehouse educational experience in a particular way, always exhorting students to do their best, to be competitive, and to believe they were just as talented and deserving as everyone else in the world.

At weekly chapel gatherings, Mays would give Morehouse students a phrase or saying that they could hang on to — quotes that they would keep for the remainder of their lives, that would serve as principles that would guide them in any situation.

I tell my students about this practice and then ask them, “What guides you, what are your principles?” And I always emphasize that Mays is a fellow �ֲ��ý College graduate. I say, “You can do as much, if not more, as Mays, a �ֲ��ý graduate. What are you learning from your education? What are you taking away from your experience at �ֲ��ý that will allow you to navigate the world and guide you through the rest of the world?”

What is another aspect of Mays that they might struggle with?

Sometimes Mays’ competitiveness, as you’ve described it, and his emphasis on always listing what he had achieved, is a bit off-putting to them. I had to learn to appreciate it myself. I thought, “Why does he keep listing this, that, and the other thing?” But I learned that it was a way for him to chart his course, assess his progress and to push himself to do even more.

Ben Coulibay ’17, a philosophy major from Philadelphia, joins the discussion on Dec. 8 during the Benjamin Mays course taught by Marcus Bruce ’77, the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

The point is, he was always trying to see how far he had come and what he achieved. It wasn’t simply his ego. It was about, “How free am I? What have I done to improve the community, the nation and the world of which I am a part?” He did that by listing his accomplishments or what he had been able to achieve at Howard and Morehouse and throughout the course of his life and career.

So long before anybody appreciated him, Benjamin Mays appreciated himself.

This is a man who was the son of former slaves, and he wanted to remind people of the fact that he got a degree from �ֲ��ý College, that he had earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and that he was dean of the School of Religion at Howard University and president of Morehouse College for 27 years. He had come a long way and achieved a great deal!

So long before anybody appreciated him, Benjamin Mays appreciated himself. That is kind of amazing.

What’s the one thing we should know about Benjamin Mays?

He was a greater man and a greater individual than we know. He had a far greater and wider impact than we actually know.

Besides appreciating him as a writer — he wrote a weekly column for The Pittsburgh Courier, an influential African American newspaper, for years — and as a scholar, as someone involved in the Civil Rights movement, and as a mentor for King, he was also an international figure, too. This is a man who was part of YMCA International and the World Council of Churches. He met and worked with hundreds of leaders around the world and had leadership positions with various national and international organizations.

The other thing that strikes me is his ongoing struggle for emancipation. I started out with the phrase — “�ֲ��ý didn’t emancipate me” — and then you look at what he meant by “emancipation,” and it’s ongoing.

When we think of “emancipation,” is it usually some 19th-century idea and event, the Emancipation Proclamation and a group of African Americans, some formerly enslaved, some free, who are struggling to define freedom for themselves and the country? No! The greatness of this country is that we keep defining “emancipation.”

The phrase that rings with me is Lincoln’s from the Gettysburg’s Address: “This nation shall have a new birth of freedom.” We tend to think that freedom was born a long time ago and it’s done. No! The process of defining freedom goes on.

Each �ֲ��ý student — all of us here — is a new birth of freedom. Now are we going to articulate that? How are we going to do that? It’s not easy. It’s painful because somebody over there might think, “That’s a ridiculous idea.”

But that is part of the process. So that is what strikes me this year, that Mays represents a new birth of freedom and encourages all of us to work through our ideas and our practice of freedom.

Corrections to this story were published at 6 p.m. Jan. 6, 2017.

Benjamin Mays’ living legacy

�ֲ��ý Magazine — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 17:03:33 +0000

The great civil rights leader never forgot �ֲ��ý. And it works both ways.

By Doug Hubley

In 1986, about a dozen �ֲ��ý people found themselves deep in rural South Carolina looking at a shack.

They were looking at a shack, but seeing the starting point of a journey whose consequences were nothing short of transformational for a man and for a nation.

Benjamin Mays ’20, photographed in 1980 when he returned to �ֲ��ý for his 60th Reunion. Photograph by Jim Daniels.

The shack was the Greenwood County birthplace of Benjamin E. Mays ’20, the civil rights theorist, educator, preacher, Morehouse College president and mentor to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — in short, schoolmaster to the civil rights movement, to paraphrase recent Mays biographer Randal M. Jelks.

The �ֲ��ý group comprised students in a Short Term religion course investigating the black church in America. For them, the shack near Epworth, S.C., was one seminal stop in a Southern itinerary that resembled a kind of “Benjamin Mays Tour” because Mays was linked to so many of its destinations.

There in the countryside, the visitors from �ֲ��ý were closing a circle. They were learning about a man who might have had a much different life, perhaps a less consequential life, without �ֲ��ý. �ֲ��ý had shaped Mays, and now his legacy was shaping these students, and back through them, the college itself.

Even 29 years after Mays passed away, that circle remains intact. Many people know of �ֲ��ý because of the college’s influence on his life. And Mays’ influence is more present than ever on campus, whether expressed in the college mission statement, or in the recollections of �ֲ��ý people who knew him, or in campus speeches, notably the Oct. 26 inaugural address by Clayton Spencer (see page 38).

Former slaves, Mays’ parents were sharecroppers. Their dwelling has since been moved to the Dr. Benjamin E. Mays Historic Preservation Site, in Greenwood, S.C., but when the �ֲ��ý group visited, it was “out in the middle of a field,” recalls Associate Dean of Students James Reese, who was part of the group led by an acting college chaplain, Rob Stuart.

“Personal and political freedom and formal education were inextricably bound together for Mays.”

The group talked about starting life in that field in the Jim Crow era — Mays’ earliest memory was of a white mob threatening his father — and ultimately heading off to Maine for a college that promised something better. In 1986, the distance from Greenwood to Lewiston “was palpable,” Reese says.

“But in 1917, it was like going across the universe. That really resonated with us.”

In that year, Mays 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. Starting with a friendly encounter with a �ֲ��ý student on the train coming north, Mays was pleasantly surprised to discover that racism in Lewiston was more the exception than the rule.

Mays poses with his 1919 debate teammates. Mays’ drive to succeed academically came from wanting to prove “that superiority or inferiority in academic achievement had nothing to do with color of skin,” he wrote in Born to Rebel. Front row, from left, Arthur F. Lucas ’20, Robert B. Watts ’22, Edward H. Brewster ’19; back row, Charles M. Starbird ’21, Benjamin E. Mays ’20, Charles P. Mayoh ’19. Photograph courtesy of Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Mays came here not only for a better education than a person of color could reasonably expect down South, but to prove his intellectual equality to whites. “How could I know I was not inferior to the white man, having never had a chance to compete with him?” Mays recalled in Born to Rebel, his 1971 autobiography.

Proof soon abounded. He 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.

“I concede academic superiority to not more than four in my class,” he wrote in Born to Rebel. “I displayed more initiative as a student leader than the majority of my classmates. �ֲ��ý College made these things possible.”

At �ֲ��ý, Mays “found a way to chart a course in which he could find the intellectual resources he needed, gain confidence in his ability and then to leave to do extraordinary things,” says Marcus Bruce ’77, who is the inaugural Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at �ֲ��ý.

Or as Mays himself 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.”

He later earned advanced degrees at the University of Chicago, but it was at �ֲ��ý that he laid the groundwork for “a new biblical interpretation that could mobilize black communities to take action against Jim Crow’s enforced apathy,” Jelks writes in the 2012 Mays biography Schoolmaster of the Movement. Mays’ studies in religion steered him toward an intellectual structure for both his profound Baptist faith and his personal mission “to uplift his people,” as Jelks puts it.

In the writings of theologian Walter Rauschenbusch and others, Mays learned about the Social Gospel, a Protestant movement that advocated for a church that would actively address societal ills — of which there was none more exigent to Mays than American racism.

Mays later came to understand the Church as central to both the persistence of racism and its amelioration. Racist whites cited Scripture to defend their prejudice, and blacks used the Church to defend their sanity and solidarity. And in that unity also lay the foundation for a civil rights movement.

Mays delivers the final eulogy for the slain Martin Luther King Jr. on April 9, 1968, at Morehouse College. Photograph courtesy of Howard University.

Mays saw in certain Baptist tenets — “freedom of conscience, the dignity and worth of every man, each man’s individual right of direct access to God,” in his words — a moral basis for the powerful rebuttal to racism that he would promulgate to generations of students. Especially during his tenure as Morehouse president, from 1940 to 1967, he “laid the intellectual groundwork for social change throughout the South among black churchgoing college students,” Jelks writes.

Both resounding and intellectually sound, Mays’ rhetoric was the ammunition that these students needed to overturn the racist discourse of the Jim Crow South. Mays, says Bruce, “employed and deployed religious rhetoric to address urgent issues of religious, political and social importance. This is certainly one of the lessons that he passed along to his student, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” as well as to such political and civil rights leaders as Julian Bond and Andrew Young.

People who know about Benjamin Mays tend to know about �ֲ��ý.

James Reese, who was a child when he first encountered Mays, at a college football game in Knoxville, Tenn., has stayed close to Mays’ legacy. Reese accompanied former �ֲ��ý President Elaine Tuttle Hansen to Greenwood in 2011 when she spoke at the dedication of the Mays Historic Preservation Site.

Hansen explained to an attentive audience that �ֲ��ý, in rewriting its mission statement in 2010, had tipped its mortarboard to Mays by declaring itself “dedicated to the emancipating potential of the liberal arts.”

“That really resonated with the audience,” Reese recalls. “They leaned back, confident that �ֲ��ý understood what Dr. Mays was about. I was so glad to be there for that moment.” In fact, Reese points out, people who know about Mays tend to know about �ֲ��ý. The warm relationship between Morehouse and �ֲ��ý has roots in his story; and Reese even has an anecdote about bringing his parents to visit a friend whose hospitality suddenly blossomed when she learned he worked at �ֲ��ý.

In June 1963, Mays and then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson confer while en route to the state funeral of Pope John XIII. Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Presidential Library

If �ֲ��ý is known elsewhere because of its role in Mays’ achievements, those achievements keep Mays alive in the campus consciousness. He is much in evidence when �ֲ��ý observes Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which always includes a debate with Morehouse. �ֲ��ý named its Residential Village campus center for Mays, adding to a list of monuments around the nation that includes an elaborate memorial, incorporating a statue and Mays’ tomb, at Morehouse.

Most important, Mays lived and taught values that �ֲ��ý calls its own. Other Northern institutions refused Mays admission due to race, but �ֲ��ý has always been open to all races.

“Personal and political freedom and formal education were inextricably bound together” for Mays, Jelks writes; so they are here.

In this undated photo, Mays talks with baseball great Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves. Photograph courtesy of Howard University.

Mays’ passion was social engagement; his scope was global — Gandhi, whom he met, was influential in his thinking. And his style was audacious. These are all �ֲ��ý hallmarks.

“Exploring the legacy of Mays is a way to discover something about �ֲ��ý as well,” says Bruce. “He continues to help us understand who we are as an institution, and the kind of education we provided in the past, and can provide in the future.”

The revised mission statement, Bruce says, presents the liberal arts education “as being about emancipation, freeing yourself from certain kinds of fears, or conventions, or ideas that are limiting. It enables you to see, and think, and live in new ways.” And if most of today’s students will likely never face the difficulties experienced by minorities back in the bad old days, the determination that Mays forged in the struggle remains inspirational.

“He’s an extraordinary example of faith, of fortitude, of persistence and clarity of vision,” Bruce says. “�ֲ��ý provided an opportunity for him, but at the same time he continues to provide us with a great deal. It’s just a matter of exploring his legacy.”

‘Questions Worth Asking’ — President Clayton Spencer’s inaugural address

�ֲ��ý News — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 21:00:42 +0000

�ֲ��ý President Clayton Spencer delivered her inaugural address, “Questions Worth Asking,” on Oct. 26, 2012. Click this link for a PDF version of the address.

Well, I guess now I really am the eighth president of �ֲ��ý College. It is an enormous honor and a humbling trust. Thank you Mike, Marcus, Umar, Lynn, and Danny for making it official.

And thank you, Drew, for those amazingly generous words. It means the world to me that you are here.

Thank you Jacqui, Michael, Pat, Jennifer, mayors Macdonald and LaBonté, and Adam for your greetings from many quarters.

�ֲ��ý is privileged to be part of a community with a rich history and increasingly vibrant present, and I have felt at home here from the moment the moving trucks pulled up at 256 College St. this past summer. We and our host cities draw strength from a partnership of genuine mutuality. Give us a little time, and I’m pretty sure that it is our West Coast counterpart that will be known as the “other LA.”

I am also honored to be joined today by my three predecessors — Don Harward, Elaine Hansen, and Nancy Cable. Their presence marks the fact that this ceremony is not about any given individual, but rather about the institution — its history, its values, and the mission we carry into the future. Anything we are able to accomplish in the coming years will build on the contributions you made to the fabric of this campus and college. Thank you for your leadership, and thank you for being here today.

I want to welcome and thank, as well, presidents and delegates from our sister institutions in Maine, and from colleges and universities across New England, the nation, and even the Atlantic. Your presence honors �ֲ��ý, and we appreciate your solidarity and support at this moment of great meaning for us.

Thank you students, faculty, and staff, who are the heart and soul of this remarkable campus community. Here, I want to give special thanks to the many individuals who have knocked themselves out planning these festivities and tackling every detail so that we would all feel welcomed and well taken care of.

About 2,500 guests attended the installation ceremony for A. Clayton Spencer as the eighth president of �ֲ��ý College on Friday, Oct. 26, 2012. Photo: Mike Bradley/�ֲ��ý College.

Thank you, as well, trustees, former trustees, and alumni — those of you present here and those of you participating at a distance. You serve and support the college in so many ways, and we are deeply grateful.

I want to give a special thanks to my friends and family who have turned up in force — my children, my parents, my brother and sister, my phalanx of relatives, and friends and colleagues from so many chapters of my life. It is such a joy to share this moment with all of you.

It is a special honor for me to wear, on this occasion, the cap that my father wore throughout his academic career, including 26 years as president of two different liberal arts colleges. It is an understatement to say that my parents have made a heroic effort to travel up here to be with us today. It is characteristic of their generosity and their spirit, and I appreciate beyond measure that they are here.

• • •

It is an uncommon privilege to be invited to step into the history of an institution. And it is a daunting responsibility to be asked to point the way into an inevitably uncertain future.

It is worth remembering, as we try our best to look ahead and make out the shape of things to come, that our predictions are always defined more by the past we have lived than by the future we imagine. Who among us in the early 1990s would have guessed at the profound reshaping of contemporary life about to be ushered in by the Internet? And who, on September 10, 2001, would have predicted a decade defined by a “War on Terror,” U.S. involvement in two literal wars, and a fundamental recasting of America’s place in the world?

Clayton Spencer hoists the cap that her father, Samuel Reid Spencer, wore as president of Mary Baldwin College and Davidson College, during her installation ceremony as the eighth president of �ֲ��ý College on Friday, Oct. 26, 2012. Photo: Mike Bradley/�ֲ��ý College.

When George Colby Chase was installed as the second president of �ֲ��ý, he described “a society so complex that its numberless and every-varying elements with their incessant action and reaction, dizzy the clearest brain and baffle the subtlest power of analysis….”[1] That was 1894.

In 1920, on the heels of World War I — the so-called war to end all wars — our third president, Clifton Daggett Gray, spoke of the future with foreboding: “This generation has only to look at what is going on under its very eyes to realize that there is taking place in both hemispheres something, the full significance of which no one is wise enough at present to estimate, but which is bound to affect for good or ill the destinies of the whole world for centuries to come.”[2] Little did President Gray know that the Great Depression and World War II would come along during his tenure to confirm his worst fears.

In 1967, as the civil rights movement shook the nation, Detroit burned, and campuses were torn apart by the Vietnam War, Thomas Hedley Reynolds, our fifth president, noted the “remarkable rapidity of change in this country in the last half century,” and worried about the “many dangers” confronting “this college and … others of its kind.”[3]

Of course, at that moment, Reynolds, and �ֲ��ý College, stood on the threshold of one of the most stable and prosperous half-centuries in human history — a period that we may well look back on as the golden age of higher education in America.

We can never know what the future has in store for us. The best we can do is to engage the present and make our way forward with energy, diligence, and authenticity.

• • •

�ֲ��ý brings to this task a strong history. We are proud of our story of origin, and we tell it often. �ֲ��ý was established in 1855 by Freewill Baptists, who were also abolitionists. We were coed from the beginning; we recruited freed slaves to come here after the Civil War; and we never had fraternities or sororities because they ran against our egalitarian grain. This is a good story, but like any story that we tell over and over, I worry that we may no longer hear its meaning. So I thought today I would share a slightly different story — one that is familiar in its broad outlines, but revealing to me, and I hope to you, in its particulars.

As most of you probably know, one of our most distinguished graduates is Benjamin Elijah Mays, an American preacher, educator, scholar, and civil rights leader, who was president of Morehouse College in Atlanta from 1940 to 1967. Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, he was an important mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., and an advisor to U.S. presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

The youngest of eight children, Mays was born in 1894 to tenant farmers, and he grew up outside of Ninety-Six, South Carolina, in a county notorious for racial extremism.[4] In 1917, he came to �ֲ��ý as a sophomore, at age 23, after cobbling together a high school education against all odds. You see, black children in Greenwood County were allowed to attend school for only four months a year — November through February. The rest of the time they were expected to be available for farm work.

Within his first eight weeks at �ֲ��ý, Mays won the Sophomore Declamation Prize, and he was then recruited to join the college’s storied debate team. He graduated in 1920, one of fifteen students awarded honors, and he was chosen by his peers to be the class day speaker. Later, Mays went on to the University of Chicago, where he earned his master’s and Ph.D.

In his autobiography, written when he was in his seventies, Mays recounts the following story: “At �ֲ��ý, teachers spoke to Negro students on campus and downtown, especially if the Negro student was in a professor’s class. I knew one or two professors at the University of Chicago in 1921 who never recognized a Negro student when off campus or on.”[5]

Not all of Mays’ experiences at �ֲ��ý were positive. He was “furious” when he was not chosen to participate in either of the intercollegiate debates his junior year — against Cornell and Harvard — despite being one of the top debaters on the team,[6] and he nearly froze his fingers and toes off while clearing snow at President Chase’s house on Christmas Day when it was forty-four below zero.[7] But Mays counted his disappointments and challenges “as nothing compared to the rich harvest I gleaned from my association with the �ֲ��ý faculty and students.”[8]

�ֲ��ý admitted black students, educated women along with men, and banned exclusive social clubs not because it was the politically correct thing to do. Quite the contrary, these policies were seriously politically incorrect in their time. Rather, as the story of Benjamin Mays makes clear, we did it because, somehow, from our very beginnings, we encountered individuals in their full humanity. We took as our task educating them with intellectual rigor, ethical responsibility, and care for their fellow human beings.

These qualities are in the DNA of �ֲ��ý College, and they define us to this day. They also point the way forward.

• • •

Last month, Rafael Reif was installed as the 17th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spoke about our changing world and the implications for higher education. According to Reif, we find ourselves now on the threshold of a “technological transformation [that] has the potential to reshape the education landscape — and to challenge our very existence.”[9]

�ֲ��ý is not MIT. And it is not our first impulse to frame our future in terms of changes in technology. Yet the technology Reif is talking about is more than a tool, it is a cultural force changing the way we live our lives and experience the world. It is reshaping our professional interactions, transforming the nature and structure of social relations, and altering our connection to information and knowledge.

Some believe that the Internet will follow radio and television, bringing broad social change while leaving institutions like ours more or less unperturbed. Others point to the printing press, which made knowledge available to the masses, leading, inexorably, to the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern West. One thing is certain: the context in which we do what we do in higher education has changed irrevocably.

This is partly because these forces hit us where we live in higher education — some of the most powerful changes are occurring at the heart of scholarship and knowledge creation. And it is partly because the changes happening around us have altered the frame through which our particular model of education is viewed.

In science, for example, online depositories allow scholarly exchange to short-circuit traditional peer review, challenging the role of scholarly journals. The Public Library of Science — PLOS — publishes open-access online journals that, in less than a decade, are among the most highly cited in biology, genetics, and medicine.[10]

Rich archives, once available only in person, are being put online. The Library of Congress has digitized historic newspapers, classic prints and photographs, as well as the correspondence of figures ranging from Alexander Graham Bell and Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass and Hannah Arendt.[11] The Google Art Project has brought online over 32,000 works by 7,200 artists, housed in 156 collections around the world.[12] One can explore these paintings in remarkable detail — down to the individual brushstroke.

These breakthroughs in technology present tremendous opportunities for places like �ֲ��ý. No longer does a senior writing a history thesis have to travel to Boston to find materials or wait three weeks to get primary sources through interlibrary loan. Language students can hone their conversational style by watching foreign-language soap operas whenever it suits them on any one of their mobile devices. And our “Presidential Campaign Rhetoric” class can pore over Clinton’s convention speech, as written and as delivered. For institutions, as for individuals, the world is quite literally a click away.

In their intellectual reach, then, �ֲ��ý, and liberal arts colleges like us, have become a great deal larger. Yet enlarging the screen on which we must project our institutional identity and compete for faculty and students makes this tiny campus in Lewiston, Maine, look ever smaller. The liberal arts colleges, taken together, educate fewer than four percent of the college students in America.[13] That fraction shrinks further against a large and growing global denominator.

Beyond sheer numbers, what Hedley Reynolds described as the “tough-minded tradition of the small New England college”[14] is at risk of looking dangerously quaint in a world of rapidly growing global populations, hungry for knowledge and credentials. Furthermore, the expansion of knowledge and fields of research renders increasingly arbitrary our choices about the faculty we hire and the courses we teach.

Finally, ready access to the world’s most enticing intellectual capital at little or no cost makes the residential model of the liberal arts feel ever more expensive. With Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and other leading universities putting highly produced courses online — often in fields we don’t even teach — we can be sure that students and their parents will scrutinize intensely the value proposition of the residential liberal arts model.

• • •

We welcome this scrutiny because it forces us to get very clear about who we are and what we do. It challenges us to make a virtue of our scale, delivering our particular model of education at a high standard of excellence. What is this model? It is the compelling paradox of the liberal arts, where we value the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, with no practical aim, and at the same time prize the teaching of values — of curiosity and empathy, imagination and confidence — that shape a human being who can in turn shape the world. It is reaching up in pursuit of truth and reaching out in acts of service, and seeing no contradiction between the two.

Here I would like to return to the story of Benjamin Mays and suggest three lessons that it offers to the �ֲ��ý of today.

First, the story of Benjamin Mays is a story about “mindset.” It is the story of a college that met the world head on from its very beginnings. Bucking history, convention, and the easy path, �ֲ��ý engaged with a very complex social reality and pressed ahead based on a simple conviction — namely, that all human beings have free and equal access to God’s grace, and, by extension, to education and human fulfillment.[15]

This mindset — standing firmly on principle and encountering the world with energy and confidence — is highly relevant today. If success for colleges and universities was defined for the past thirty years as a niche competition based on wealth and prestige, in the next decades success will go to the institutions that engage most robustly and effectively with the forces that are reshaping our world.

It is not enough, in the liberal arts, to circle the wagons and assume that we can keep doing what we’re doing, the way we’ve always been doing it. In a world of exploding knowledge, we need to be highly intentional about how we recruit new faculty and how we configure departments to build on our particular strengths. We need to move beyond the limits of disciplinary structures to shape intellectual capacity and curriculum in ways that respond to the evolution of fields and student curiosity, while at the same time maintaining our standards of excellence. And we need to think pragmatically about how to support faculty members who wish to adapt their pedagogy to take greater advantage of the powerful tools that are now available.

With technology turning the world into our library, we must also work with faculty and students to gain access to the range of content and modes of intellectual production that are now at our fingertips. At the same time, the central goal of liberal education — “to nurture the growth of human talent in the service of human freedom,” as historian William Cronon puts it[16] — has never been more important. Given all that our students have coming at them — in the classroom, in their lives, and on their machines — they sorely need adults whom they know and respect to work with them as they learn to navigate complicated intellectual terrain.

The good class is not simply the “small” class, but rather the “engaged” class. Here, faculty, through their own passion and erudition, inspire students to take ideas seriously, and sometimes even to love them. They help students when the work gets hard — when texts resist interpretation, or require more context than an eighteen-year-old could possibly bring; when experiments fail in the lab; or when weeks of analysis must be scrubbed because of an error in a data set. Working closely with adults and with each other, students learn that although information may be a click away, mastery and meaning are not. Some kinds of knowledge require patience, and perseverance, and close attention.

This is what South African artist William Kentridge calls “getting our hands dirty.” Last spring, Kentridge gave the Norton Lectures at Harvard, and I was privileged to attend all six of them.[17] He titled the series, “Drawing Lessons,” and each week he invited us into his studio — through films, drawings, and reflections — and showed us how the studio is for him the place where he makes sense of the world. For Kentridge, meaning emerges from making. The making of the object is not a one-way translation of an idea into a visual object. Rather, the process of construction is where meaning materializes. From the act of encountering the world and rendering some aspect of it in physical form, we can then look at the object in front of us, and parts of the world and ourselves are revealed.

College, like the studio, is quintessentially a place of making — making sense of ourselves and making sense of our world. In this respect, the liberal arts college, with its intimate scale, has a distinct advantage. And �ֲ��ý has a strong tradition of active, engaged learning to build on. All of our students write senior theses or develop capstone projects, working intensively with a faculty member one-on-one over a period of months. A third of our students work in the local community through their courses or the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. Our General Education Concentrations embrace problem-oriented and interdisciplinary approaches. And over sixty per cent of our students spend some portion of their undergraduate time abroad, quite literally engaged with the world.

In short, the mindset exemplified in the Benjamin Mays story is grounded in ideas and values, but porous to the world. For the liberal arts college it means, among other things, recognizing that the line between theory and practice is breaking down. It means acknowledging that our students’ work with Somali children and adults in Lewiston is not only an opportunity for service, but also a venue for cultural learning at a very high level. And it means that we see the growing concern of students and parents with employment prospects not as a domain beneath our proper notice, but rather as a deep aspect of our obligation as a liberal arts college to prepare our students for a life of purposeful work. At our best, we challenge ourselves as an institution to wrestle actively and joyously with the world as we encounter it. In so doing we model this mindset for our students as they work to construct their own lives.

Second, the story of Benjamin Mays is a human story. It is as much about “heart” as “head.” It illustrates the most distinctive and important dimension of our work at liberal arts colleges — the project of guiding young people through the passage from childhood to adulthood, to make them not only knowledgeable and equipped to navigate a complex world, but also motivated with empathy toward their fellow human beings. As Peter Gomes — another of our notable graduates — once said, we put “the making of a better person ahead of the making of a brighter person, or a better mousetrap.”[18]

This “making of a better person” is an important project, and one that liberal arts colleges are positioned to carry out better than any other higher education model — and certainly better than any machine. To paraphrase a recent Boston Globe headline, “There’s no app for answering deep questions.”[19] Questions, again in the words of Peter Gomes, like “What is my purpose? How can my life be better? How can I help to make a better world?” Gomes continues, “These are the questions worth asking, and college is one of the few places that allows you, even requires you, to do so.”[20]

It is not our job to supply the answers to these questions, but it is our job to create the conditions under which our students will be inspired to ask them for themselves. Learning here occurs in community. We are situated in a particular place, with a particular culture, and a particular set of human beings who come to know each other face to face. Just as all great novels are parochial novels,[21] so the most complete kind of human learning takes place in community, with the solidarity of companionship and the challenge of truth.

The liberal arts college embodies a powerful alchemy of the universal and the particular. The audacity of the intellectual project — to encompass knowledge across time and the world — invites our students to grapple with fundamental principles even as they hone their individuality. At the same time, our intimate scale creates a zone of care and concern that — when it works — produces graduates with ethical awareness and a commitment to serving purposes larger than themselves.

Finally, the story of Benjamin Mays is, at the most literal level, a story about community — not only what community is for, but how it is constructed. It is a story of openness and inclusion, well before we had the language for such things.

The genius of American higher education is that it unites excellence and opportunity at the heart of the enterprise, allowing talented students regardless of background or means to attend our best colleges and universities, and, conversely, allowing these institutions to draw from broad pools of talent that are constantly being renewed. This is a historical accident brought to us by the G.I. Bill following World War II and codified in the Federal Higher Education Act of 1965.[22]

Far from turning American colleges and universities into “hobo jungles,”[23] as predicted in 1944 by University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins, the returning GIs infused our institutions with talent, energy, aspiration, and grit, producing a higher education system of unmatched vitality and intellectual power. In other words, American higher education is excellent not in spite of its openness, but because of it.

At �ֲ��ý, we claim this union of excellence and opportunity as a core element of our identity, and we need to continue to build on this deep aspect of who we are. As a practical matter this means redoubling our efforts to recruit students from a wide range of backgrounds, and it means maintaining an unwavering commitment to financial aid. A residential liberal arts education is expensive for us to offer and for families to afford. Unless we are content to become a luxury good — higher education’s version of the “gated community” — we must make sure that we have the financial means to seek out and admit talented students regardless of their ability to pay.

And we must make equally sure that, once here, our students encounter a diverse range of adults ready to support them for success, and a culture that embraces diversity across many dimensions, giving richness and power to the educational experience of all of our students.

• • •

It is no accident that one of the great technologists of our era, Steve Jobs, titled his commencement address at Stanford in 2005, “You’ve Got to Find What You Love.”[24] He told three stories — one called “Connecting the Dots”; one called “Love and Loss”; and one called “Death.” In this last story, in which he described being diagnosed with cancer and then apparently “cured,” Jobs delivered a simple message to the assembled students: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Likewise, at �ֲ��ý, we don’t have time to waste. In certain respects, we lag our peers in wealth and fame and market position. But we are not in danger of living someone else’s life. We know who we are and what we stand for, and we stand ready — together — to challenge ourselves and to engage the world.

Thank you.

This inaugural address by �ֲ��ý President Clayton Spencer, “Questions Worth Asking,” was delivered on Oct. 26, 2012.

Endnotes

1. George Colby Chase, �ֲ��ý College — Inaugural Address of President George C. Chase, September 22, 1894, p. 8.
2. Clifton Daggett Gray, “Inaugural Address,” �ֲ��ý College Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 1 (December 1920), p. 35.
3. Thomas Hedley Reynolds, “The Inaugural Address by Dr. Thomas Hedley Reynolds,” news release, October 7, 1967, pp. 4 and 8.
4. Benjamin E. Mays, Born to Rebel: An Autobiography. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987 (c. 1971), p. xliv.
5. Mays, p. 65.
6. Mays, pp. 58-59.
7. Mays, p. 54.
8. Mays, p. 60.
9. L. Rafael Reif, Inaugural Address, Office of the President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September, 21, 2012, .
10. Thomson Reuters,
11. Library of Congress,
12. Google Art Project,
13. See Helen L. Horowitz, “Balancing Hopes and Limits in the Liberal Arts College,” Liberal Arts Colleges in American Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities, American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper No. 59 (2005), p. 18, retrieved from
14. Reynolds Inaugural Address, p. 1.
15. Alfred Williams Anthony, �ֲ��ý College and Its Background: A Review of Origins and Causes. Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1936, pp. 81-82. See also, Charles E. Clark, �ֲ��ý Through the Years: An Illustrated History. Lewiston, ME: �ֲ��ý College, 2005, p. 20.
16. William Cronon, “‘Only Connect…’: The Goals of a Liberal Education,” The American Scholar, Volume 67, No. 4 (Autumn 1998), retrieved from .
17. See .
18. Peter Gomes, Never Give Up! And Other Sermons Preached at Harvard, 2008–2010, ed. Cynthia Wight Rossano (Cambridge: Memorial Church, Harvard University, 2011) p. 21.
19. Karen Campbell, “Answering deep questions — there’s not an app for that,” interview with Howard Gardner, The Boston Globe, October 8, 2012, p. G14.
20. Gomes, p. 41.
21. Ian McEwan, “The Lever: Where Novelists Stand to Move the World,” (lecture, Harvard University, April 17, 2012).
22. See, for example, Patricia Strach, “Making Higher Education Affordable: Policy Design in Postwar America,” Journal of Policy History, Vol. 21, No. 1 (January 2009), pp. 61-88 (esp. pp. 65-67 and notes 19-28).
23. Robert Maynard Hutchins, “The Threat to American Education,” ��Ǳ��’s, December 30, 1944, pp. 20-21.
24. “‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says,” Stanford Report, June 14, 2005, .

Benjamin Mays – News

Recalling the late Henry Aaron’s friendship with Benjamin Mays

Transformative: The �ֲ���ý Mission Statement at age 10

+The �ֲ���ý College Mission Statement

�ֲ���ý in the News: Oct. 25, 2019

�ֲ���ý Football

How to tackle concussions? High schools get helmets with sensors — Portland Press Herald

Elizabeth Strout ’77

Elizabeth Strout’s view from the top — WNYC

Benjamin Mays, Class of 1920

The late Rep. Elijah Cumming’s favorite poem linked to Benjamin Mays — multiple outlets

Deshun Peoples ’17

Student lands place at top art college thanks to nine months training in China — Encounters in China

Tessica Glancey Crampton ’12 and Robert Crampton ’13

Philadelphia weddings: Tessica Glancey and Robert Crampton — The Philadelphia Inquirer

Adriana Salerno

Episode 46: “Adriana Salerno” — My Favorite Theorem

Michael Morgan ’22

Michael Morgan continues to build on his creative legacy — The Gleaner

Carine Warsawski ’07

Jewish summer camp with campfires, crafts, and no lights out — The New York Times

Anita Charles

Relationship-based practices for today’s students — Heinemann Publishing

Hannah Morris ’96

Art review: “Waiting to Happen: Hannah Morris” — Seven Days

Justine Wiesinger

New climate change comedy uses laughs to tackle tough questions — WUNC

Kelli Armstrong ’86

Dr. Kelli Armstrong inaugurated as president of Salve Regina University — Rhode Island Catholic

What emancipation meant to Benjamin Mays, and what it means now

Recalling when �ֲ���ý fought, yet benefited from, a racist debate organization

Sources

Meet six alumni from �ֲ���ý history as Black History Month concludes

Henry Chandler, Class of 1874

Stella James, Class of 1897

Benjamin Mays, Class of 1920

John Davis, Class of 1926

William Worthy, Class of 1942

Peter Gomes, Class of 1965

Mays Medal to Ed O’Neil ’82 highlights alumni awards at Reunion 2017

Edward J. O’Neil Jr. ’82: Benjamin E. Mays Medal

Judith A. Marden ’66: Helen A. Papaioanou ’49 Distinguished Alumni Service Award

Robert E. Cramer ’79, P’13, P’14: Bruce Stangle Award for Distinguished Service to the �ֲ���ý Community

Q&A: Marcus Bruce ’77 on Benjamin Mays, MLK, and the ongoing struggle for emancipation

How did Mays influence King during the boycott?

Did you ever meet Mays?

For Mays, emancipating himself meant competing with and doing better than white students in his studies and activities. What do you take away from his focus on competition to prove his self-worth?

Do we know if that was a typical experience of Southern African Americans who went to Northern schools, to frame their goals in competitive terms?

Since the presidential election, where are your students in their thinking?

So education still has the power to liberate students from fear?

That connects to Mays’ eulogy for King, when he said that there’s no such thing as someone, like King, being “ahead of their time” because the time is “always ripe to do that which is right and that which needs to be done.”

Free Will Baptists founded �ֲ���ý. Is there something about how they interpreted their gospel and teachings that resembles what Mays and King were doing?

What should we know about Mays’ meeting with Mahatma Gandhi?

Was Mays ever criticized?

I have seen an interview with Mays where he talks about seeing the pro-KKK film Birth of a Nation in Lewiston, and afterward running back to campus because he feared for his safety.

Are there parts of Mays’ experience that don’t resonate with your students?

What is another aspect of Mays that they might struggle with?

What’s the one thing we should know about Benjamin Mays?

Benjamin Mays’ living legacy

‘Questions Worth Asking’ — President Clayton Spencer’s inaugural address

Endnotes

Transformative: The �ֲ��ý Mission Statement at age 10

+The �ֲ��ý College Mission Statement

�ֲ��ý in the News: Oct. 25, 2019

�ֲ��ý Football

Recalling when �ֲ��ý fought, yet benefited from, a racist debate organization

Meet six alumni from �ֲ��ý history as Black History Month concludes

Robert E. Cramer ’79, P’13, P’14: Bruce Stangle Award for Distinguished Service to the �ֲ��ý Community

Free Will Baptists founded �ֲ��ý. Is there something about how they interpreted their gospel and teachings that resembles what Mays and King were doing?