BENJAMIN ELIJAH MAYS, SCHOOLMASTER OF THE MOVEMENT,
“This is not a short war, this is a long war,” by Randal Maurice Jelks, (2012),
pp.221-222
“The civil rights movement went forward in spite of the
violence, but the tensions created by both personal ethics and political
demands strained the personal relationship between King and Mays. King had been
desirous of a seat on Morehouse’s board of trustees, and King’s father, a
thirty-year trustee, had urged Mays to put King’s nomination forward. Some
trustees considered King’s activities too controversial for him to serve as a
trustee. One can only speculate that King’s dalliances with women outside his
marriage had also become a problem for members of the board of trustees. Although it has not been fully documented, it
is likely that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had begun to inform
some of the trustees of King’s personal indiscretions, doing whatever it could
to discredit his leadership. Whatever the case may be, the board of trustees
voted against King’s placement on the board, leaving Mays with the unpleasant
and awkward duty of explaining to him why he was not elected. King was stunned
and aggrieved that his mentor had not been able to be more persuasive with his
trustees.
“Mays nevertheless vigorously defended King in his
[Pittsburgh] Courier column when the F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover, called
him the “most notorious liar in the country.” And he turned the spotlight back
on the FBI’S slow investigation of heinous hate crimes against black Americans
all throughout the South. When King was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace later
in 1964, many of the trustees who had been reluctant to elect King as a member
became a bit more disposed to appointing him as a Morehouse trustee. There were tensions felt inside the Mayses’
household as the movement pressed forward. According to Ralph Abernathy, one of
King’s top lieutenants, Mrs. Mays was none too happy about King’s repeated use,
in his public addresses of phrases, wholesale quotes, and parts of speeches
authored by Mays without giving him credit for them. She wanted her husband to be given the credit
that he rightly deserved. She found it unseemly and questioned King’s
character. Mays remained quiet about his
wife’s complaints, however, not wishing to be a distraction to King and the
larger aims of the movement. He knew
that black preachers, like their counterparts in the music world, were famous
for borrowing stylistic innovations and rhetorical flourishes without
attribution. However, Sadie felt that King’s international reputation as a
famed preacher was based on her husband’s words, and her loyalty was first and
foremost to him as a wife, not to King as a movement leader. If King was one of
the spearheads of the movement, Mrs. Mays thought, he should freely acknowledge
that the ideas he preached were his mentor’s, not his own.”
