Born: August 1, 1894, Ninety-Six, SC

Education: Virginia Union University, 1917; Bates College, B.A., 1920; University of Chicago, M.A., 1925, Ph.D., 1935

Died: March 28, 1984, Atlanta, GA

Growing up in the segregated South, Mays hoped “that someday I would be able to do something about a situation that had shadowed my early years and killed the spirit of all too many of my people” (Mays 2003, p. 49). Between the 1930s and 1960s, he became an educator, minister, and civil rights activist of major importance. An institution builder, he helped foster the philosophy and practice of nonviolence. Generations called him “School Master of the Movement.”

Education, religion, and equality were his paramount causes. A pillar of the Atlanta NAACP, National Baptist Convention USA, and National Council of Churches, he joined in interwar movements against lynching, the white primary election, job discrimination, and Jim Crow education. He authored seminal books on Christianity and race relations; his autobiography was reissued in 1987 and 2003. He taught seminary and college students, including Martin Luther King, Jr., to excel and challenge segregation through nonviolence. Mays was King's eulogist before an international television audience. King honored him as his “spiritual mentor and my intellectual father.” Some Atlanta whites, calling Mays a communist, picketed his residence at Morehouse College. As the chairman of the Atlanta School Board, he led its adoption and execution of a full desegregation policy.