Benjamin Elijah Mays was an American Baptist minister and American rights leader who is credited with laying the intellectual foundations of the American civil rights movement. Mays taught and mentored many influential activists, including Martin Luther King Jr, Julian Bond, Maynard Jackson, and Donn Clendenon, among others. His rhetoric and intellectual pursuits focused on Black self-determination. Mays' commitment to social justice through nonviolence and civil resistance were cultivated from his youth through the lessons imbibed from his parents and eldest sister. The peak of his public influence coincided with his nearly three-decade tenure as the sixth president of Morehouse College, a historically black institution of higher learning, in Atlanta, Georgia.
Mays traveled to Maine to study at Bates College when he was 23.
Mays studied at the University of Chicago after receiving his B.A. from Bates; he received a M.A. in 1925 and PhD. in 1935.
Mays worked at Howard University from 1934 to 1940.
Mays as the 6th president of Morehouse College.
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Christian minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. A black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.
King in 1964
King's childhood home in Atlanta
The high school that King attended was named after African-American educator Booker T. Washington.
King received a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951 (pictured in 2009).