King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

On August 5, the president of Morehouse, Dr. Benjamin Mays, visited the tobacco farm. The son of a sharecropper, he stood tall and slender, his posture perfect, his silver hair carefully cut and seeming to illuminate his dark, handsome face. Mays had risen impressively through the church and academy, and held a doctorate from the University of Chicago. Morehouse was the most prestigious all-Black, all-male college in the United States, but it had been struggling since the 1929 Wall Street crash. Mays had earned the nickname “Buck Bennie” for his efforts to repair the school’s finances. He insisted students pay their tuition promptly, and he helped them find jobs. But he had done more than shore up the school’s budget. He boosted the school’s academic reputation, too. Before Morehouse, Mays had served as the dean of the Howard University School of Religion, where he worked with two of the most influential African American preachers of the early twentieth century, Mordecai Johnson and Howard Thurman. At Howard, these preachers had created a laboratory where the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel (that religious belief must be put in action to correct society’s flaws) and Mahatma Gandhi’s views on nonviolent resistance would be applied in fighting racial injustice. At Morehouse, Mays set out to empower his students, to produce young men charged with changing the world. To be a Morehouse man, he made clear, was to be a part of a special order and to bear a special...