Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays (August 1, 1894 — March 28, 1984) was an American minister, educator, scholar, social activist, and the president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1940 to 1967. He was also a significant mentor to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and was among the most articulate and outspoken critics of segregation before the rise of the modern civil rights movement in the United States. While serving as the Dean of the School of Religion at Howard University in Washington D.C. from 1934 to 1940, he traveled to India and spoke with Mohandas Gandhi, a highly respected equal-rights believer known all over the world; this meeting had a lasting impact on Dr. Mays.
Benjamin E. Mays High School in Atlanta, Georgia, was named in his honor.
Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays was born in 1894 in Greenwood, South Carolina, the youngest of eight children; his parents were tenant farmers and former slaves. After spending a year at Virginia Union University, he moved north to attend Bates College in Maine, where he obtained his B.A. in 1920, then entered the University of Chicago as a graduate student, earning an M.A. in 1925 and a Ph.D. in the School of Religion in 1935. While in graduate school Mays worked as a Pullman Porter. He also worked as a student assistant to Dr. Lacey Kirk Williams, pastor of Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago and President of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.His education at Chicago was interrupted when he was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1922 and accepted a pastorate at the Shiloh Baptist Church of Atlanta. Dr. Mays later taught at Morehouse College and at South Carolina State College. At Morehouse, he was Martin Luther King Junior's mentor.
Benjamin E. Mays, Born to Rebel: An Autobiography (New York: Scribner, [1971]; reprint, with a revised foreword by Orville Vernon Burton, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003). ISBN 0-8203-2523-6.