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The Magnificent Mays: A Biography of Benjamin Elijah Mays. By John Herbert Roper Sr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2012. Pp. [xvi], 367. $44.95, ISBN 978-1-61117-077-1.)
Sheer determination pulled Benjamin E. Mays (1894-1984) out of rural and racially oppressive South Carolina to become a premier scholar, seminary dean, and college president. Mays educated three generations of black professionals whose leadership helped destroy American apartheid and achieve black civil rights. His dense analysis of black religion, Gandhian nonviolence, and liberal Protestant theology expressed in scholarly publications, sermons, and speeches laid intellectual foundations for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and he tutored such leading activists as James Farmer and Martin Luther King Jr. Though best known as the longtime president and builder of the modem Morehouse College, Mays was also long involved in the black freedom struggle. His participation in these efforts, though often in the background, was important and at times indispensable.
John H. Roper Sr., who has written intellectual biographies of historians Ulrich B. Phillips and C. Vann Woodward, shifts between social and intellectual analysis in The Magnificent Mays: A Biography of Benjamin Elijah Mays. Roper's prose is rich and sometimes excessive in its use of extensive classical and biblical allusions and passages. Apparently, the author has deployed this literary style to emphasize Mays's hunger for learning against great odds in a racist and violent South and to demonstrate Mays's full...