Benjamin Mays

Oh, we're, we're the godfathers of the civil rights movement in this story.

You can't have a Benjamin Mays running Morehouse if he don't come to University of Chicago and be a Pullman porter.

You can't have the Great Migration if the Pullman porters out of Chicago aren't taking the Chicago Defender newspapers down South so the sharecroppers can apply for jobs and come on up.

And there is no civil rights movement without the money, and the Black middle class in Chicago financed the civil rights movement, right? We got John H.

And and there was no pity party for you.

You know, not what Benjamin Elijah may say, not failure, but low aim is sin.

That's it.

That's it.

Um, but she knew Martin Luther King from the early 1950s.

She was very good friends with Benjamin Mays, Dr. Benjamin Mays, who was the president of Morehouse, and his wife, Sadie Mays, the First Lady of Morehouse.

Sadie Mays came to her 1943-

And, and just to remind everyone, Morehouse of course is, uh...

You, you might describe what Morehouse is.

Yeah, so Morehouse is one of the HBCUs, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and that is where Martin Luther King went to school, and Benjamin Mays is actually his mentor, and I think that's probably how they originally met.

That, that, um, correspondence is gone, but she was great friends with the Kings, both Coretta and Martin.

And I start the book out actually with a story of how Martin Luther King is arrested driving her from dinner at their house back to Emory University, where she's taking some of her cancer treatments, and gets pulled over.

I mean, it may sound quaint to some listeners, but how rare was that in the Jim Crow South?

They were really the first in the Deep South to publish Black writers at all and worked with their grassroots kind of organization that they knew all of these famous Black writers and activists from, as you said, W.E.B. Du Bois, but also the head of Morehouse, who would become Martin Luther King's mentor in many ways.

And they had all these amazing connections.

They were the first people to publish Pauli Murray, first people to give Pauli Murray a paycheck.

That's fascinating as well.

I'm curious, what was her relationship with Dr. King?

So she knew the Kings pretty early on, like I said, because she knew his mentor, Benjamin Mays and Sadie Mays, the first lady of Morehouse.

And I think that's how she originally got introduced to King.

And I can think of some really specific examples of really meaningful research experiences in my life.

One was a summer program at Bates College that was named after Benjamin Mays.

He's a civil rights leader.

And this was a program targeted at students who didn't have opportunities to be involved in science.

It was at Barnett's home on Hillview Street in Clinton, where the lifeless body of Grayson Eli Watson was found on Sunday, stuffed in a couch and displaying bruising and bite marks, according to reports.

The Central City Police Department arrested Elijah Mays of Central City on Sunday, charged him with Grayson's murder, and now additional charges have been filed against the step-grandfather of the baby.

Also in Muhlenberg County, the Central City Police Department is mourning the loss of one of their officers who died unexpectedly at home on Thursday.

Jason Phillips joined the CCPD in November of 2020, according to the department's website.

We got to go over and beyond.

Benjamin Elijah Mays said, you got to run faster or forever be left behind.

It is my love for black businesses that prevents and precludes me from telling you the name of the restaurant that's in Marietta, Georgia, that sells served food, that was open on Labor Day.

But what I will say is, Whatever town I'm in, I'm going to go to a soul food restaurant.