I am so glad I went to Spelman. As an all-Black women’s college it gave me the latitude and safe space—one not defined by male or White folks’ expectations, habits of competition, or by the need to preen and prove myself to anyone beyond myself and God—to dream my dreams and to find and forge my own path.
While I hated and hate forced segregation or forced anything, I now recognize that Spelman provided the incubation I needed after leaving home to stand on my feet confidently with anyone anywhere. The cloistered shared community and rituals prepared Spelman women to do battle outside its gates. The words of chapel speakers like Dr. Howard Thurman and Dr. Benjamin Mays worked themselves into the hidden recesses of my mind and heart and well up when needed. The exposure to past and present struggles for social justice undergirded our academic studies. And the regular interaction with our college presidents and teachers and community leaders all helped shape the adult I became.
Young people today need the same nurturance and guidance and engagement with adults that I received. They need a sense of shared purpose that comes from shared actions and struggles. And they need exposure to a wide variety of people doing worthwhile rather than frivolous or self-seeking things. I was massaged and renewed by the rich touches and words and spirits of Black womenfolk during my childhood, and I learned during my college years that there was a big wide world with all kinds of people in it and that I could stand tall amongst them.
DR. BENJAMIN ELIJAH MAYS
One of the most important people to me during my college years was Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, president of Morehouse College between 1940 and 1967. I first met him in 1953 when I was thirteen years old and he came to stay at my house. Daddy had invited him to speak at our church. Because there were no hotels where Black visitors could stay in my southern town (or, as Langston Hughes had learned, in any neighboring town), the pastor and parishioners always provided hospitality to strangers great and humble.
I heard and saw Dr. Mays and his beautiful wife Sadie often at Spelman or on Morehouse’s campus. Students were regularly invited to their house and I was one of eight very lucky Spelman students privileged to sing with eight Morehouse students at Morehouse’s Sunday morning chapel services in Sale Hall. The choir was conducted by the gifted young Wendell Whalum who made our songs and spirits soar.
I heard Dr. Mays as well as an array of other speakers from Morehouse and the outside world every week. With Spelman’s 3:00 P.M. compulsory Sunday chapel coming after Morehouse’s 9:00 A.M. services and Spelman’s daily 8:00 A.M. chapel, my spiritual and civic education rivaled, indeed exceeded, my academic education. The formal and informal rituals and speeches and discussions about life and meaning left a bigger imprint than the formal classes about history and economics. Planning and participating in sit-ins and other civil rights activities were better political science and theory classes than even my very engaging professors Sam Cook and Howard Zinn could mount.
Students privately called Dr. Mays “Buck Bennie,” lovingly mocked his words and mannerisms, and hungrily internalized his unerring belief that we were God’s instruments for transforming the world.
Dr. Benjamin E. Mays was a remarkable man and role model for thousands of students who entered the doors of Morehouse, Spelman, Atlanta University, Clark, and Morris Brown Colleges, and the Interdenominational Theological Seminary that constituted the broader Atlanta University center of Black higher education during his twenty-seven years of service as Morehouse’s president. A mentor of mentors like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook, Dr. Otis Moss, and Dr. Charles Adams, Benjamin Elijah Mays was born of slave parents in Ninety-Six, South Carolina and graduated from Bates College in Maine, where he didn’t mind being an older student as he made up for lost time and earlier educational deprivation. He later earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Ramrod straight of posture, unwaveringly principled and caring, keenly intelligent and elegant in speech, Dr. Mays inspired me with a passion for excellence and service as the following youthful poetic salute from my college diary attests.
Tall Black man in flowing black robe
stately beneath your snow crowned head
trembling voice stirred with emotion
eyes like magnets compelling my soul
piercing words like darts shot from your
heart to the enclosure of mine
live forever, oh live forever.
Of the six college presidents in the Atlanta University academic complex, Dr. Mays was the one we looked up to most. He inspired and taught and stood by us when we challenged Atlanta’s racial discrimination. Some of his teachings I wrote in my college diary. Others I internalized, and like many others who heard him frequently, I shared his words with others. I especially remember his oft-repeated “God’s Minute” from an anonymous sage:
I have just one minute
Only sixty seconds in it,
Forced upon me—can’t refuse it
Didn’t seek it, didn’t choose it,
But it’s up to me to use it.
I must suffer if I lose it,
Give account if I abuse it.
Just a tiny little minute—
But eternity is in it.
My dear friend Rev. Otis Moss, pastor of the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, current chair of the Morehouse College Trustee Board, and former co-pastor with Rev. Martin Luther “Daddy” King, Sr., of Ebenezer Baptist church, described a meeting called by Daddy King to convince Martin Luther King, Jr., not to return to Montgomery. Like any parent, Daddy King did not want to see his child killed, hurt, or jailed. So he’d called together some of the best minds and friends in Atlanta to help convince his son to leave Montgomery. Dr. Mays was among them. When young Dr. King told the group that he would rather spend ten years in prison than abandon the people of Montgomery, Dr. Mays stood up to support him. And when Morehouse College gave the young Dr. King his first honorary degree and later, after his assassination, bade him farewell at a service on the grassy rectangle connecting Atlanta University with Morehouse where I stood with thousands of others, Dr. Mays movingly saluted his former student, fellow freedom fighter, and servant of God with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words: “See how the masses of men worry themselves into nameless graves, while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.”
How many high school and college students today are consistently urged to follow intrinsic rather than extrinsic values? Who is the morally authoritative voice among college presidents—Black, Brown, or White—for students of all races? Dr. Mays was a great unselfish soul who through the countless young people he inspired lives on. Today’s prosperous America needs to heed his warning that “the tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.”
HOWARD ZINN
The tall, lanky professor and I arrived at Spelman College together in 1956. He and his wife Roslyn and their two children, Myla and Jeff, lived in the back of the Spelman College infirmary where students felt welcomed to gather, explore ideas, share hopes, and just chew the fat.
Howie encouraged students to think outside the box and to question rather than accept conventional wisdom. He was a risk-taker. I am indebted to him for my first interracial experience with a discussion group at the YMCA on international relations and for going with his Black Spelman students to sit in the “White” section of the state legislature which stopped its deliberations to hoot and jeer and demand that we be removed. He lost no opportunity to challenge segregation in theaters, libraries, and restaurants, and encouraged us to do the same.
Howie not only lived what he taught in history class by breaching Atlanta’s segregated boundaries, but stretched my religious tolerance beyond childhood limits. I felt shock and confusion when he announced in class that he did not believe in Jesus Christ. There were few Jew
ish citizens in my small South Carolina hometown. Through him I began to discern that goodness comes in many faiths and forms which must be respected and honored.
The Black Spelman establishment did not like Howard Zinn any more than the White establishment did. Later, after he joined the faculty at Boston University, its president, John Silber, disliked him just as much as Spelman’s president Albert Manley did, because he made some teachers and administrators uncomfortable by challenging the comfortable status quo. We called him Howie and felt him to be a confidant and friend as well as a teacher, contrary to the more formal and hierarchical traditions of many Black colleges. He stressed analysis and not memorization; questioning, discussions, and essays rather than multiple choices and pet answers; and he conveyed and affirmed my Daddy’s belief and message that I could do and be anything and that life was about far more than bagging a Morehouse man for a husband.
He lived simply and nonmaterialistically. I felt comfortable asking to drive his old Chevrolet to transport picketers to Rich’s department store. He was passionate about justice and his belief in the ability of individuals to make a difference in the world. Not a word-mincer, he said what he believed and encouraged us as students to do the same.
He conveyed to me and to other students that he believed in us. He conveyed to members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee whose voter registration and organizing efforts he chronicled in his book SNCC: The New Abolitionists that he believed in, respected, and supported our struggle. He was there when two hundred students conducted sit-ins and seventy-seven of us got arrested. He provided us a safe space in his home to plan civil rights activities by listening and not dictating. He laughed and enjoyed life just as he still does and he spoke up for the weak and little people against the big and powerful people just as he still does.
An eloquent chronicler of The People’s History of the United States, of the Civil Rights Movement, and of the longings of the young and the poor and the weak to be free, his most profound message and the title of one of his books is that “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” You can and must act against injustice.
Howie taught me to question and ponder what I read and heard and to examine and apply the lessons of history in the context of daily political, social, and moral challenges like racial discrimination and income inequality. He combined book learning with experiential opportunities to engage in interracial discussions; partnered with community groups challenging legal segregation; and engaged students as participants, observers, data collectors, and witnesses in pending legal cases as my diary recalls. He listened and answered questions as we debated strategies for conducting sit-in demonstrations to challenge segregated public dining facilities and used his car to check out, diagram, and help choreograph planned civil rights events. He reassured us of the rightness of our cause when uncertainty and fear crept in and some of our college presidents sought to dampen our spirits and discourage our activities.
In short, he was there for us through thick and thin, focused not just on our learning in the classroom but on our learning to stand up and feel empowered to act and change our own lives and the community and region in which we lived. He taught us to be neither victims nor passive observers of unjust treatment but active and proud claimants of our American birthright.
Howie helped prepare me to discover my leadership potential. With Charles Merrill, Howie made possible a defining year in my life by sending me as a nineteen-year-old Black girl from a small segregated southern town off to navigate the world of Europe all by myself.
I learned I could travel the world without losing my moral compass and common sense and not to fear, indeed to enjoy, being alone. I learned to be comfortable in strange lands with people who speak different languages, worship God in many different ways, have different political systems and ideologies and yet have the same human longing for freedom. Howard Zinn and Charles Merrill gave me a chance to get outside myself, outside segregated America, and roam around inside myself where one dreams, prays, and connects with our Creator and others.
CHARLES E. MERRILL, JR.
When I was eighteen years old and a sophomore at Spelman College, Charles E. Merrill, Jr., opened up the whole world to me. I’ll never forget my fear upon being summoned to Spelman College President Albert Manley’s office, wondering what infraction f d been caught doing. And I’ll never forget my elated disbelief at being told I’d been chosen as one of two Merrill Scholars—the greatest campus honor—providing a year of study and travel abroad. I ran back to my dorm in tears to call my Mama to share the exciting news which spread like wildfire throughout my hometown.
I thought how pleased my Daddy would be, as I still think at every accomplishment. I then ran to thank Howard Zinn who had nominated me. Soon Howie, Madame Billie Jeter Thomas, Spelman’s elegant French department chair, and I began discussing where to go and with which group. Smith College and Sweet Briar College were among those offering structured academic and travel programs that lent social protection and guidance abroad. But Howard Zinn insisted that I not go with any group but travel on my own. This was a radical suggestion in the sheltered, planned-down-to-the-minute, closely supervised life of Spelman College.
Of Charles Merrill, Jr., I knew then only that he was privileged son of the founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage house and brother of the poet James Merrill, who had invested his talents and wealth in developing young people. Impressed with the confidence and pride of Morehouse men he had met in the army, Charles Merrill, Jr., later sought out Morehouse College and Dr. Benjamin E. Mays. He eventually chaired Morehouse’s Board of Trustees. His lasting contributions include founding the Commonwealth School in Boston and establishing the Merrill Fellowship for a year’s travel and study abroad for Morehouse students which he later, thank goodness, extended to one Spelman student in 1957 and then two in 1958. I was one of the lucky two. That year changed my life and Charles Merrill’s friendship enriched it.
Charles Merrill did not just give a scholarship; he gave himself in long conversations, letters, and visits. He became a lifelong friend whose confidence and expectations I wanted to live up to and reciprocate. I still do.
He shared time and advice and books including Orwell’s 1984 and the Road to Wigan Pier that remain on my bookshelves still. He responded regularly to my long excited ramblings during my year abroad and promptly set me straight by return mail when I wrote him about my conversations with a young former German Nazi soldier whose charm and agony momentarily clouded my moral accountability thermometer at a youth camp in the Soviet Union. Painfully shy but keenly interested in my youthful perceptions and experiences, his investment in sending students abroad multiplied throughout our college and home communities as Merrill Scholars shared impressions and reports upon returning from the big free world of Europe.
After graduating from Spelman I would visit Charles and Mary Merrill’s home on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, their farm in New Hampshire, and occasionally the Commonwealth School in Boston, where he served as headmaster for many years. When I was in law school, he visited me in New Haven, treated me to a play and dinner, and came to Mississippi, where he applauded my ability not just to try civil rights cases but to competently cook an egg sunny side up for breakfast. He later served on CDF’s board and made me as proud as a child by attending every one of my five W. E. B. DuBois lectures at Harvard in the 1980s, then coming to hear me in Boston when my book, The Measure of Our Success, was published.
Children and adults never cease needing the approval of their mentors. In opening up the whole world to me—a nineteen-year-old Black girl forty-one years ago—Charles Merrill in turn opened it up to my three sons who travel comfortably all over the world today and recognize the common humanity of God in all peoples regardless of language, geography, color, ideology, or nationality.
Many ask today whether Black children and youth can benefit from White role models and mentors. Of course they can. While children certainly need mentors wit
h whom they can identify personally from common experiences of race, gender, culture, and economic circumstance, they also need to be shown and taught that human values and caring know no racial or gender boundaries: that all people have something to teach and learn; that race and class need not prevent sharing and helping; and that every person is our neighbor and every child our charge. Charles Merrill enabled me to learn that lesson which I shared with my Spelman sisters when I returned home for my senior year. Speaking in Sisters Chapel I said:
By getting a glimpse into the lives of others, I have come to examine my own life much more closely. I have come to see my place as an individual in the world community. I have come to know my own worth—my own importance. I have burst out of the old bonds of provincialism which had once so limited me, and have been made to feel the needs—not just of Spelman, the South, and America—but of the whole world. I have become an individual aware of personal and national shortcomings, and determined to correct these in every instance offered me. I have seen and felt the sufferings of others and gained incentive to alleviate it in my own small way.
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