April 10, 2024
Honoring Dr. Benjamin E. Mays: Inspiring Generations and Preserving a Legacy
Some legacies don’t just shape history—they continue to inspire generations. I had the opportunity to visit the Benjamin E. Mays Historic Preservation Site in Greenwood, South Carolina, and sit down with Christopher Thomas, Executive Director of the site, to learn more about the life, impact, and enduring influence of Dr. Benjamin E. Mays.
We talk about his journey from humble beginnings to becoming a global leader, mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and a powerful voice for justice and human dignity. We also explore how his story is being preserved today, the importance of understanding history in its full context, and how his message still challenges and inspires us to live with purpose and conviction.
Episode Highlights
[00:40] - I sit down with Christopher Thomas, Executive Director of the Dr. Benjamin E. Mays Historic Preservation Site
[01:28] - The history and significance of the site and Dr. Mays’ early life
[02:54] - Dr. Mays’ philosophy on dignity, purpose, and making an impact
[04:35] - His global influence beyond Morehouse College and international work
[05:44] - Christopher shares his personal connection to Dr. Mays and journey to this role
[07:52] - The powerful story behind preserving Dr. Mays’ birth home
[09:50] - How the site engages with students and the local community
[12:02] - A defining moment: Dr. Mays’ bold stance against apartheid
[14:03] - Challenges of preserving history and having difficult but necessary conversations
[16:58] - Signs of progress and growing unity within the community
[18:50] - A pivotal moment that brought greater awareness to Dr. Mays’ legacy
[22:12] - Future goals for expanding the site and educational programs
[24:08] - Where to learn more and plan your visit
[26:01] - A powerful quote on determination, purpose, and shaping your future
Links & Resources
- Benjamin E. Mays Historic Preservation Site: https://www.mayssite.org/
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If this conversation resonated with you, take a moment to reflect on the impact you want to make in your own life. And if you enjoyed listening, don’t forget to follow, rate, share, and leave a review—it truly helps these stories reach more people.
SPECIAL THANKS FOR THIS EPISODE:
VIDEOGRAPHY, AUDIO, AND BTS : MELANIE LECH
OLD 96 DISTRICT AND THE DR. BENJAMIN E. MAYS HISTORIC SITE
Chapters
00:03 - Preserving the Legacy of Dr. Mays
04:28 - Dr. Mays' Global Influence and Legacy
12:55 - Legacy of Dr. Mays in Greenwood
22:06 - Expanding Dr. Mays' Legacy Site
25:50 - Words of Wisdom
Transcript
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Everyone has a story to tell.
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We connect and relate to one another when we share our stories.
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My name is Amelia Old and I am your host of Voices of Inspiration.
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Join me as I share stories of friends, family and strangers from my everyday life and travels.
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You will laugh, possibly cry or walk away, feeling connected more than ever to those around you and ready to be the change our world needs.
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Everyone has a story to tell.
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What's yours?
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Welcome to Voices of Inspiration.
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I'm your host, amelia Old.
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Today, I have with me Chris Thomas from the Benjamin E Mays Historic Preservation Site.
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First of all, I know you are so busy, so I really appreciate you taking time out of your day just to be with us here during our tour of the Greenwood area, and so I'm really grateful for you to just take time out of your day to share a little bit of your story and the history here at this site.
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Well, I appreciate you taking time out to come to the site and take an interest in Dr Mays and his life and his legacy.
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Thank you.
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So can you just start off by, for those that are not familiar with the site, just start off by sharing a little bit more about the historical significance of where we are and what this represents.
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Our site opened in 2011.
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We opened to honor the life and legacy of Dr Benjamin E Mays.
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He was a Greenwood native.
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He was born and raised here in Greenwood County.
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He was born to two parents that were ex-slaves.
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The house that's on our site here originally sat about 14 miles from here.
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It was still in Greenwood County and it was in a community called Epworth, and the house was moved here to the site in 2004.
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And it took a number of years for us to build the building we're in now in the museum.
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And the Burns Spring School came a few years later, in 2009, and then we opened in 2011.
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In 09, and then we opened in 11.
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And it is an extraordinary story of someone, through perseverance and determination and dreaming, that was able to get off the farm to leave the sharecropping community he was born into and go on to be the president of Morehouse College for 27 years, the mentor, the eulogist to Dr Martin Luther King Jr, an advisor to three presidents, able to travel the world in the 1930s, and he really just left a lasting impact upon American life.
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I don't think there are many people in American life in the 20th century that had the impact upon America that Dr Mays did.
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So how does this site preserve and honor the teachings and philosophy of Dr Mays?
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Can you talk a little bit about what those teachings and his philosophy was and how important that is to preserve those?
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Dr Mays was one of America's great moral leaders and he inspired a generation of young men simply by making them believe in higher aspirations and pursuing higher callings in life.
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And he also made them to believe that, through his travels and through his engagement with the social gospel theorists, that they should seek to make a difference in the world.
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Whatever it is that they went into, whether it was medicine or education or law, that you should seek to impact the world and the life of the people around you.
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And he had great success, particularly during his time at Morehouse and encouraging these young men to enter into social justice movements and initiatives.
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And, of course, many of the clergymen King being probably the highest of those adopted these principles and ideas of Dr Mays and carried them to the world.
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And I think that's Dr Mays' legacy and what his teachings were, and we try here to preserve them.
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Dr Mays really believed in the tenet that all people have a God-given dignity and that God-given dignity should be protected and preserved, and he encouraged his students and the people that he encountered to do that as they went through the life in the world, to always recognize the God-given dignity in people and to preserve it, and I think that's something that we should seek to do today In our political discourse today.
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I think sometimes we don't understand that all people, whether you agree or disagree with them, have a sense of human and divine dignity that we should seek to preserve and to promote.
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Yeah, I think that's really important.
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How did his influence extend beyond his role as president of Morehouse College?
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So, in addition to his presidency at Morehouse College in the 1930s, Dr Mays earns his doctorate degree and becomes the dean of the School of Religion at Howard University.
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During that time he promoted a number of initiatives and also during that time, through his contacts during his time earning his master's degree, his contacts from people at Bates College, he has an opportunity to become a delegate for the YMCA and he also attends several conferences of the Council of World Churches.
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And so Dr Mays has an opportunity to engage in the world ecumenical movement that was going on and to be able to spread his leadership and his beliefs beyond the borders of the United States.
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He becomes a global leader, particularly in terms of his movement, his engagement in the YMCA and his engagement in the Council of World Churches, and so he was able to sort of spread his message and what he wanted to see, particularly in terms of eradicating race and racism in systems and institutions like the church, and he's able to have great success doing that, even outside of the United States.
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What led you to this position.
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So my family's from Greenwood.
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My great-grandfather was from the same Epworth community Dr Mays is from.
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He was a little older than him.
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Big Papa was born in 1881.
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Mays was born in 1894.
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But you know, I heard a lot about his name when I was a boy when I would come here to visit, when we would go to our family's church that's down there in Epworth, we would drive past his house the birth home that's here sat on the side of the road, and our family talked about it often.
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Dr Mays' sister, Susie, marries one of my great-grandmother's grandchildren and so there was always this connection to the family.
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In fact, my great-grandfather's brother, his oldest brother, Jim, and his wife Louisa moved into that house after the Mays family moved out of it, and so I always had this connection.
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I was a history student as an undergraduate student and a cousin of mine, Walter Robinson, when I was probably a junior in college, sent me a copy of Born to Rebel Dr Mays' autobiography, and so I was always smitten by him and by who he was.
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My father talks about, when he was at Tuskegee University, my father that Dr Mays would come there to speak, and so they always had this connection when they were around each other because they knew they had this home connection.
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So I kind of always had this sort of connection to Mays coming from the same place and he going and taking such a leadership role in HBCUs.
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And my family, all the generation up to my dad, pretty much all attended HBCUs and so I think I just always had this sort of passion for them.
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And when the site opened, for the first two years I was just a tour guide here, and then in 2015, our former curator and director emeritus, Lloyd Sarton, decided he wanted to retire and so I had an opportunity to ascend to the role of director and that's what brought me here.
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So I don't know, it was kind of it was sort of destiny, I guess.
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It seems to me.
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It does sound that way.
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It sounds like, with all of the connections between your life and his life, that this was meant to be, for you to be in this position.
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I think that's pretty incredible.
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So can you talk about what efforts you mentioned it briefly earlier, but what efforts have been made to preserve Dr Mays' birth home?
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So the house is kind of enthralled in the same kind of racial conflicts that Mays lived his life in when he was here in 1981.
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For the dedication of the Mays Crossroads it's a highway where the house sits.
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We have some pictures of it on the wall when they were here at the time.
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But Coretta Scott King was here and Congressman Dorn, who was our congressman at the time, and Larry Jackson was then the president of Lander University, which is the university here in our town In Mays.
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They walked through the fence and walked up to the house and May May sort of tearfully said to the folks that were there that he wished someone would do something to preserve his house.
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The man that owned the property wasn't too then would not let it go, but he ended up passing away and eventually pressure was put on his widow to sell the house and eventually she does Um, but she, she said because she didn't want the community to know that she was publicly caving, she made us come to pick the house in the middle of the night.
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So literally our folks went out there at like two in the morning with fog lights and lifted it up and brought it here and uh, but it has been a long community effort um uh of people in both the black and the white community that wanted to see the life and legacy of Dr Mays preserved, and so we had to bring the house here and add a roof to it and repair a bunch of stuff, and just this past year we had to do some additional repairs on the home, and so it's an important piece of African-American history in South Carolina and it's worthy to be preserved.
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It should be a place that people and kids come and have a chance to experience the life and legacy of Dr Mays in a practical sense, with things that you can touch and feel, and so we have made every effort we can to preserve the house and to ensure that it's here for future generations to come.
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How does the site engage with you mentioned, with children coming here and schools coming here?
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How does the site engage with the local community, with children coming?
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here and schools coming here.
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How does this site engage with the local community?
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So we have programming every year that invites people in the community to come out.
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We host several events.
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Sometimes.
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We've done a couple of gospel events here.
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We call them Gospel at the Maze House, where we bring local gospel artists out and put a little stage in front of the house and they sing and it brings people out.
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It's a wonderful time.
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But with school kids we get a lot of local school kids that come and do either just tours and sometimes they schedule like all day field trips here at the site and particularly in the springtime they have opportunities to come here and garden Cause we do a garden and a cotton field out back every year, and so we tried the best that we can to engage them.
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There was a local school teacher she's since retired but her name was Anna Marie Glau and Ms Glau was the Gatiss teacher at what was formerly the Springfield Elementary School and for probably eight years when we first opened up, she would bring her Gatiss kids you know our gifted and talented kids here and they would be here all day.
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They would do lessons in the schoolhouse, they would garden and do stuff outside, and that school is now the school that was renamed after Dr Mays.
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It is now the Dr Benjamin E Mays Elementary School, and so it's been a wonderful opportunity to share with young people about Mays.
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A lot of times, of course, they're very interested in his connection to Dr King, but it's wonderful to be able to give them some exposure to who Mays was and what he did and what he accomplished, and most of the kids that I know and their families that attend the now Dr Benjamin Mays Elementary School are very proud to go to a school that bears his name.
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Is there one specific story from Dr Mays that's just really been impactful to you?
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I know that there are many, but is there one moment in his life that really stands out to you, that's just always really impacted and inspired you?
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of him holding up the delegation floor at the Council of World Churches.
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Because the South African churches wanted to enter the Council of World Churches and Mays thought that they should not unless they were willing to denounce the apartheid government.
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And Mays literally goes around from delegation table to delegation table for a long time telling these delegates and again, these are churchmen from all over the world and telling them what was going on in South Africa with the apartheid government and because what was going on, why they should not allow these South African churches to enter.
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The delegation eventually decides to side with Mays and to demand that if the South African churches wanted to enter, that they would have to formally, publicly, in writing, denounce the apartheid government.
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Of course the South African churches did not choose to do that, but this effort of Dr Mays was bold, it was very impressive and it ultimately led to both the South African churches not entering the Council for Churches at that time.
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But also it has been credited with Dr May's internationalizing the apartheid movement, because many of these delegates that were there at this conference were not aware of what was going on in South Africa and they go back to their home countries armed with this knowledge of what's going on in South Africa with the South Africans and the apartheid government, and it's just always been something that's touched me both because he was so bold, not even in his home country.
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It's one thing to have that kind of boldness in a place you're comfortable, but to do that not even on the native soils of your own land and to take such a bold stance, I just think it really says a lot In a room full of people.
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Yeah, it says a lot about Dr Mays and his convictions.
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He certainly was a man that lived by his convictions and I think he had a lot of success with his students because he encouraged them to do the same that ultimately, you should stand by your convictions and live by your convictions and he certainly did, and that is a great example to me of him choosing to do that and succeeding.
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He ultimately won the day in that battle.
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I love that.
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What do you think are some of the challenges that you faced trying to continue Dr May's stories with this site?
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I think you know it's tough to talk about today because you know there's this push that people want to, you know, say that we live in a post-racial America.
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But clearly we live in a better America, but not necessarily in a post-racial America.
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And I think you know just addressing the challenges of just racism and people having their own still consistent racial ideas about history itself, about people's involvement and engagement in history, and so I think a lot of people have just not really wanted to give Mays the honor and the credence that he deserves because of their own views and biases.
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And you know, at the end of the day I said this at a conference of historians several years ago.
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I said that I don't believe that any South Carolinian, white or black, has made more of a contribution to national American life than Dr Mays did, and nobody challenged me on it.
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So I've been sort of resolute in my conviction that I was correct.
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But I think for some people that's sort of hard for them to come to say that an African-American man had such an impact in a state like South Carolina that does have its own unique history of race and racism and racial segregation and racial violence and those things.
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So all those things still continue to challenge us today as we try to preserve this legacy.
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Because for people that don't really want to address that area of history, all the conversations about Maze's life become uncomfortable conversations.
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Because and I tell people that come through all the time if we don't talk about the world he was born into, the growing racial violence, the entrenching of Southern segregation, then his life and the things that he did are pale in terms of what they should be.
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You have to understand the world he was born into to understand why his life is so significant.
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This morning I had a conversation with someone locally and she said to me that she was starting to see a little bit more of the coming togetherness and, um, understanding and in this, specifically in this area.
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And she said I mean, obviously, as you mentioned, we still have a long way to go, but she said that she recognized that she was starting to see it as a long time.
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You know she's local and said that she's starting to see a little bit more coming together and for people to be open about hearing the stories.
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And she said to me, um, and just saying I'm sorry, and she said, and listening to the story and hearing each other out.
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Do you also agree with that, that you're starting to see a little bit more, while it still has a long way to go?
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Are you seeing a little bit more of that kind of coming together to talk about the history of not only this area but South Carolina as a whole?
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I am very proud of Greenwood.
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I think that in the last decade, citizens here have made a lot of intentional efforts to improve racial conditions, whether it's pastors coming together and trying to have interracial, interdenominational, ecumenical worship services addressing and having conversations about race and racial history.
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There's a lot of different groups here that have come together and have taken on those kinds of efforts, and so you have seen a significant shift in Greenwood and Greenwood County in the areas of racial reconciliation, in the areas of just racial harmony in the current era.
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And so, yeah, I think I agree with her that there has been a tremendous shift in the area and I would hope that the May site has contributed to that in some significant way, because it is a place, it is a platform that people have to come and talk about and address those kinds of histories and share an appreciation for the fact that one of your greatest native sons of this county made such an impact in American life, because I always say that, you know, america probably would have had a civil rights movement eventually, but it probably wouldn't have had it as quickly as it had if it had not been for the contributions of Ben Mays, but it probably wouldn't have had it as quickly as it had if it had not been for the contributions of Ben Mays.
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Is there a moment that stands out with you from a visitor to this site that maybe they hadn't especially maybe children you know where they don't know a lot of the history, or if it's someone that's older, that has just didn't want to know a lot of history and something you saw just click with them when they were visiting the site, Is there a moment that you can think of that just really stands out?
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So for us, the entire weekend of celebration in 2017 for the unveiling of our statue was a pivotal moment at the Mays site and sharing the legacy of Dr Mays, but I think in Greenwood as well.
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We had a Friday night panel discussion with four or five of the premier scholars on Dr Mays.
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It was at Lander University.
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The place was just packed that night.
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I mean, the place seats 750 people.
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I think there may have been 35 to 50 empty seats if that, and then from that night, individuals like Doug and Sally Kaufman, who would later make the decision to make a contribution from the Kaufman Family Foundation to Lander University to establish a Benjamin E Mays Endowed Chair of the History and Philosophy Department.
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Doug came and purchased a copy of Born to Rebel, dr Mays' autobiography.
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Afterwards, our current mayor, brandon Smith, also came to that event.
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He is the one that he also came and then wanted to buy a copy of the autobiography because he wanted to learn more about Dr Mays.
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He would then, the year after he's elected, he would go to the county council I mean, excuse me, the school board and say to them it's time that Greenwood names a school after Dr Mays.
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And that led to the renaming of the Benjamin E Mays Elementary School after Dr Mays and so I think that entire weekend, and then Saturday of course, we unveiled that statue it's the only life-size statue of anyone in the history of Greenwood County brought a level of recognition to Dr Mays, to the Mays site.
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That I think significantly has impacted people's desire and awareness to want to learn more about him, and learning more about him makes people have to address that history.
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You can't read his autobiography without really you know.
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He kind of lays it out in details what the world was like, what his experiences were like, you know, growing up here in Greenwood County, and I think that that weekend was probably the weekend for me that I say you know, a lot of people just kind of got it, you know after that weekend, looking back on your own personal journey, can you share a moment that you feel really shaped you into the man that you've become today?
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I think for me just coming here to South Carolina when I was a child really had a tremendous impact on me.
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I again was born and raised in Sacramento.
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My dad was in the Air Force.
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He left Greenwood and went to Tuskegee and graduated from Tuskegee and then took a commission and so my father then did three tours in Vietnam and then after we come back to Vietnam we go to Okinawa for about 18 months and then back to Sacramento.
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That's when I lived in Sacramento.
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But coming home for me as a young man really sort of put me in touch with just my roots and where I was from and you know, coming here and going to church in the summers and experiencing my family and you know, again, as I said earlier, we were from the same Epworth community and, just having a sense of pride, I always had an opportunity to hear the stories and hear people talk about individuals like Dr Mays, and you know my family's journey to education.
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Many of them went off to South Carolina State.
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My father goes to Tuskegee and so I think just my time here as a child in Greenwood really helped to shape me into the person that I am.
00:22:04.226 --> 00:22:05.390
I love that.
00:22:05.390 --> 00:22:10.141
What are some of your goals and aspirations for the site moving forward?
00:22:12.011 --> 00:22:13.336
So I want to expand the site.
00:22:13.336 --> 00:22:17.134
We have a project right now we're going to expand this building.
00:22:17.134 --> 00:22:21.301
We also had an auditorium design that hopefully we'll get that built.
00:22:21.301 --> 00:22:22.304
That will sit up on the hill.
00:22:22.304 --> 00:22:26.032
And I want to expand our education programs.
00:22:26.032 --> 00:22:29.375
We have a couple of them now, one called the May Scholars Program.
00:22:29.375 --> 00:22:33.720
So I want to expand, you know, high school students being able to come and learn.
00:22:33.720 --> 00:22:49.682
The expansion here will help that because one of the rooms that's going to be here will be a research library that Dr Orville Vernon Burton, who is also from Epworth, who wrote the foreword to May's autobiography, he's donating to us his collection of books that he's acquired over a long career as a historian.
00:22:49.682 --> 00:22:53.381
So we'll have a first-rate research library here at the site.
00:22:54.290 --> 00:22:58.353
And I want to expand the connection between Mays and King.
00:22:58.492 --> 00:23:15.383
So I'm hoping at some point to be able to create some kind of King pavilion outside somewhere, because I think it's important that Greenwood understands the contribution that Greenwood essentially made to the development of a person like King and the civil rights movement itself.
00:23:15.383 --> 00:23:30.823
So I think those are some of the things that I want to do just continue to build those additional buildings and to build some more programs and knowledge for young people here and I would like to formalize some kind of relationship with our local school district.
00:23:30.823 --> 00:23:43.307
We've had a good relationship so far, but by formalized I mean so that we can institute some kind of formal training program or inserting of Dr Mays into the current.
00:23:43.307 --> 00:23:44.790
He's not in the state standards.
00:23:44.790 --> 00:23:45.512
That's one challenge.
00:23:45.512 --> 00:23:55.030
But just so that students that come through, even if they don't read Born to Rebel the entire thing, that we can create maybe some kind of smaller version of it in a lesson format.
00:23:55.030 --> 00:24:02.625
So all students leaving Greenwood District 50 have to come into contact with Dr Mays and his life and legacy in some way before they graduate from high school.
00:24:03.009 --> 00:24:04.654
I think that's important, definitely.
00:24:04.654 --> 00:24:06.800
How can our listeners find you online?
00:24:07.911 --> 00:24:12.422
So you can go to wwwmaysmuseumorg.
00:24:12.422 --> 00:24:16.911
You can find us there, or you can just Google us and they'll find you there.
00:24:16.911 --> 00:24:21.962
You can find us on our Dr Benjamin E May's Historical Preservation site is on Facebook.
00:24:21.962 --> 00:24:28.773
We have an active Facebook page, so any of those sources are a way to find us and to make contact with us and to schedule a visit.
00:24:28.773 --> 00:24:29.978
Come visit the site.
00:24:29.998 --> 00:24:35.070
I think a lot of times people they don't really realize what's here.
00:24:35.070 --> 00:24:44.695
Barbara one time had a promotion going on that they were promoting this like girls trip thing and encouraging people to come here and a group of sisters there were three of them.
00:24:44.695 --> 00:24:45.557
One of them lived in.
00:24:45.557 --> 00:24:49.479
They think they were originally from Georgia and one of the sisters lived in North Carolina.
00:24:49.479 --> 00:24:51.201
Another one lived in Georgia, one lived in Florida.
00:24:51.220 --> 00:25:07.890
They decided to meet here for the weekend and they go over to the Inn on the square which is a hotel and restaurant here, and when they told the waitress why they were here, her response was oh, I don't know why.
00:25:07.890 --> 00:25:08.730
You came here to go see that place.
00:25:08.730 --> 00:25:09.792
Nothing over there but a couple old buildings.
00:25:09.792 --> 00:25:10.650
It's kind of going to be a waste of your time.
00:25:10.650 --> 00:25:15.037
And so they were a little disappointed, thinking they were just going to come over here and be here for 10 minutes and of course when you come you get an actual guided tour.
00:25:15.057 --> 00:25:26.873
It usually takes about an hour, an hour and a half, and so afterwards they were just, you know, sort of blown away and they then said you need to go talk to the folks there and you know, sort of tell them, you know what they'll experience when they come to the Mayside.
00:25:26.873 --> 00:25:28.758
And so it is a wonderful time to come.
00:25:28.758 --> 00:25:40.881
All of our tour guides both me, me and Loy and our volunteers and sometimes we have interns here from Lander doing a wonderful job and guiding you on the tour and giving you a chance to see Mays' life and legacy.
00:25:40.881 --> 00:25:44.037
So I would encourage them to come and visit and see what's here.
00:25:44.317 --> 00:25:49.845
And I'll make sure that I link to your website and social media channels on the notes of the episode of this.
00:25:49.845 --> 00:25:59.125
And one more question, and I ask everyone this Do you have a favorite quote or any words of wisdom that you would like to leave behind?
00:26:00.971 --> 00:26:01.852
Oh, my favorite.
00:26:01.852 --> 00:26:15.382
I have so many Mays quotes that I like, but probably my favorite is the one that's on the back of the statue where Dr Mays, you know, did not believe that our birth conditions were the greatest determinant of our outcomes in life.
00:26:15.382 --> 00:26:16.564
And Maze would tell his students.
00:26:16.564 --> 00:26:24.977
He said it's not in your environment, it's you, the determination of your will, the integrity of your soul, that will shape your life and determine your future.
00:26:24.977 --> 00:26:43.597
And so I think that, knowing those kinds of things, I try to tell young people I quote that to them often that understand that your environment isn't the greatest determinant of your outcome, it's not your environment, it's in you, it's the things that you do, it's the condition of your own heart, your own determination and will.
00:26:43.597 --> 00:26:47.132
And I think Mays was very spot on in that advice to his students.
00:26:47.512 --> 00:26:48.256
Thank you so much.
00:26:48.256 --> 00:26:53.073
Thank you for taking time to share a little bit about your own story and Dr Mays' story.
00:26:53.073 --> 00:26:54.175
I really appreciate it.
00:26:54.276 --> 00:26:55.298
Yeah, well, thank you for coming.
00:26:55.298 --> 00:26:56.902
We appreciate you taking the interest in the site.
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