Raised in "respectable poverty" in a rural section of South Carolina, Benjamin Mays was the youngest of eight children of a cotton farmer who had been born into slavery. Mob violence and lynchings were formidable facts of life. In Dr. Mays' boyhood the school year for Black Americans was four months. Two problems he wrestled with in his youth were: the practical one of how to get an education, and more fundamentally, how to become and remain a man...