The Negro’s Church. [Signed and inscribed by Civil Rights Leader Benjamin Mays]

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First edition and the author’s first book. Baptist minister and civil rights leader and activist, Mays served for almost three decades as president of Georgia’s Morehouse College. Martin Luther King Jr. recalled Dr. Mays as his “spiritual mentor” and “intellectual father” (Morehouse College). Mays’ book was an attempt to survey in the early 1930s African-American churches, based “chiefly on a first-hand study of 609 urban and 185 rural churches widely distributed in twelve cities and four country areas.”

Presented and inscribed and signed here by Mays, as senior author, to Laurence John Wesley Hayes (1908–?) who “has a profound sense of appreciation for work done by Negro authors”. Hayes appears to have been graduated from Howard University which published his monograph The Negro Federal Government Worker, A Study of His Classification Status in the District of Columbia, 1883-1938 (1941).

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