University of Kansas professor Randal Maurice Jelks follows the civil rights leader's life from his childhood in rural South Carolina to his long tenure at Morehouse in Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement, to be released this spring by the University of North Carolina Press.

Jelks looks at Mays's lifelong desire to compete with the best students -- black and white -- and empower a younger generation of black men to do the same. The son of former slaves and a mentor to the civil rights movement's most iconic leader, Mays worked his way off a cotton farm in South Carolina to Bates College in Maine and eventually the University of Chicago, where he earned two graduate degrees.

Mays was an ordained Baptist minister who left the pulpit for the classroom but whose deep faith was central to his time as dean of the Howard University School of Religion and his presidency at Morehouse.

Jelks agreed to answer some questions from Inside Higher Ed about his book.

Q: It’s hard to overstate the importance of Mays’s role as a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. But you point out that Mays’s contributions extend well past his role in shaping King. What do you see as Mays’s legacy both to the country as a whole and to the education system in particular?

A: Mays’s legacy shows what a committed educator can do! When Mays returned to Morehouse in 1940 it was in dire straits financially and on the verge of being taken over. Through a lifelong commitment to the institution (27 years), he helped preserve it as a men’s college (for black men), an institution of higher education that continues to benefit the United States today. If you look at the alums of Morehouse, they are a who’s-who in America. That's a claim that only a few elite institutions of higher education can lay claim to, and all of those institutions are 40 times richer than Morehouse.

Q: Mays was an ordained Baptist minister. Though he left the clergy for academe as a young man, you argue that his religious background helped shape his philosophy as an educator and administrator. Do you think Mays would have been as well-positioned to guide leaders like King without that religious training?