The Rev. Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays Debate

Presented by students from Morehouse and Bates colleges, this debate honors the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Mays, a 1920 Bates graduate, prominent debater, longtime Morehouse president, pioneer of the civil rights movement, and important mentor to Martin Luther King Jr.

This year’s topic is “Resolved: This House believes that social justice movements should practice a politics of anger.” 

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. offered a complicated assessment of anger’s place in our struggle for social change. King once cautioned in his speech titled, “The Other America,” that “angered expressions” of despair could produce “bitterness in the violent rebellions” of civil rights activists. Yet, King also recognized anger’s positive potential in his 1968 commemoration of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, expressing that “The supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.”

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