Religious Rebel in the Jim Crow South

April 27, 2006 == MEDIA ADVISORY

Calvin College professor of history Randal Jelks has been selected as a
National Humanities Center Fellow for 2006-2007.

The Center received over 500 applications for the 2006-2007 Fellowships, and
selected just 40 academics to receive the honor. Jelks is one of 15 historians
selected for 2006-2007, but the only one from a Michigan college or
university.

He will spend the academic year in North Carolina where he will work on a
research project in the humanities, and will share ideas in seminars, lectures
and conferences.

Jelks, who also is director of Calvin's new minor in African and African
Diaspora Studies, earned the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and will work on
an intellectual biography of Benjamin Elijah Mays, a man Jelks calls "a
religious rebel in the Jim Crow south."

Mays was a Baptist preacher and a college president (he headed Morehouse
College from 1940 to 1967). Interestingly Jelks is both a college professor and
an ordained minister.

"Mays mentored a generation of civil rights activists," Jelks says. "His
theological thinking was central to his concerns as an Afro-Southerner
combating Jim Crow. He used his theological training to create an insurgent
movement among African American Baptist and white mainline Protestants about
American racial inequities, rural impoverishment and civil rights."

Prior to heading to North Carolina, Jelks, author of the recently released
book African Americans in the Furniture City, will spend four weeks this summer
at Harvard University after having been selected as a recipient of a National
Endowment for the Humanities grant. He will study African American Civil Rights
Struggles in the Twentieth Century at Harvard's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute.
 
For the full story see
http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2005_06/jelks_nhc.htm

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Received on Wed Apr 26 10:24:43 2006