LEWISTON — While Benjamin Elijah Mays attended Bates College between 1917 and 1920, the seeds of social change were germinating and Mays was already demonstrating the sense of commitment that would ultimately be recognized as a major influence upon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Randal Maurice Jelks, author of “Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement,” urged an audience of Bates students and faculty to embrace those principles in a lecture he delivered Monday night at the Benjamin Mays Center on the Bates campus. He said the 1994 conference honoring Mays and dedicating the building named for Mays was the inspiration for writing this first major biography of Mays.

“I wrote this book so you could see yourself in it,” Jelks told the audience of about 50. He challenged them to imagine what Mays encountered when he traveled 130 miles from poverty in rural South Carolina, where his first memory was of a white mob threatening his father, to a small college in Maine, where he would develop the qualities that would make him a significant figure in America’s civil rights movement.

From an early age, Mays was determined to get the best education and to break the grip of Jim Crow laws on the South.

Jelks quoted Mays’ assertion that “Bates College did not ‘emancipate’ me, It did the far greater service of making it possible for me to emancipate myself, to accept with dignity my own worth as a free man.”

In the conclusion to his lecture, Jelks admonished students to make Bates “the source of your liberation” and “to feel the sense of yourself.”

The biographer emphasized that Mays “was on honest man.” He said people might sometimes disagree with him, but they would always respect him.

Mays had a historical mind, and he “always thought about the long run,” Jelks said.

Mays was a civil rights theorist, educator, preacher, Morehouse College president and mentor to King.

In discussion of the role played by Mays in King’s civil rights activity, Jelks said King was about 15 when he first met Mays, who often had King at his dinner table.

King spoke of Mays as his “spiritual and intellectual father,” Jelks said.

Mays entered Bates in 1917 as a 23-year-old sophomore after a year at Virginia Union University, where two Bates alumni on the faculty encouraged him to try their alma mater. He came to Lewiston not only for a better education than a person of color could reasonably expect down South, but to prove his intellectual equality to whites. He proved that early by winning a speech award.

Jelks emphasized that Mays worked tirelessly to discover “how do we transform the minds of a generation who have been in constant oppression?”

Mays recognized the intelligence of ordinary people, Jelks said, adding, “That’s leadership.”

Jelks said, “School is about wisdom, not just relevance,” and he said, “Bates is at the center of this because it gives opportunity.”

Central to the new biography is Jelks’ argument that by connecting the substance of Christianity with the responsibility to challenge injustice, Mays prepared the black church for its role in the civil rights movement.

The lecture by Jelks was sponsored by the Bates College Office of Intercultural Education.