In September 1923, the council of the American Mathematical Society elected twenty-seven new members. These people included Benjamin Lewis Waits, a professor at Alcorn University. Although Professor Waits' election received no special attention, it was a notable event. Waits was one of the first Black men to join the AMS.
Professor Waits was born in Alabama on March 15, 1890. According to an online family genealogy, his parents were Ben and Ann. Both Ben and Ann were born during the Civil War, likely to enslaved parents. In 1890, they were working as laborers in St. Clair County in 1890. The father, Ben, died when Waits was a young child.
Waits himself first appears in the historical record in the late 1900s as a student at the Burrell Normal School in Florence, Alabama. The school is now closed, but at the time, it was newly opened and run by a missionary society. By the time he completed school, Waits was working as a live-in domestic servant for a local journalist, M. Woodson Comper.
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Student at Burrell Normal School
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Waits appears to have planed on becoming a teacher. In January 1910, he passed a statewide teachers exam, one of only four African Americans to do so. However, rather than teach, he moved to D.C. to attend Howard University. He attended the teacher's college and graduated in 1914 with a B.S. degree and a teaching diploma.
After graduating from Howard, he moved to Massachusetts to attend Clark University. He wrote the thesis "Fourier's method for the separation of the roots of an algebraic equation." For that work, he was awarded a M.A. degree in 1916.
In the first years after he got his M.A. degree, Waits remained in Massachusetts and lived in the city of Worcester. However, he enlisted in the army on July 31, 1918, after the United States entered the Great War. Waits served as a sergeant in a medical detachment that was part of the 807th Pioneer Infantry. He was sent with his until to France in early September 1918 and remained there until the war's end.
At some point in the late 1910s or early 1920s, Waits married Caroline Lassiter, a woman from North Carolina who was living in Albany, New York. She was working with her siblings and her mother, Margaret, as domestic servants for the physician, Erastus Corning. (Her father, William, died when she was young.)
Waits began working as college professor after the war. His first position was at Florida A&M University. In 1922, he left FAMU to teach at Alcorn University in Mississippi. It was during his first year at Alcorn that he was elected to AMS membership.
Waits only stayed at Alcorn for a few years. In 1924, he was hired by Wilberforce University (in Ohio) to serve as dean. His appointment marked a remarkable professional rise for Waits. In his mid-thirties, only one generation removed from enslavement in Alabama, he had completed an advanced degree and was now working as a senior college administrator. Tragically, Waits' life took a horrific turn the next year. In September 1925, he shot his wife, Caroline, with a pistol. She was seriously injured but survived. Waits told the police that he had gone insane with jealous after seeing her talking to another man.
I have not been able to find a detailed account of the legal proceedings against Waits, but he was confined to a state hospital for the criminally insane (Lima State Mental Hospital) for a number of years. He was still confined to the hospital in 1930. While Waits was in the mental hospital, his wife returned to Albany and worked as an elevator operator. Remarkably, she remained married to Waits.
Waits was released from the hospital in the late 1930s. However, his college career was ruined. Shortly after the shooting, Waits resigned from his position at Wilberforce, although this was a ceremonial gesture since his confinement in a state hospital rendered his continued employment impossible.
Waits and his wife moved to Albany, New York. Waits first found work as a teacher, but he spent most of his time in the city working as a mail supply clerk for the Department of Labor. On January 22, 1967, while he and his wife were still living in Albany, Waits died. He was buried in St. Agnes Cemetery in the village of Menands (near Albany).
Sources
1. Year: 1910; Census Place: Florence Ward 4, Lauderdale, Alabama; Roll: T624_21; Page: 14a; Enumeration District: 0061; FHL microfilm: 1374034
2. Year: 1930; Census Place: Bath, Allen, Ohio; Page: 8B; Enumeration District: 0007; FHL microfilm: 2341480
3. United States, Selective Service System. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. M1509, 4,582 rolls. Imaged from Family History Library microfilm
4. Year: 1880; Census Place: Mundine, St Clair, Alabama; Roll: 31; Page: 93C; Enumeration District: 119
5. "Wilberforce University Instructor Held on Charge of sooting Wife." Pittsburgh Courier, September 19, 1925. p. 1.
6. "Is Asked to Resign." September 11, 1925. p. 1.
7. "Lauderdale Teachers." The Birmingham News, January 29, 1910. p. 2.
8. "Indict Negro For Shooting At Wife." The Daily Times. January 11, 1938. p. 10.
9. National Archives at Washington, DC; Washington, D.C.; Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950; Year: 1950; Census Place: Albany, Albany, New York; Roll: 1739; Page: 11; Enumeration District: 63-203
10. Albany, New York, City Directory, 1939
11. Albany, New York, City Directory, 1929
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