An antislavery Unitarian minister—he aided traveling slaves in their journeys northward to Canada—May was the first clergyman to advocate female suffrage. An ally of Parker, Emerson, and Mann, he was the first president of America’s pioneering Normal School for Women in Lexington, Massachusetts. He ministered in Syracuse at what is now named the May Memorial Church. When he died, Andrew D. White, then president of Cornell University, spoke of him as “the best man, the most truly Christian man, I have ever known.”