Dr.Howard Washington Thurman

Over A century ago, an African American seventh-grader from segregated Daytona, Fla., prepared to board a train for Jacksonville and high school. His family dropped him at the train station with the fare but neglected to give him enough money to ship his luggage. A boy like other boys, without an adult’s self-sufficiency, he did what any stranded child might do—he sat down and cried. Then a black man, a stranger, covered the bill for him. Years later, when the boy became a man and wrote his life story, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman, he dedicated it to the stranger who “restored my broken dream.”

                       Dr.Howard Washington Thurman

   Howard Washington Thurman was an African-American author, philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader. As a prominent religious figure, he played a leading role in many social justice movements and organizations of the twentieth century. Thurman's theology of radical nonviolence influenced and shaped a generation of civil rights activists, and he was a key mentor to leaders within the movement, including Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr.

   Howard Thurman was born in 1899 in Florida, probably in West Palm Beach. He spent most of his childhood in Daytona, Florida, where his family lived in Waycross, one of Daytona's three all-black communities. He was profoundly influenced by his maternal grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, who had been enslaved on a plantation in Madison County, Florida. Nancy Ambrose and Thurman's mother, Alice, were members of Mount Bethel Baptist Church in Waycross and were women of deep Christian faith. Thurman's father, Saul Thurman, died of pneumonia when Howard Thurman was seven years old. After completing eighth grade, Thurman attended the Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville, Florida. One hundred miles from Daytona, it was one of only three high schools for African Americans in Florida at the time.
    In 1923, Thurman graduated from Morehouse College as valedictorian. In 1925, he was ordained as a Baptist minister at First Baptist Church of Roanoke, Virginia, while still a student at Rochester Theological Seminary.  He graduated from Rochester Theological Seminary in May 1926 as valedictorian in a class of twenty-nine students. From June 1926 until the fall of 1928, Thurman served as pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio. In the fall of 1928, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he had a joint appointment to Morehouse College and Spelman College in philosophy and religion. During the spring semester of 1929, Thurman pursued further study as a special student at Haverford College with Rufus Jones, a noted Quaker philosopher and mystic.
 Morehouse, when Sue was a student at Spelman. Howard and Sue Bailey Thurman's daughter Anne was born in October 1933. Sue Bailey Thurman was an author, lecturer, historian, civil rights activist, and founder of the Aframerican Women's Journal. She died in 1996.

  Thurman married Katie Kelley on June 11, 1926, less than a month after graduating from seminary. Katie was a 1918 graduate of the Teacher's Course at Spelman Seminary (renamed Spelman College in 1924). Their daughter Olive was born in October 1927. Katie died in December 1930 of tuberculosis, which she had probably contracted during her anti-tuberculosis work. On June 12, 1932, Thurman married Sue Bailey, whom he had met while at
    Thurman served as dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University from 1932 to 1944 and as dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University from 1953 to 1965. In 1944, he co-founded, along with Alfred Fisk, the first major interracial, interdenominational church in the United States.

   Thurman remains unknown to most people in this country. His life bridged eras: born the grandson of a former slave in horse-and-buggy days, he died the year the IBM personal computer debuted. Death took Thurman long enough ago to fog the history he made. He preached a philosophy of Common Ground, which taught that humans need to seek inner spiritual happiness that would lead them to share their experience in community with others. In 1944, Thurman co-founded San Francisco’s Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, the first integrated, interfaith religious congregation in the United States. In 1953, he became the dean of Marsh Chapel, the first black dean at a mostly white American university, mentoring, among many others, Martin Luther King, Jr.as he developed his philosophy of nonviolence.
    Thurman believed that the first order of social change was changing one’s individual, internal spirit. “He rather gently and powerfully moved through the world in a spirit of grace, dignity, and humility,”
    Thurman said he caught the “contagion” of religion from his grandmother, who cared for him after his father died when Thurman was seven and his mother became the family breadwinner. His grandmother recited for Howard the mantra of the black preacher she’d heard as a child on her owner’s plantation: “You are not slaves. You are not niggers. You’re God’s children!” His grandmother’s charismatic rendition, Thurman said this inspired in him the belief that “the creator of existence also created me.”

   His first pastorate after his 1925 ordination as a Baptist minister, in Ohio in the 1920s, led to study with Quaker pacifist Rufus Jones, which Thurman said changed his life. His thinking was honed by a 1935 trip to India with other African Americans to meet Mohandas Gandhi, who completed Thurman’s conversion to nonviolent social activism.
     In 1935, Howard Thurman, one of the most influential African American religious thinkers of the twentieth century, took a pivotal “Pilgrimage of Friendship” to India that would forever change him—and that would ultimately shape the course of the civil rights movement in the United States. When Thurman became the first African American to meet with Mahatma Gandhi, he found himself called upon to create a new version of American Christianity, one that eschewed self-imposed racial and religious boundaries, and equipped itself to confront the enormous social injustices that plagued the United States during this period.
     Thurman stood on the other side of the world, gazing into Afghanistan across the Khyber Pass, the fabled mountain trade route. The last place he could have ever imagined life taking him that day at the train station in Jacksonville. It was 1936, and Thurman was an esteemed professor of religion at Howard University. He’d been invited to India, Ceylon and Burma on a months-long trip as part of an African-American delegation representing the YMCA and YWCA—a “Pilgrimage of Friendship.” Thurman had resisted going. He didn’t think he was the right person for the job, even if it meant a chance to meet Mahatma Gandhi.

   Gandhi’s philosophy and practice of satyagraha, or “soul force,” would have a momentous impact on Thurman, showing him the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance. After the journey to India, Thurman’s distinctly American translation of satyagraha into a Black Christian context became one of the key inspirations for the civil rights movement, fulfilling Gandhi’s prescient words that “it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”
     The main thing that had drawn the distinguished members to Gandhiji,” his philosophy of ahimsa (nonviolence) and satyagraha (civil disobedience campaigns). “Is non-violence from your point of view a form of direct action?” Thurman asked. “It is not one form,” Gandhi replied, “it is the only form.” Nonviolence, Gandhi said, does not exist without an active expression of it, and indeed, “one cannot be passively nonviolent.” Gandhi went on to lament that the term had been widely misunderstood.
     Ahimsa was a Sanskrit word with deep resonance in all of South Asia’s ancient karmic religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, and (especially) Jainism, in which ahimsa stood for a commitment to refrain from harming living things. He felt there was no good English language equivalent for ahimsa, so he created the term nonviolence (the earliest usage in the Oxford English Dictionary, citing Gandhi, is from 1920), but told Thurman that he regretted the fact that his coinage started with the “negative particle ‘non.’ ” On the contrary, Gandhi insisted nonviolence was “a force which is more positive than electricity” and subtler and more pervasive than the ether.

   Gandhi went on to expound his theory of nonviolence to the delegation. “We are surrounded in life by strife and bloodshed, life living upon life.” But “some great seer [unnamed by Gandhi, perhaps Jesus or Buddha], who ages ago penetrated the center of truth said: It was not through strife and violence, but through non-violence, that man can fulfill his destiny and his duty to his fellow creatures.” He continued: “At the center of non-violence is a force which is self-acting.” “Ahimsa,” Gandhi told the visiting Christians, meant “ ‘love’ in the Pauline sense, yet something more,” presumably referring to the famous passage in 1 Corinthians, “Faith, hope, and love abides, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” (Although the passage Gandhi referred to was Thurman’s favorite passage from the corpus of the Pauline epistles, the two men agreed that the religion of Paul was a fateful detour from the authentic religion of Jesus. Gandhi had written in 1928, “I draw a great distinction between the Sermon on the Mount and the Letters of Paul. They are a graft on Christ’s teaching, his own gloss apart from Christ’s experience.”)
 

    Thurman, always at his religious core a nature mystic, a romantic vitalist, was very sympathetic to Gandhi’s broader point that the ultimate truth, whether it was labeled God or ahimsa, was at once natural and supernatural, profoundly alive but not limited to any specific living thing. “If the source of life is alive, then it follows that life itself is alive,” Thurman would write, somewhat cryptically but characteristically, in 1944. What he meant by this was that there was an underlying moral order in the universe. “The cosmos is the kind of order that sustains and supports the demands that the relationships between men and between man and God be one of harmony [and] integration.” Gandhi’s ahimsa was a close relative of Thurman’s increasingly unconventional notion of God.
     When King arrived at Boston University as a doctor of theology student, he was already aware of Thurman. Thurman, who was on the faculty at the university and served as dean of its chapel, had attended Morehouse College with King’s father, Martin Luther King Sr. Thurman’s association with Martin Luther King, Jr., predated BU. Thurman and King’s father, an Atlanta minister, were friends when the young King was growing up. “Thurman was at the King home many times,”Their BU time overlapped for only a year, and King considered his father and Thurman a different, older generation. Nonetheless, King carried Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman’s most important book, while leading the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott.

   What’is important, historically is not just the personal friendship but the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. would come and sit in those homilies and those lectures that Howard Thurman gave. He took voluminous notes because he really did believe that Howard Thurman had a lot to say and then would go on often times and quote Howard Thurman in his speeches over the course of his life.
     Dr.King is said to have carried Thurman’s 1949 book “Jesus and the Disinherited” with him in his travels. It was Thurman’s explanation of his theology to uplift the oppressed. Thurman emphasized the inherent worth and dignity of all people, often recounting a sermon of a slave preacher his grandmother recalled hearing who told his congregation they were God’s children and not slaves. King later recounted the anecdote in a sermon at his Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.
      Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who also worked with King, recalled that it was Thurman who provided Dr.King with a spiritual basis for nonviolence after visiting Mahatma Gandhi in India, shaping King’s strategy for resisting Jim Crow laws in the American South of the 1950s. Dr.Thurman helped Dr.King realize that nonviolence was not just a tactic, but a lifestyle, scholars and activists say. And the theologian, who practiced times of silence and contemplation, urged King to do the same.

   The creator of existence also created me and therefore with that sort of backing, I could absorb all the
     Dr.Thurman traveled broadly, heading Christian missions and meeting with world figures such as Mahatma Gandhi. When Thurman asked Gandhi what message he should take back to the United States, Gandhi said he regretted not having made nonviolence more visible as a practice worldwide and suggested some American black men would succeed where he had failed.


    The Legacy of Howard Thurman: Mystic and Theologian


           Landrum Interviews Howard Thurman


         Conversations with Howard Thurman Pt 2


       Backs Against The Wall: The Howard Thurman Story


          Howard Thurman - "What Do You Want, Really"
       

       For a Time of Sorrow
By Howard Thurman

I share with you the agony of your grief,
The anguish of your heart finds echo in my own.
I know I cannot enter all you feel
Nor bear with you the burden of your pain;
I can but offer what my love does give:
The strength of caring,
The warmth of one who seeks to understand
The silent storm-swept barrenness of so great a loss.
This I do in quiet ways,
That on your lonely path
You may not walk alone.

https://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2014/10/when-howard-thurman-met-mahatma-gandhi-nonviolence-and-the-civil-rights-movement.html
https://redefineschool.com/howard-thurman/
https://religionnews.com/2019/01/17/howard-thurman-mentor-to-king-who-preached-nonviolence-featured-in-documentary/
https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2018/01/26/for-a-time-of-sorrow/
http://www.bu.edu/today/2011/who-was-howard-thurman/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Thurman
https://www.guideposts.org/inspiration/miracles/gods-grace/the-divine-encounters-of-howard-thurman-civil-rights-pioneer