Howard Thurman, one of the most important Black theological leaders of the 20th Century, significantly influenced the spiritual and civil rights evolution of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Photo courtesy of Morehouse College National Alumni Association)
By Sean Yoes
AFRO Senior Reporter
syoes@afro.com
Many argue the Black American struggle for freedom and justice in the 20th century was facilitated mainly via two paths: faith (the church) and the law (the courtroom). Charles Hamilton Houston, one of the greatest legal minds in American history trained a phalanx of Black super lawyers at Howard University in Washington D.C., including the iconic Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who laid the legal groundwork for the courtroom victories that eventually broke the back of Jim Crow.
And another pioneering Howard University professor, the Rev. Howard Thurman, an internationally renowned theologian, author, educator, philosopher and civil rights leader, was spiritual adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Jesse Jackson and myriad other faith-based Black leaders.
Thurman was born in 1899, in the Waycross community of Dayton Beach, Florida, one of three all-Black enclaves in the town. His father Saul Thurman died of pneumonia, when Howard was seven. That left his mother Alice and his maternal grandmother Nancy Ambrose, a formerly enslaved woman, as the primary caregivers for Howard and his two sisters Henrietta and Madeline. “Grandma Nancy” built a powerful bond with her grandson in part because Howard read to his grandmother, who could not read. Further, it was his grandmother and mother, two deeply spiritual women and members of the Mount Bethel Baptist Church in Waycross, that established Thurman’s spiritual foundation. Because of Jim Crow, Thurman was forced to attend high school at the Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville, about 100 miles away from his home in Daytona Beach, one of only three Black high schools in the state.
Thurman became the first Black student to receive a high school diploma in Daytona Beach. He moved on to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta and graduated as the school’s valedictorian in 1923.
In 1925, Thurman was ordained as a Baptist minister after he completed his study at the Colgate Rochester Theological Seminary in New York State. In 1926, Thurman married Katie Kelley less than a month after graduating from seminary. She was a graduate of the Teacher’s Course of Spelman Seminary, which later became Spelman College. Their first daughter Olive was born in 1927.
Thurman’s first assignment was to pastor Mount Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio. Subsequently, he returned to Atlanta as professor of religion and director of religious life at Morehouse and Spelman colleges.
In 1929, Thurman formally continued theological studies and earned his doctorate at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He studied specifically with Rufus Jones, one of the most influential American Quakers at the time. Jones helped found the American Friends Service Committee and was a leader of the pacifist, interracial Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Perhaps Thurman’s most influential theological and philosophical work began in 1932, when he became the first dean of Howard University’s Rankin Chapel, a position he held from 1932-1944.
In 1935, it was Thurman who led a delegation of Black Christians to South Asia, where he and his wife Katie met Mohandas Gandhi, the Indian political ethicist and spiritual leader who utilized non-violent resistance to lead India to independence from Great Britain. Thurman’s meeting with Gandhi impacted him profoundly and further convinced him that the Black American struggle against racial injustice had to be waged through non-violent methods. Thurman’s embrace of non-violence resistance, which would later become the bedrock of the American Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. King, was illuminated by Thurman when King was still in elementary school.
“It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world,” Gandhi allegedly told Thurman during his visit to India. And it was a phrase King and others repeated in the early years of the Movement in the 1950’s.
In 1944, Thurman left Howard to help the Fellowship of Reconciliation establish the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, the first racially integrated, multicultural Christian church in the United States.
In 1949, more than a decade after his transformative meeting with Gandhi in India, Thurman published Jesus and the Disinherited, a book that manifested his use of New Testament principles to craft the blueprint for the Civil Rights Movement. King met Thurman when he served as Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University from 1953 to 1965 (the first Black American to hold such a position at a majority White institution), during King’s first years at the school. King reportedly carried an often referenced copy of Jesus and the Disinherited, during the early days of the Movement and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Yet, it may have been Thurman’s book, Meditations of the Heart that inspired King’s most important speech “I Have a Dream.”
Thurman wrote, “Keep alive the dream; for as long as a man has a dream in his heart, he cannot lose the significance of living.”
Although he did not participate directly in protest during the Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s he continued to counsel King and other leaders. After he left Boston University in 1965, Thurman continued his ministry as chairman of the board and director of the Howard Thurman Educational Trust in San Francisco until his death in 1981.
