Black History in the Church · Howard Thurman
Howard Washington Thurman played a leading role in many social justice movements and organizations of the twentieth century. He was one of the principal architects of the modern, nonviolent civil rights movement and a key mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Thurman was born in 1899 and was raised by his grandmother, a former slave, in Daytona, Florida. As a child, Thurman complied with his grandmother’s request that he read the bible aloud to her, and he developed an interest in the text at an early age. As a young child, Thurman learned not only of the trials of slavery but also of the slaves’ deep religious faith, which profoundly shaped his later vision of the transformative potential of Christianity.
Thurman studied at the Florida Baptist Academy, Morehouse College, and Columbia University before receiving a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Rochester Theological Seminary in 1926. Following seminary, he served as pastor of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio.
During this period in the 1920s, Thurman was one of the most articulate and visible theological figures in the national student youth movement. As a regular on the YMCA and YWCA lecture circuits during the height of segregation, he was the student movement’s most popular speaker for interracial audiences.
In 1929, Thurman returned to the South to serve as Professor of Religion and Director of Religious Life at Morehouse and Spelman colleges. During his tenure at Morehouse and Spelman, Thurman completed a series of sermons on Negro spirituals that would become the basis of the Ingersoll lectures that he delivered at Harvard Divinity School in 1947. He published these lectures as two books, Deep River (1945) and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death (1947). In 1932, Thurman moved to Washington, D.C. to become Professor of Religion at Howard University, where he was appointed the first Dean of Rankin Chapel in 1936. During that year he became the first person to lead a delegation of African Americans to India to meet with Mahatma Gandhi.
In 1943 Thurman established the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples (Fellowship Church) in San Francisco—the first major interracial, interfaith church in the United States – alongside A.J. Muste, a white pastor. Thurman’s almost 10-year ministry at Fellowship Church was deeply influenced by his experiences in 1935–36 while traveling in India, Ceylon, and Burma, particularly his meeting with Mahatma Gandhi.
The Gandhian ideas that Thurman developed in the years just before and during his tenure at Fellowship Church received a larger audience through the publication of his most famous work, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949), which deeply influenced leaders of the civil rights struggle. In this work, Thurman offered the vision of spiritual discipline, as opposed to resentment, that later informed the moral basis of the black freedom movement in the South.
The years at Fellowship Church prepared Thurman for what was to be another daring adventure in his search for common ground among people of all faiths. In 1953, at the invitation of Boston University President Harold Case, Thurman resigned as Minister-In-Residence of the Fellowship Church to become the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. Thurman was the first African American to hold such a position at a majority-white university.
Thurman retired from the university in 1965. He founded and directed the Howard Thurman Educational Trust, which provided funding for college students in need. He also remained a prolific writer and a popular speaker until his death in 1981. Among his many books are Deep River (1945), Jesus and the Disinherited (1949), Meditations of the Heart (1953), The Creative Encounter (1954), The Inward Journey (1961), Disciplines of the Spirit (1963), and With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (1979).
Submitted By: Brendan and Tedi Oberkircher