HOWARD THURMAN AND THE DISINHERITED
LIBRARY OF RELIGIOUS BIOGRAPHY Mark A. Noll, Kathryn Gin Lum, and Heath W. Carter, series editors Long overlooked by historians, religion has emerged in recent years as a key factor in understanding the past. From politics to popular culture, from social struggles to the rhythms of family life, religion shapes every story. Religious biographies open a window to the sometimes surprising influence of religion on the lives of influential people and the worlds they inhabited. The Library of Religious Biography is a series that brings to life important figures in United States history and beyond. Grounded in careful research, these volumes link the lives of their subjects to the broader cultural contexts and religious issues that surrounded them. The authors are respected historians and recognized authorities in the historical period in which their subject lived and worked. Marked by careful scholarship yet free of academic jargon, the books in this series are well-written narratives meant to be read and enjoyed as well as studied. Titles include: Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President by Allen C. Guelzo A Christian and a Democrat: A Religious Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt by James D. Bratt and John F. Woolverton Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life by Nancy Koester For a complete list of published volumes, see the back of this volume.
Howard Thurman and the Disinherited -  A Religious Biography -
Paul Harvey
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com © 2020 Paul Harvey All rights reserved Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ISBN 978-0-8028-7677-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harvey, Paul, 1961– author. Title: Howard Thurman and the disinherited : a religious biography / Paul Harvey. Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020. | Series: Library of religious biography | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A religiously focused biography of Howard Thurman, one of the most significant progenitors of the Civil Rights movement”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020017615 | ISBN 9780802876775 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Thurman, Howard, 1900-1981. | African American Baptists—Biography. Classification: LCC BX6495.T53 H37 2020 | DDC 230/.044092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017615
For Philip Goff, Fellow Old Man and Partner-in-Crime
1 2 3 4 5 6
Acknowledgments
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Introduction
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“My People Need Me” The Education of Howard Thurman
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“The Unadulterated Message of Nonviolence” Howard University and the Voyage to India
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The Affirmation Mystic in Action Thurman’s Philosophical Explorations, 1936–1944
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“A Sense of Coming Home” The Great Adventure in San Francisco
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“The Scent of the Eternal Unity” Dreams Deferred in Boston
163
“The Way the Grain in My Wood Moves” Thurman’s Wider Ministry
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Epilogue Mentor of the Movement: Thurman’s Influence and Afterlives
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Bibliographic Essay
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Index
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First and most important, thanks must go to the generation of scholars and archivists who have worked for many years with the Thurman papers, now at Boston University, and in the process produced five volumes of his papers along with two edited volumes of his sermons and other writings. These keepers of the Thurman flame have made possible this book and many others previously published and yet to come. My thanks to Robert Sackett, my departmental colleague, for reading the manuscript and giving it a thorough edit; to friends and professional colleagues Randal Jelks and Stephen Prothero for offering early encouragement; to Stetson University, for providing me the opportunity to give a series of endowed lectures that served as a kind of first draft for my writing about Thurman; to Jason Sexton and the online magazine Boom California, for encouraging me to write on Thurman’s years in San Francisco; and to numerous friends and colleagues in the field of African American religious history, who have taught me so much over the years. And finally, thanks to David Bratt, Heath Carter, Mark Noll, and my former coauthor Kathryn Gin Lum for encouraging me in this project and seeing it through the process to be included in the Library of Religious Biography series at Eerdmans.
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The goal of life is God! The source of life is God! That out of which life comes is that into which life goes. He out of whom life comes is He into whom life goes. God is the goal of man’s life, the end of all his seeking, the meaning of all his strivings. —Howard Thurman, “Deep River”
As a boy growing up in a small black community situated by Daytona Beach, Florida, Howard Thurman loved nature. He learned from it lessons that shaped his life. And then he devoted that life to meditating on spiritual matters even while envisioning a world, as he put it, of “friendly men underneath a friendly sky.” Thurman loved to sit near the ocean at night; it gave him a sense of “timelessness, of existing beyond the reach of the ebb and flow of circumstances.” The periodic storms that lashed the coastline thrilled him: “Unafraid, I was held by the storm’s embrace.” His experience with the storms gave him, as he described it in his autobiography, an “overring immunity against most of the pain with which I would have to deal in the years ahead when the ocean was only a memory. The sense held: I felt rooted in life, in nature, in existence.” But even in the midst of these storms that came in from the sea and stripped trees bare, the oak tree in his backyard held. “I needed the strength of that tree, and like it, I wanted to hold my ground.” The young Thurman talked to the oak tree, and felt understood. Thurman was growing up, too, in his local black Baptist church. He was educated in high school, college, and seminary in the Baptist tradition. Yet, even as a boy, he already had left that tradition. And as a boy, too, he experienced the sharp “psychic wounds” (as he called them) of American racism, 1
- 1 and he spent his life channeling his religious experience toward combating the basic violence of hatred that stalked the lives of black Americans. The mystic and the movement philosopher, the poet and the preacher and prophet, the searing critic and the soothing soul—Thurman joined together in one soul qualities from diverse personalities, spirits, and intellects. Howard Thurman (1899–1981) has interested me for a long time. In 2017, I began to consider writing his biography. There were parts of his life I didn’t know very much about. I began by searching for other biographies. At that time, although two biographies of Thurman had been prepared during his life, no scholarly biography using the full range of his now publicly available papers existed. Since then, a lengthy and definitive biography of his life has been completed by a longtime editor with the Howard Washington Thurman Papers Project, Peter Eisenstadt: Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman. Readers interested in a magisterial, academically rigorous, and expertly produced academic biography of Thurman are well advised to begin with Eisenstadt’s volume (expected out in 2021). Also, a biography of sorts can be compiled by reading the impeccably scholarly introductions to the five volumes of The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, a project directed for several decades by the scholar Walter Fluker. In Visions of a Better World, Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt laid out the portions of his life most directly relevant to his trip to India and meeting with Gandhi in 1935–1936. More recently, one section of Gary Dorrien’s Breaking White Supremacy provides a beautifully crafted introduction to his life and thought, set within the context of the long history of the black social gospel movement. (The reader may find full references for all these works in the bibliographic essay at the end of this book.) But with the exceptions of the forthcoming work by Eisenstadt and two documentary films (The Psalm of Howard Thurman, currently in production, and Backs against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story, first aired on PBS in February 2019), it is remarkable how little attention the remarkable story of Thurman’s life has garnered from scholars or from the general public. He hasn’t yet made the starting team of African American all-stars of the twentieth century. But he should be on that squad. Why are Thurman’s life and career so little known, at least relatively speaking? 2
- 1 In certain quarters, of course, Thurman is a well-known figure, and the documentary film that premiered in 2019, Backs against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story, covers his life well in a 55-minute film. But in general, Thurman certainly is not a household name. It’s easy to see why: he was a mystic, an intellectual, a poet—much more than an activist. He was not on the front lines, or even in the rear, of the civil rights struggle. Thurman didn’t appear before the cameras of national television, and he was best known by university students and an intellectual class. As Thurman explained himself, he never sought the limelight. He preferred to remain behind the scenes, a quiet force of intellect and faith. This relatively short biography reflects on major portions of Thurman’s life, and considers what made him so important, even though few outside the scholarly world have heard of him or know much about his life. Yet his relevance to our contemporary world is unmistakably clear. Thurman was foremost a man of ideas. His theo-philosophical conceptions formed the basis for remaking not only the American South but also the very texture and contours of religious experience in America. Thurman’s background was deeply immersed in the black Baptist tradition. He filtered these ideas through liberal social gospel Protestantism, Quaker introspection, nature mysticism, and a universalist cosmopolitanism. In the process, he shaped and transformed ideas about how to remake the country and the globe. The full implications of his intellectual pilgrimage are still being explored in various worlds of American religion. Thurman the man is not particularly well known; Thurman’s ideas, though, have exercised a deep and wide influence, even among those who have never heard his name. In his own peculiar and unmistakable way, he put together diverse parts of the American religious tradition in a way unlike that of any other figure. He was, as one later-life friend and mentee put it, a teacher of teachers. And I would add, he was a seeker of seekers, a person always amplifying that which is God in us, but also deploying the God in us against the most basic forms of violence and inequality that shaped and distorted social life at home and abroad. And the basic contradiction of his life, one he fully recognized and appreciated, was how much his poor and provincial background and training within one particular tradition, confined within the walls of the American 3
- 1 racial system, gave him the power to speak to diverse audiences looking to find a way out of their own limitations. Thurman the black American from coastal Florida, who struggled his whole life with the demons of American racism, became Thurman the figure of an expansive vision of the potentialities of God within us. He was a spirit who taught people how to unlock their own spirits in their quest for God, and in pondering how to make those quests relevant to the struggle for a more just social and political world. Two stories of major encounters in his life illustrate much of Thurman’s philosophy and approach to human relations and religious teaching. One is Thurman’s encounter with Mahatma Gandhi during his six-month sojourn in India, a story described later in this book and told as well, beautifully and completely, in Dixie and Eisenstadt’s Visions of a Better World. The other is Thurman’s most extended conversation, in person, with Martin Luther King, in 1958. On September 20, 1958, a mentally disturbed African American woman named Izola Ware Curry came to a bookstore in Harlem, in uptown New York City. There, Martin Luther King Jr. was signing copies of his new book, Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. She took out a sharp-edged letter opener. Then she stabbed the twenty-nine-year-old minister, who had just vaulted to national prominence through his leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott. King barely survived. Doctors later told him that, if he had sneezed, he could have died. Of course, King later received a fatal gunshot wound in April 1968; Curry lived out her days in a mental institution, to the age of ninety-seven. Resting in the hospital afterward, King received a visit from the African American minister, theologian, and mystic Howard Thurman. The two had met before. Thurman served from 1932 to 1944 as dean of the chapel at Howard University; then as minister of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco during 1944–1953; and then as dean of Marsh Chapel and professor in the School of Theology at Boston University from 1953 to 1965. King was a student at Boston University when Thurman first assumed his position there, and he heard the renowned minister deliver some addresses. King later remembered watching a World Series game together in a house with Thurman, who later commented with humorous irony that he 4
- 1 was one of the few professors at Boston University to have exercised almost no influence on the young King. Indeed, Thurman was far from prophetic about the young King, once recommending another candidate over him for a particular ministerial post. The two were never personally close. Thurman was the age of King’s father, and indeed, was closely connected with King Sr. throughout his years at Morehouse College in Atlanta. But King was close, intellectually and spiritually, with Thurman. One legend has it that King carried around his own well-thumbed version of Thurman’s best-known book, Jesus and the Disinherited, in his pocket during the long and epic struggle of the Montgomery bus boycott. Whether true in a literal sense, it certainly pointed to the ideas that formed the young civil rights leader. King quoted and paraphrased Thurman extensively in his sermons during the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing from Thurman, King understood Jesus as an emblem of the dispossessed— both to a group of Jewish followers in ancient Palestine and to African Americans under slavery and segregation. That was precisely why Jesus was so central to African American religious history. By that time, Thurman had exercised an outsized intellectual and spiritual influence on the entire generation that became the leadership of the civil rights movement. Thurman’s trip to India in 1935, where he met Mahatma Gandhi, was a key moment in the translation of the Indian nonviolent struggle for independence to the African American struggle for freedom. No wonder that, at the close of his meeting with Thurman, Gandhi told him (according to the account of the meeting published in India) that “it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.” In that New York hospital, Thurman gave King the same advice he gave countless others over the decades: he should take the unexpected, if tragic, opportunity to step out of life briefly, meditate on his life and its purposes, and only then move forward. By doing so, he could recover in both body and soul. When told how long King had been given to recuperate, Thurman urged him to take an additional two weeks. Thurman wrote: “When he told me, I urged him to ask them to extend the period by an additional two weeks. This would give him time away from the immediate pressure of the movement to reassess himself in relation to the cause, to rest his body and mind 5
- 1 with healing detachment, and to take a long look that only solitary brooding can provide. The movement had become more than an organization; it had become an organism with a life of its own to which he must relate in fresh and extraordinary ways or be swallowed up by it.” King replied to Thurman that “I am following your advice on the question.” Later, after leaving the hospital, King took an unexpected respite from his public duties, one of the few times he did so in his adult life. And also during this time, nearly quoting Thurman via Gandhi, he said that “I am now convinced that if the Negro holds fast to the spirit of non-violence, our struggle and example will challenge and help redeem, not only America but the world.” He then took the opportunity to travel in India in February and March of 1959. Before then, continuing their phone-tag-style correspondence (the two busy men could never find a date when both were free and one could preach at the other’s house of worship), Thurman wrote to King of his pleasure in knowing that “plans are afoot in your own thinking for structuring your life in a way that will deepen its channel.” He still hoped for an extended conversation with King, of some hours, to “talk about these matters that are of such paramount significance for the fulfillment of the tasks to which your hands are set.” But they never had that opportunity. King was a whirlwind of activity, of course, but ironically the apostle of calm and serenity, Howard Thurman, was so in demand that he also could never squeeze such a meeting into his schedule. As Walter Fluker, editor of the Howard Thurman Papers Project, has explained, Thurman the private mystic and Thurman the public activist found common ground in understanding that spirituality is necessarily linked to social transformation. Private spiritual cultivation could prepare the way for deeper public commitments for social change. King himself, according to one biographer, came to feel that the stabbing and enforced convalescence was “part of God’s plan to prepare him for some larger work” in the struggle against southern segregation and American white supremacy. In previous years, some had tagged Thurman as the new Gandhi, the long- awaited messiah for a nonviolent movement in America. Thurman had no such pretensions; he knew he was no such thing. But he served as a mentor for the movement. This role fit his capacity for deep reflection and profound 6
- 1 preaching that spread new spiritual understandings. King’s stabbing was a bizarre and tragic event, but in some sense it gave him the period of reflection and inner cultivation needed for the chaotic days of the civil rights struggle that were to come. The prison cell in Birmingham, Alabama, where in mid-1963 King penned his classic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” also accidentally but critically provided much the same spiritual retreat for reflections that helped transform America. Thurman was a private man and an intellectual; he was not an activist, as King was, nor one to take up specific social and political causes to transform a country. But he mentored an entire generation, including King, who did just that. Thurman’s lesson to King was that the cultivation of the self feeds and enriches the struggle for social justice. In a larger sense, the discipline of nonviolence required a spiritual commitment and discipline that came, for many, through self-examination, meditation, and prayer. Thurman transmitted that message to the larger civil rights movement. Thurman combined, in the words of historian Martin Marty, the “inner life, the life of passion, the life of fire, with the external life, the life of politics.” Nearly a decade later, in his last letter to Thurman prior to his assassination, King referred (obliquely but unmistakably) to this advice, expressing to Thurman his wish for a time of repose and meditation amidst the tumults of the later 1960s. And immediately after King’s assassination, Thurman, then in retirement in San Francisco, delivered a memorable eulogy that beautifully captured the meaning of King’s life. Thurman then went on to foster close personal relationships with young black ministers, politicians, activists, and scholars, the people who would carry King’s legacy into the future. Beyond the story of King, though, following the life of Thurman introduces us to a long history of religion and the civil rights movement, from the 1920s to the 1970s. And beyond that, it gives us a fuller picture of the interactions of twentieth-century black theologies with the worlds of liberal Protestantism, the social gospel, mysticism, interracial projects, and intraracial development in the major educational institutions of the black institutional world. Thurman’s active and varied life thus put him in touch with, and gave him influence over, a diverse array of twentieth-century theologies, movements, and philosophies. Born and trained in the South, he 7
- 1 left it behind but always returned to his southern background and training when reflecting on his life and its significance. Howard Thurman was born during some of the ugliest years of Jim Crow and one of the worst possible times to be an African American in the post– Civil War United States. He lived to see the end of Jim Crow, and his career as a teacher, minister, theologian, writer, and mentor helped to bring about its demise. But his career extends beyond being a minister for civil rights, for he was a mystic, a cosmopolitan, a poet, and a seeker. His thoughts, ideas, mentorship, and teaching deeply influenced key figures of a civil rights generation, including everyone from Pauli Murray to James Farmer, Benjamin Mays, Martin Luther King Jr., Vincent Harding, and Jesse Jackson. If Mays was, in the words of his biographer Randal Jelks, the “schoolmaster of the movement,” Thurman was its spiritual mentor. And his role in founding and leading one of the first self-consciously interracial churches in the United States, the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, gave him an institutional space in which to express his vision for the world. Thurman explored mysticism even as he provided guidance to a generation of students seeking a way to apply the religion of Jesus both to their own lives and to the problems of the world. He found his voice through poetry more than prose, but in the process he articulated a pluralism and cosmopolitanism that came to define the center-left of American Protestantism. He came from an isolated and provincial part of Florida but became a man of the world. For all he meant to so many people, Howard Thurman is almost unknown to those outside the ken of religious history and civil rights history. Yet his life and thought illuminate many important developments and movements in twentieth-century American religion. In particular, he combined a mystic spirit and an activist heart for social justice. And he showed how those religious impulses could be combined in one person; how the head and the heart could work together in a person’s soul and in transforming the world at large to better reflect that which is God in us.
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