Sue Bailey Thurman: Advocate for Peace

by Cora Saddler

Sue Bailey Thurman was an American author, lecturer, historian and civil rights activist, an advocate for interracial, intercultural, and international understanding, peace and fellowship. She and her husband, Howard Washington Thurman, who has been called the grandfather of the civil rights movement, are also known as the nation’s first African-American power couple.

Sue Bailey was the youngest of 10 children born to a prominent Black family in Pine Bluff, Ark. Her father was a minister, the Rev. Isaac Bailey; and her mother, Susie, was an educator who was also active in multiple Black women’s organizations and the YWCA at both the local and national level.

Sue Bailey graduated from Spelman Seminary in Atlanta in 1920 and was the first non-white student to earn a bachelor’s degree in music and liberal arts from Oberlin College in 1926. She worked as national traveling secretary for the YWCA’s college division, lectured throughout Europe, and established the first World Fellowship Committee of the YWCA.

Bailey’s inspiration was Juliette Derricotte, the YWCA secretary of National Student Council and later the dean of women at Howard University, who believed high-achieving women of color should be able to travel the world and be inspired by their counterparts. Bailey established a scholarship so African American undergraduate women could study and travel abroad. It was the youth, she believed, who had the capability to bridge gaps in cultural understanding.

Her future husband, Howard Thurman, was born in Daytona Beach, Florida and raised by his grandmother, a former slave who never accepted those boundaries for him, because he was “a child of God.” Thurman left home at age 14 to pursue his education because his hometown did not provide for Black children past the seventh grade. A single act of kindness changed the course of his life. Waiting for the train to take him to Jacksonville, Thurman found himself with enough money for the fare, but not enough for luggage. Thurman would later dedicate his autobiography to that “anonymous stranger” on the train platform who paid the fee and “restored his broken dreams.”

Thurman was the first Black child from Daytona to earn a high school diploma. He then graduated from Morehouse College, a historically black men’s liberal arts college in Atlanta in 1923 and earned his BD from Colgate Rochester Divinity School in New York in 1926. As valedictorian there, he encountered many emerging Black leaders of the 20th century.

Both Bailey and Thurman had social ties to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. long before the civil rights movement. Thurman and Dr. King’s father graduated from Morehouse a few years apart and remained close during King’s boyhood. Bailey had been good friends at Spelman with Alberta Williams, who would later become Dr. King’s mother.

Married in 1932, the Thurmans traveled with the Rev. Edward and Phenola Carroll on a “Pilgrimage of Friendship” to Burma, Ceylon and India in late 1935 and early 1936. They were invited by the Student Christian Movements of the United States and India.

General secretary of the Indian Student Christian Movement A. Ralla Ram argued for the inclusion of the Thurmans and Carrolls because of their unique perspective as Black Christians; Christianity at the time was considered the oppressor religion in India.

Thurman gave 135 lectures in over 50 cities. Sue Bailey Thurman also lectured on Black women and internationalism. She advocated for female empowerment in India to create a sense of international solidarity among women of color.

The delegation became the first African Americans to meet Mohandas Gandhi.

Over three hours, they discussed racial segregation, lynching, African American history and religion, Gandhi’s perspective on the African American struggle in the U.S., and the redemptive power of ahimsa – “do no harm” – which was later rephrased as nonviolence.

Sue Bailey, meanwhile, challenged Gandhi to expand the role of women. And because she held the music degree, her husband urged her to lead the group in singing Black spirituals: in particular, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” In response, Gandhi bowed his head in prayer.

Thurman came home revitalized in his spiritual thinking. The Black social gospel tradition, he realized, should be wider than an individual congregation. It should encompass society. Inner spirituality should be paired with community action.

Sue Bailey Thurman, date unknown.

(Photo courtesy of the Howard Gotlieb Library, Boston University)

If people stayed awake to the moment, he said, they would find opportunities to improve society. An example was the anonymous person who paid the luggage fee that allowed him to board the train for high school – who thus gave him his start, the person to whom he dedicated his autobiography.

Sue Bailey, in addition, promoted international leadership by women of color in the name of antiracism and anticolonialism. It was a “fight on all fronts” to make Black women “in all parts of the world as people to be respected.” Soon after their return, she spoke to an audience of 650 at Oberlin, rallying African Americans to emulate the Indians in their united front against British colonialism.

In the 1940s, Thurman co-founded the Church for the Fellowship of All in San Francisco with Dr. Alfred G. Fisk, who was also co-pastor. The church was unique for being the nation’s first interdenominational and interracial congregation. Sue Bailey, during the same time, from 1940-44, was the founder and editor of “Aframerican Women’s Journal,” the first publication of the National Council of Negro Women; she founded its national library, archives and museums.

Bailey Thurman, the first African American woman to meet Mohandas Gandhi, playing the Veena on her trip to India in 1935.

(Photo courtesy of the Howard Gotlieb Library, Boston University)

In the 1950s, Thurman was recruited to serve as the first African American Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University (BU), at the time a primarily white institution, because of his unifying philosophy. He engaged with activists like James Baldwin, Arthur Ashe, and the doctoral student Martin Luther King, Jr. King had known Thurman as a boy and now they watched Jackie Robinson play baseball on TV together on Sundays. Six months after King received his degree, he led his first nonviolent mass protest in Montgomery, AL.

Simultaneously, Sue Bailey Thurman organized the rescue of the Museum on Afro-American History, a former African Meeting House that had been both Boston’s first Black church and the nation's first public school Blacks could attend. Next, she mapped out a north-south Boston Black heritage trail, which would later serve as the blueprint for the National Park Service’s Boston African American Historical Site.

Continuing support of her husband’s ministry, she often welcomed students and faculty members to their home for fellowship and community-building. After the suicide of a Japanese student at BU, Sue Bailey founded the International Student Hostess Committee to prevent future internationals from feeling isolated and undervalued.

During that time, Sue Bailey had published two books, one a history of Afro-Americans in California inspired by her move to the Bay area, entitled “Pioneers of the Negro Origin in California” (1949) and “The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro” (1958). In the latter, she marketed African American history more palpably, entwining into the book the stories of professional women, to dispel misconceptions on the capabilities of Black women.

In 1965, the Thurmans returned to San Francisco, where Howard Thurman began his most prolific years as an author, although his books were more widely regarded abroad. After his death in 1981, Sue Bailey spent her remaining 32 years in San Francisco, where she established the Sanderson Foundation and was a major contributor to the African American Historical and Cultural Society.

Howard Thurman and Sue Bailey Thurman in India 1935.

(Photo courtesy of the Howard Gotlieb Library, Boston University)

Together, the Thurmans carved out a place for their meaningful work to create a better, more actualized world, in all its diversity. Although their names were once-unfamiliar, scholars now hail them as figures essential to the birth of the civil rights movement. One cannot understand King without first understanding the Thurmans. Their philosophical reflections paired with community action through partnership and education are needed now more than ever. The Thurmans encouraged others to stay awake to the moment. If one did, the opportunity to do good could come alive. True connections could be made, even in the most divided times.

– Suzanne Hanney contributing