Dear Folks,
Join me this Sunday at 11:30 in the South transept in a conversation about Howard Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited.
Author, theologian, and mystic Howard Thurman was raised in Daytona, Florida by his grandmother, who had been enslaved. Trained at Colgate-Rochester seminary and ordained a Baptist minister in 1925, Thurman served first in Oberlin, Ohio, and then held a joint appointment as professor of religion and director of religious life at Morehouse and Spelman colleges in Atlanta, Georgia. During the spring semester of 1929, Thurman studied at Haverford College with Rufus Jones, a Quaker mystic and leader of the pacifist, interracial Fellowship of Reconciliation.
By1932, Thurman was offering his own “tactics of peace” to the African American community, a set of interior strategies to counter the majority’s “will to dominate and control the Negro minority” and the crippling spiritual hatred that it engendered. How might we break the cycle of racist hate that has made all of us, Black and White, its victims, he wondered.
In 1936, Thurman led a “Negro Delegation of Friendship” to South Asia, where he met and spoke at length with Mohandas Gandhi. Perhaps the message of non-violence would be sent to the world by African Americans, Gandhi offered, in an anecdote shared by Thurman in his autobiography.
And then in 1949 in his seminal work, Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman provided an interpretation of the New Testament gospels that laid the foundation for a nonviolent civil rights movement. According to This Far by Faith, a publication of the Public Broadcasting Service, “Thurman presented the basic goal of Jesus’ life as helping the disinherited of the world change from within so they would be empowered to survive in the face of oppression. A love rooted in the ‘deep river of faith,’ wrote Thurman, would help oppressed peoples overcome persecution. ‘It may twist and turn, fall back on itself and start again, stumble over an infinite series of hindering rocks, but at last the river must answer the call to the sea.’”
It is no surprise that Thurman profoundly influenced the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., though ironically they did not spend a great deal of time together. Thurman was 30 years King’s senior, the same age as his father, and they first encountered each other at Boston University. King was a graduate student and Thurman was the Dean of Marsh Chapel, where MLK heard several of the senior pastor’s sermons. A few years later, King invited Thurman to speak at his first pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. Later, King carried a well-worn copy of Jesus and the Disinherited through the tumultuous year of the Montgomery bus boycott.
Then in 1958, when King was signing copies of his new book about the boycott at an event in Manhattan, he was stabbed, and nearly died. Thurman visited King in the hospital and encouraged him to step away from the movement for a few weeks, to rest and deeply reflect, to practice healing detachment. Thurman worried that the movement had stopped being an organization and had become an organism with a life of its own that could potentially swallow up King.
King took his advice, and tended to his inner fire, so that he might encounter the outer struggle, and survive. Further, King adopted Thurman’s view of Jesus as friend and ally of the dispossessed, and quoted him extensively in sermons and speeches throughout the 50’s and 60’s. Do you hear the mystical interiority of Thurman in King’s soaring, public rhetoric?
Bring your thoughts and questions about Jesus and the Disinherited to our conversation this Sunday.
Love,
David