When Howard Thurman spoke, he filled the entire room with compassion, truth, keen intellect, and joy. To be in his presence was to experience the drama of life itself-with all its attending conflicts-and to be carried beyond these realities to the Reality of a gracious God whose will is life and wholeness.
Howard Thurman was a graduate from Morehouse College (the greatest school on earth) and Colgate-Rochester Theological Seminary. He then became a special student of philosophy in residence at Haverford College with Rufus Jones, the noted Quaker philosopher and mystic. After serving on the faculty of Howard University as Professor of Theology, he moved to San Francisco to help found the intercultural and interdenominational Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. He began his journey towards a philosophy that stressed an activism rooted in faith, guided by spirit, and maintained in peace.
“In an essay entitled “Peace Tactics and a Racial Minority,” Thurman depicted white America as characterized by the “will to dominate and control the Negro minority,” a situation which engendered among blacks a spiritually crippling hatred of their would-be dominators. He suggested that a “technique of relaxation,” might break this cycle.
In 1936, Thurman led a “Negro Delegation of Friendship” to South Asia. There he met the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. His conversations with Gandhi broadened his theological and international vision. In his autobiography, Thurman said that in his meeting with Ghandi, the Mahatma expressed his wish that the message of non-violence be sent to the world by African-Americans.
In his seminal 1949 book, Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman provided an interpretation of the New Testament gospels that laid the foundation for a nonviolent civil rights movement. 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.”
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