Ressurecting the Thurman Legacy for the Next Millennium

Black Issues in Higher Education, Nov 11, 1999 by Michele N-K Collison

At the entrance to Morehouse College, stand two monuments to two giants of the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Dr. Howard Thurman.

King's legacy looms large in the nation's memory. But while Thurman was a confidant to King and is widely considered to be the intellectual and spiritual architect of the civil rights movement, the history books have all but forgotten him.

"Thurman is from the underside of history," says Dr. Walter E. Fluker, director of the Thurman Papers Project at Morehouse. "No one talks about Thurman being a major player in American life because he was one of the great souls who happen to be in Black skin, but he was just as formidable."

Now as the college prepares to celebrate Thurman's centennial with a conference devoted to his career, the scholar is about to be rescued from obscurity. Scholars have begun to do critical work on Thurman, just as public figures like authors Iyanla Vanzant, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and tennis star Arthur Ashe began introducing Thurman to a new generation a couple of decades ago.

"There is a confluence of interest in spirituality and a specific interest in Thurman that converges at the end of the millenium," Fluker says. "Thurman is the holy man for then new millenium."

Fluker and co-editor Catherine Tumber have catalogued more than 50,000 of Thurman's unpublished sermons, writing articles and correspondence into a database that soon will be made available to scholars. Thurman's writings will be published in a three-volume edition called The Sound of the Genuine to be published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2001. And filmmaker Arleigh Prelow has produced a full-length documentary titled Howard Thurman": In Search of Common Ground.

In recent years, books about spirituality have vaulted to the tops of best-selling lists, including one written by the Dali Lama. Talk-show host Oprah Winfrey regularly devotes shows to authors of these books, encouraging audiences to get in touch with their spiritual selves. Fluker says he believes these are signs that people are desperately searching for some meaning in their lives. He cautions, however, that Thurman would not appreciate being considered the next New Age guru.

"The ideas many New Age gurus are talking about are themes Thurman has been thinking about since the `30s," he says. Moreover, he says many of the new books are self-help guides masquerading as spirituality. "It's more flash than depth. The hard questions are not of prosperity or of economic well being. Thurman spoke more to the eternal question of what am I here for? What is my calling?"

While new spirituality offers a "quick fix," Thurman is hard for people to get into, Fluker says. His challenge is to "translate Thurman to get out him out of the catacombs and allow him to speak to a wider audience."

To that end, Morehouse has created a Center for Leadership to create a curriculum for ethical leadership training for a new generation of scholars and youth.

A Life of Activism and Faith

Thurman was born in the segregated town of Daytona, Fla. in 1899. Raised and ordained in the Baptist church, he was educated at Morehouse College and Rochester Theological Seminary. In 1929, Thurman returned to Morehouse as a professor of religion. While he was dean of Howard University's Rankin Chapel, Thurman and other Black intellectuals, such as former Howard President Mordecai Wyatt Johnson and Franklin Frazier, served as advisors to the civil rights movement in the 1930s.

A proponent of racial and religious harmony, Thurman founded and pastored the Interdominational Church for Fellowship of All People in San Francisco in 1943, the first mutiracial, interfaith church in the United States.

Thurman's ministry there was deeply influenced by his meeting with Mohandas K. Gandhi. Thurman led the first African American delegation to meet the Indian leader in 1936. Later, he integrated the Gandhian principles of non-violent social change into his own Christian vision. It was this vision that formed the core of his most famous book, Jesus and the Disinherited, which deeply influenced Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders. King carried the book in his briefcase during the Montgomery Boycott.

"What does Jesus have to teach those with their backs up against the wall," Fluker says. "He teaches that the anatomy of fear and hate only leads to violence. He offers the vision of spiritual discipline against resentment. This was the moral basis of the nonviolent movement of the Black freedom movement in the South."

Thurman later resigned his position with the Fellowship Church when he became the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University in 1953. He was the first Black man to occupy such a position at a traditionally White university.

Scholars say Thurman's real influence is on building community. "Thurman is a significant figure in ecunemical movements," says Thurman scholar, Luther E. Smith of Emory University and author of Howard Thurman: The Mystic as Prophet. "He speaks to what it means to have a community of Christians, Muslims and Buddhists living in the same community and finding ways to be tolerant of all religious views. The Thurman project seeks to recognize and utilize Thurman as we wrestle with these very difficult questions."