The fact that twenty-five years of my life were spent in Florida and in Georgia has left deep scars in my spirit and has rendered me terribly sensitive to the churning abyss separating white from black. Living outside of the region, I am aware of the national span of racial prejudice and the virus of segregation that undermines the vitality of American life. Nevertheless, a strange necessity has been laid upon me to devote my life to the central concern that transcends the walls that divide and would achieve in literal fact what is experienced as literal truth: human life is one and all men are members one of another. And this insight is spiritual and it is the hard core of religious.
Born in 1899 in West Palm Beach, Florida, and growing up in a particular black neighborhood of Daytona Beach, Howard Thurman had a childhood full of what he would later describe as psychic scars. But his boyhood was also full of the wonders of nature along the Atlantic seaboard. Thurman lost the man he considered his father when he was seven. Later, he endured schoolyard taunts about his paternity, because his boyhood male role model was not his biological father. Howard never mentioned that publicly, perhaps because that psychic wound was too hard to accept. He was raised principally by his mother, Alice (Ambrose) Thurman, and his grandmother Nancy Ambrose. His mother, dear to him through his life, worked constantly to support the family. As Thurman recalled, she always carried with her a “deep inner sadness.” She seemed unable ever to be spontaneously joyful.
Perhaps (it’s impossible to know) she had some of the depression that later afflicted Thurman’s younger sister, Madaline. Even if not, Alice Thurman had a rough go of it. She lost two husbands to early deaths and finally married a third who never would be close with her children. She also lost her firstborn child, Henrietta, Howard’s older sister, who passed from an illness when Howard was in high school.
The kind of hardships Alice Thurman endured may be seen too in her own manner of passing. In the late 1940s, Thurman moved her to San Francisco to care for her during her declining days. When she was near death, Thurman admitted her to Stanford Hospital, but she refused to stay, saying of the “buckra” (white people) around her, “The first chance they get, you don’t know what they will do to you. I’m scared to go to sleep at night, and you just have to take me out of this place.” Alice’s decades-long ungrammatical but loving correspondence with her son, and Howard’s fiercely protective attitude toward his beloved mother, suggests the closeness of their relationship.
From his own account, his grandmother, in particular, fundamentally shaped his religious sentiments; she was his hero. His grandmother had been a slave, and later, when Thurman began writing his books on the spirituals, he had her words in mind. Nancy also was a midwife in Daytona, known generally by the community as “Lady Nancy,” and remembered by Thurman as the “anchor person in our family.” She came from a large plantation estate in South Carolina; her owner, John C. McGehee, had moved to Madison County, Florida, before the war, where the majority of the larger planters were from South Carolina. Growing up, Thurman made frequent pilgrimages to Madison County but remembered of his grandmother, “She granted to no one the rights of passage across her own remembered footsteps.”
But there was one great exception. Nancy frequently repeated the story of the slave minister she remembered, who came once a year to preach to them. He would address the enslaved people, saying, “You are not niggers! You are not slaves! You are God’s children!” Thurman recounted that story numerous times in his orations, sermons, and books, including the autobiography he prepared later in his life. It was one of his staple parables that he returned to time and again when he reflected on his life. Another of those stories was of the girl who lived with a family for whom Thurman’s grandmother did laundry. Thurman worked raking leaves in their yard, and the girl tormented the boy by scattering the leaves. When Thurman told her to stop, she picked up a pin and jabbed him in the hand. “Oh Howard, that didn’t hurt you! You can’t feel!” she said. The grandmother’s affirmation of worth, and the girl’s negation of it, defined Thurman’s experience growing up as a black boy in Daytona.
Thurman’s mother, Alice, always a devout woman for whom Thurman cared deeply her entire life, married three times. The first, Saul, was the man Thurman assumed was his father, and Thurman revered him as a strongly built man who held opinions contrary to the general sentiments of the community. For one thing, he had some books by the famous agnostic Robert Ingersoll; for another, he conspicuously avoided going to church. Saul died in 1907; Alice then married Alex Evans, a skilled workman from Lake Helen, Florida, but he passed away in 1910. Thurman respected Evans as well. Finally in 1914, Alice married James Sams, and the two would be married for the next several decades. But Sams was someone for whom Thurman and his sister felt little affection, and in future years Thurman would write to Sams and lecture him, with uncharacteristically harsh words, about his mistreatment of his mother. Indeed, much later in his life, shortly before Alice’s death, Thurman would instruct his mother on how to cash in an insurance policy that had matured, and how to do so in a way that James would not know about (Thurman always suspected that James schemed to take money away from his mother).
Socially awkward and physically gangly as a boy, Howard spent a difficult childhood communing more with nature than with other people. Nature “provided my rather lonely spirit with a sense of belonging that did not depend on human relationships,” he later reflected. He particularly enjoyed the later hours, when he “could hear the night think and feel the night feel.” One exception was with his sister Madaline, born in August of 1908, with whom he was close in his life. Madaline shared with Thurman a passion for music but also suffered from bouts of depression that sometimes were crippling. Thurman took care of her as a child, and then sometimes as an adult during her lowest moments; in exchange, when Thurman went to India, Madaline cared for Thurman’s two young girls. But Madaline struggled with mental illness through her life, her artistic talents hampered by her bouts of crippling depression. Thurman also had an older sister, Henrietta, who passed away from an illness during Thurman’s second year in high school in Jacksonville, Florida. Little wonder that, as Thurman later wrote, death surrounded him while growing up. The annual season of illnesses routinely struck down many in the community. With doctors helpless, impoverished black families could only place their loved ones’ souls in the hands of God.
Thurman grew up in Mount Bethel Baptist Church, in Waycross, one of the black neighborhoods across the Halifax River from Daytona Beach and the tourist areas. Thurman learned to be wary of Baptist orthodoxy early on. When Saul Thurman died, a local Baptist minister initially had refused to give his father a proper burial. The pastor of their church initially refused to preach the eulogy. Thurman’s grandmother, as he recounted it, pressed the deacons to allow a service in the church, but a visiting evangelist who gave the sermon used the occasion to make an object lesson of the fate of unsaved souls. “I listened with wonderment, then anger, and finally mounting rage,” Thurman said, as his father was “preached into hell.” He whispered to his grandmother, “He didn’t know Papa, did he? Did he?”
Thurman’s bitter experience with the funeral of the man he understood to be his father, his symbol of masculinity in his otherwise female-dominated world, had a long-lasting effect. Thurman would be in search of symbolic fathers, physical and spiritual, for years to come, but the conclusions of those relationships often were unsatisfactory. Also, the shocking events of his father’s funeral set Thurman up for a love-hate relationship with religious experience and the institutional church. Thurman’s own attempt to join his boyhood church furthered this early sentiment. At twelve, feeling that he had been converted, Thurman expressed an interest in joining the church. He told the deacons of Mount Bethel of his experience, but they initially refused to accept its validity.
In fact, it had long been a tradition in many black Baptist congregations to require repeated versions of the conversion story. Thurman’s fellow Floridian Zora Neale Hurston, daughter of a Baptist minister in an all-black town in Florida, was a lifelong religious skeptic who knew intimately of the entirely ordinary lives of churchgoers in her hometown: “They plowed, chopped wood, went possum-hunting, washed clothes, raked up back yards and cooked collard greens like anybody else.” Even with her doubts and questions, she enjoyed the oral artistry of the salvation narratives. She felt moved in churches “not by the spirit, but by action, more or less dramatic.” Candidates for membership were pursued by “hellhounds” as they “ran for salvation” (perhaps the same “hellhounds” that dogged legendary bluesman Robert Johnson as he ran from the “blues falling down like hail”). They would dangle precariously over the fires of hell, call on Jesus, see a “little white man” on the other side calling them, and finally traverse to heaven. In publicly describing their spiritual journeys, they sometimes strayed from the scripted narrative expected of them, relying instead on extemporaneously created variations: “These visions are traditional. I knew them by heart as did the rest of the congregation. Some of them made up new details. Some of them would forget a part and improvise clumsily or fill up the gap with shouting. The audience knew, but everybody acted as if every word of it was new.”
The twelve year-old Thurman was no religious anthropologist, however, but an awkward boy who sought community and acceptance. The deacons’ initial rebuff brought grandmother Nancy back to the fray. “Maybe you do not understand his words, but shame on you if you do not know his heart,” she told them. He joined the church. In his younger years he felt called to the ministry but resisted that call precisely because of his long-smoldering anger over the rejection he saw at Saul Thurman’s funeral. He struggled with that sentiment for a long time, until finally feeling some release from his resentment when, years later, he encountered the man who had preached that funeral. But his quarrel with orthodox religious dogma continued through his days. The young Thurman was on his way to becoming a seeker, a path he followed the rest of his life.
Thurman’s home community of Waycross was one of the three black neighborhoods of Daytona. It had about 1,800 black residents during his younger years (about half the growing city’s population). The Daytona city directory of 1900 depicted a (relatively speaking) prosperous black community. Blacks worked in the citrus industry, for the railroad, and in other occupations a step above what was available for most rural black southerners. The presence of northern snowbirds helped, both in bringing money into the general area and in slightly lessening the degree of racial hostility and violence blacks experienced. “The tempering influence of these northern families made contact between the races less abrasive than it might have been otherwise,” Thurman remembered. And in Thurman’s case, it helped precisely because early on he developed white benefactors (including James Gamble, of the Proctor and Gamble company) who gave him modest ($5 a month) but indispensable early support in furthering his education.
Over time, however, as white southerners moved in, the town grew more visibly segregated. The influence of the northerners who had been prominent in the town’s founding diminished, and the normal patterns of Jim Crow set in more or less around the time of Thurman’s boyhood. He remembered how the movements of blacks were “carefully circumscribed,” and that the worlds of whites and blacks were “separated by a wall of quiet hostility and overt suspicion.” Most important for Thurman’s later reflections was the complete absence of whites from his ethical field of vision. As he later described it, he did not regard whites “as involved in my religious reference. They were read out of the human race—they simply did not belong to it in the first place. Behavior toward them was amoral.” Blacks and whites lived on opposite sides of a river, but they effectively dwelled on separate planets.
The Daytona area, then, was no paradise, nor an escape from the larger world of Jim Crow. And yet, there was evidence of black prosperity and black political activity. Thurman found it in the work and achievements of his lifelong friend Mary McLeod Bethune. In 1904, she founded what is now Bethune-Cookman College (originally called the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Girls), a place that, together with the “inner strength and authority of Mrs. Bethune,” gave younger blacks such as Thurman “a view of possibilities to be realized in some distant future.” Thurman also looked up to role models such as Thornton L. Smith, a cousin who played baseball in the Negro Leagues and helped to stanch the tide of Ku Kluxism around Daytona in the 1920s. The physician for Thurman’s family, John T. Stocking, also had white patrons, and Thurman remembered him as someone who resisted pressure to join the church. They were his “masculine ideals” as a young man.
Thurman later told the story of his grandmother’s belief in the magic power of education. She had wanted, as a slave, to learn how to read; the daughter of the slave owner was going to help her, but the mother, upon discovering this, intervened, and Nancy Ambrose’s hopes were dashed. But Nancy transmitted to the young Howard her belief in the power of education. Thurman managed to make it through seventh grade in Newton, one of the other black communities (aside from Waycross) where he grew up. It was the only school for young blacks in the area and extended only as far as seventh grade. The principal tutored Thurman through eighth grade individually, even as Thurman worked in a fish market to help support the family. Thurman received high marks throughout, setting his long pattern of being the valedictorian of virtually any educational institution he attended. Thurman graduated from eighth grade, the first black boy in Daytona to do so.
But there was no high school there for him. There were, in fact, only 492 black secondary school students in the state, just 3 percent of those eligible to go to high school; they attended two public and six private high schools. Thurman would have to go elsewhere to continue his education. One of the private high schools was in Jacksonville, a hundred miles north of Daytona. Thurman was desperately poor, and even the process of getting to Jacksonville on the train almost derailed his efforts. Thurman could not pay the passage for his small, ragged trunk of clothes and belongings, and, as he recounted in his autobiography, he sat in the station, crying. An unknown man asked him what was the matter. Upon learning it, he told Thurman, “If you’re trying to get out of this damn town to get an education, the least I can do is to help you.” He paid the trunk fare and disappeared, one of several instances of good fortune that Thurman understood as God’s grace, his intervention in lives, the growing edge that produced fruit out of seemingly nothing. Thurman dedicated his autobiography to this unknown man, the “stranger in the railroad station in Daytona Beach who restored my broken dream sixty-five years ago.”
Thurman attended Florida Baptist Academy from 1915 to 1919, again achieving stellar academic marks, working himself to a state of complete mental and physical exhaustion in school and in various odd jobs, and completing tough academic courses, including several years of Latin and some Greek. During his second year there his older sister, Henrietta, suddenly died. In his autobiography, Thurman claimed to have had some premonition of the tragedy, during which he received a telegram with the news of Henrietta’s grave illness; he traveled immediately to Daytona, but she had passed before he arrived. Later, in 1958, he recounted a similar experience when he woke up obsessed with thoughts of needing to go visit Martin Luther King Jr., who, that day, as he soon learned, was stabbed and nearly killed.
Thurman’s later mystical speculations on the powers of intuition, of foreknowledge and esoteric understandings of mysteries and inexplicable premonitions, had some roots in these early years. They may also have risen from African American folklore about “the veil.” While dubious of it, Thurman grew up surrounded by the pervasive African American folklore of the “veil.” This was the central image of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk. The great black intellectual famously used the physical image of the “veil” of amniotic fluid over a baby’s face (interpreted by African Americans as a sign of special wisdom or power given to that baby, but also a sign of trouble and grief), combining it with the veil worn by women to shield themselves, to speculate on the ways in which African Americans lived behind the veil. For Du Bois, it was a powerful image of being unable to see through clearly to the outside world, but also that the outside world could never see in, clearly, to the African American world. All was shrouded, veiled. And thus the world was darkened and made mysterious or even invisible.
Thurman’s ears were pierced as a child, a common practice to “break” the veil and thus rid the child of the heavy burden of carrying it. “How deeply I was influenced by this ‘superstition’ I do not know,” Thurman later wrote. “The veil” was not a central image in his writing, as it was for Du Bois. And yet, Thurman’s lifelong project of creating real human relations between people, beyond the evils of separation and segregation, really involved breaking through the veil. Being able to see what was God in us, ridding ourselves of the spiritual obstacles that made such a vision impossible, and then transmitting that knowledge into movements to transform and redeem the social world—this was his lifelong vision. And it was one in the process of formation from the earliest years of his education both in school and in his lonely encounters with the forces of nature.
By his senior year, Thurman was known locally as the academic star, and he was proud of his excellent grades. His work ethic was unexcelled, both in school and in his long hours working at hard jobs to pay his rent and (barely) keep himself fed. At the same time, his drive for work always conflicted with his sensitive nature; he was prone to bouts of minidepression and suffered from physical symptoms of overwork. Much of his later focus on the words “sensitiveness” and “relaxation” surely stemmed from these years of ceaseless mental and physical exertion. His achievements were recognized, however, as he won a partial scholarship to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta; he could not have gone there otherwise. Further, in his senior year Thurman worked as something like the dean of students at Florida Baptist Academy, which had just moved to Saint Augustine, Florida, and become Florida Normal and Industrial Institute. Further, Thurman spent the summer of 1918, during the last months of World War I, at a student army-training-corps camp at Howard University, one of several places early in his life where he began to make connections to the wider black intellectual and social world. After the experience at Howard, he returned to finish high school. While giving his high school graduation speech, he collapsed, partly because of high blood pressure. He kept his demanding regimen of work in a hot bakery during the sweltering Jacksonville summer, saving the money necessary to attend Morehouse starting in the fall of 1919.
Before making it to Atlanta, with the emotional but not financial support of his impoverished mother, Thurman had begun his correspondence with figures that would serve as mentors—most significantly, during his younger years, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, who later served as president of Howard during its glory years as the capital of the intellectual world of black universities. Thurman began attending events such as YMCA student conferences while in high school, where he heard addresses delivered by Johnson and other black intellectual leaders. After hearing Johnson speak in 1917, he had wanted to introduce himself, but the shy high schooler just could not bring himself to do it. Finally in June 1918, he wrote directly to Johnson to introduce himself after hearing him at a YMCA student event in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. “Listen while I tell you my soul,” he wrote in the second paragraph. He hungered to be heard, as yet far from fully mature but with a deep desire for service to the race. His participation in the YMCA and other student organizations and conferences furthered that desire.
Thurman told Johnson of the arduous path he had pursued. As the first black student in Daytona Beach to receive promotion (to move past eighth grade), he had told his mother of his desire to continue, and heard from her, “Son you may go but I cannot do anything for you financially, for I must care for your sisters.” Thurman replied that he only wanted and expected her prayers. From there he recounted the rigors of his training at the Florida Baptist Academy of Jacksonville: surviving on one meal a day, walking two and a half miles to and from the school, dry cleaning clothes at twenty-five cents per suit, running a fish market, and working eleven-hour days on Saturday for fifty cents. And then scoring in the high nineties throughout his high school career and winning the scholarship medal. Now, he sought advice on how to proceed. It was 1918, the draft was on, and he was willing to serve his country, but at the same time he wanted to be a minister, and, as he put it, “I feel the needs of my people. I see their distressing condition, and have offered myself up on the altar as a living sacrifice.” In considering how to respond to the war effort, he explained, “I am willing to fight for democracy, but my friend Rev. Johnson, my people need me.” He pleaded with Johnson: “What would you advise me to do? Please take a personal interest in me and guide me and God will reward you.” Thurman was often very discouraged, with so much work and so little help: “Sometimes I think nobody cares but thank God, Jesus does, mother does and I believe you do.”
This was the voice of the young Thurman, knowing he had a mission but knowing almost nothing about how to pursue it. He would soon move away from the evangelical tone and YMCA idealism of the letter, and just a few years later would be a big man on campus at Morehouse.
Johnson responded sympathetically, urging Thurman to pursue his work carefully and thoroughly, avoiding any shortcuts. Between college and theological training, he should be able to complete a thorough course of training by the time he was twenty-six, he told Thurman. And essentially that is what Thurman did. Johnson also gave him advice that Thurman later adapted and transformed into one of his best-known axioms of wisdom: “Keep in close touch with your people, especially with those who need your service. Take every opportunity to encourage their growth and to serve them. School yourself to think over all that you learn, in relation to them and to their needs. Make yourself believe that the humblest, most ignorant and most backward of them is worthy of the best prepared thought and life that you can give.” Later, Thurman frequently advised listeners, congregants, and readers to take people not necessarily where they were but where they ought to be, and then treat them as if they were already there. In effect, he was taking Johnson’s advice and turning it into a deeper theological principle. Interestingly, in the same letter Johnson noted that he was sending Thurman a book on the history of the “people of Israel,” noting that “you will find it to your advantage to cultivate the historical perspective that such books can give.” It was one of Thurman’s earliest exposures to modernism, or at least to higher historical criticism, in interpreting the Bible. This lesson stuck. From a fairly early age, Thurman rejected any literalist or textual interpretations and embraced the Bible as literature that taught metaphorical truths.
Another voice of the young Thurman was one of gratitude toward a high school teacher. He wrote to his English teacher Ethel Simons in June of 1919, just before entering Morehouse, recounting his return to Daytona and a visit to the doctor, who told him that he “owed a big bill to Dr. Sleep,” and his health problems. Thurman adored Simons, and the letter has some hints of a teenage intellectual crush. Surely Thurman loved the attention that intellectually oriented adults lavished on him, the promising young student desperate to learn everything he could. Simons returned the favor with a lifelong interest in Thurman’s career. Thurman kept writing to her during his first year at Morehouse, proudly informing her of his academic progress (outstripping some more advanced students, he noted) and thanking her again—“your life has at least blest me if none other.” At the end of his first year, he wrote again to thank her for a card she had sent and noted that he was starting to serve as a substitute pastor for his home church in Daytona: “I am here holding this big job down as best I can under God.” After detailing further academic successes—academic prizes, editorships of college literary magazines, and others—he concluded, “I am working, working, working. I preach real hard too. I must do my best even tho it is against my health.”
Thurman’s first year at Morehouse, which was founded just after the Civil War, came under the presidency of the formidable personality and intellectual John Hope. Hope’s earliest years coincided with the years of W. E. B. Du Bois. Both survived the harrowing Atlanta race riot of 1906. Hope later guided Morehouse generally in the direction of the kind of black liberal arts college valued by Du Bois, a place of academic accomplishment, rigorous expectations, and a demanding personal code of conduct that brooked little challenge. The idea was to be a “Morehouse man,” an exemplar of intellectualism and respectability. And that was even the more demanded if one came from a poor family such as Thurman had. Hope called the students “young gentlemen,” a label that stuck with Thurman for its affirmation of the essential manhood of the students. Hope’s legendarily strict requirements for personal conduct meant that he was a distant father figure, respected rather than loved, but certainly Thurman respected him and did well with Hope’s requirements that each student compose and deliver, without notes, his own oration each year. People would later say to Thurman (by his own recollection), “You’re one of John Hope’s men, aren’t you?,” a way of saying that Thurman’s Morehouse training was “unmistakable.” Thurman also fell under the sway of the dean of students, Samuel Archer, an avuncular figure whose personal warmth contrasted with the demanding front of John Hope. “Big Boy,” they called him. “The men of the college honored and liked President Hope. They revered and loved Dean Archer,” he later wrote. Together, the team of Hope and Archer “undergirded the will to manhood for generations of young black men, … which countered all the negatives beating in upon us from the hostile environment by which we were surrounded.”
Equally important was a stress on service—service to the race, service to the community and church, and service to the world at large. The YMCA, Thurman’s other major source of education, reinforced all these ideas and provided Thurman his earliest opportunities in speaking, leadership, and fraternizing with other leaders of the race as well as relationships with young white men. The YMCA functioned as one of the primary vehicles for carrying on the social gospel movement in the early twentieth century. It was a waystation for numerous southern liberals and radicals seeking to apply their Christian training to real-world social problems. The YMCA and YWCA also sponsored numerous speaking tours and international visits, and brought together people from widely varying backgrounds and gave them the opportunity to forge youthful cross-racial alliances. Thurman later rejected some of the strictures of the Victorian ethics and conduct required by the YMCA, but it was there that he was immersed in social gospel ideas. It was a limited yet indispensable training ground for his later work.
Relatively progressive though it was for its era, the YMCA was segregated, with black students participating through the “Colored Work Department.” Eventually, the timidity of the YMCA leadership in challenging norms of segregation infuriated Thurman. But during the 1910s and 1920s, at least, the YMCA provided key forums for the development of African Americans in positions of religious, social, and political leadership. And it at least provided contact with younger whites who sometimes were willing to consider other possibilities for applying Christian ethics to southern life. Thurman started attending conferences in high school; it was at a YMCA conference that he saw Mordecai Wyatt Johnson and yearned to be mentored by him. There also Thurman made a lifelong friendship with Channing H. Tobias, a leader of the international YMCA.
At Morehouse two of Thurman’s primary influences were Benjamin Mays (his psychology teacher there originally, who became his lifelong friend “Bennie”) and the formidably cantankerous sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. The latter, in particular, seemed to take delight in puncturing Thurman’s youthful YMCA-style Christian pretensions. Thurman remembered Frazier telling him in class, “I am the teacher and you are the student. From this day forward you are not to speak a word in this course, not even to answer ‘present’ when the roll is called. Understand?” But Frazier, in fact, respected Thurman’s intellect and promise, giving him high marks and encouraging him toward further academic achievement. At the same time, Frazier’s sarcasm and burlesque of biblical myths in the classroom clearly upset the young Thurman, not yet fully developed as a modernist, nor as a mature man who could recognize and appreciate a sense of wit and irony directed toward felling intellectual idols.
Thurman’s life in Atlanta, during his years at Morehouse and later, left him depressed. Unlike the slightly more hopeful situation he had in Daytona, Atlanta was a place full of misery and destitution. As he remembered it later, he lived in Atlanta when Georgia was particularly infamous for its overt racism: “Lynchings, burnings, unspeakable cruelties were the fundamentals of existence for black people. Our physical lives were of little value. Any encounter with a white person was inherently dangerous and frequently fatal.” Thurman’s lifelong theological emphases on worth and dignity sprang in large part from these youthful and college-age experiences, when he saw firsthand what it meant to live in a society whose entire raison d’être was to demean and crush you.
Somewhat surprisingly, Thurman focused considerable study in economics, business, and sociology during his years at Morehouse. In particular, he was influenced by Lorimer Milton, who took to Thurman and tried to persuade him to enter business. Thurman had no interest in doing so, but perhaps the poverty and hardships of his earliest years led him to his intellectual, if not practical, interests in money. Thurman later frequently consulted with Milton on business and money matters, including in the founding of the Howard Thurman Educational Trust, originally designed to provide poor African American youngsters the means to attend college. Long before it was established, and probably during Thurman’s college years, he proposed a Negro scholarship fund, funded from contributions by blacks, that could help black students receive college educations and then teach at black schools. His proposal in part reflected the influence of Milton and more generally the culture of black uplift and progress from that era.
And yet, Thurman was bitter at the lack of a program in philosophy. His true interests lay there, but the benefactors of black education (particularly white philanthropists who directed money through institutions controlled by Booker T. Washington and his disciples) had no interest in developing young black minds in the deepest craft of thinking. To do so would induce a questioning of the very system that produced well-educated black men who effectively could find no place in society. Thurman’s later critique of black educational institutions, one based on an appreciative recognition of what he had received but a biting analysis of what deliberately was left lacking, drew directly from his Morehouse experience. Thurman was proud to be a Morehouse man, but he also understood what he had been denied.
Thurman excelled in nearly everything at Morehouse, and his fellow students recognized that by giving him monikers both warmly admiring and gently joshing. They called him “Dud.” In the college yearbook of 1923, after his numerous prizes and awards were listed (Edgar Allen Poe Short Story Prize, Athenaeum Literary Prize, Chamberlain Scripture Reading Prize, president of the Atlanta Student Council, and so on), he was characterized as follows: “Slow in speech, large in stature, with long dangling arms, ‘Dud’ is a striking figure in any group. The personification of the Morehouse Ideal of a genuine Christian. His big heart and massive brain have been the repository of many student problems.” As the “ideal of a minister,” he had “won the confidence and respect of [the] entire school” and was considered “our most brilliant classmate.” He also won the unofficial title of “most dignified” and “the busiest,” owing to his schedule of “debating, teaching, preaching, editing the Annual, managing the ‘Y’ and office work.” Another student named there was at best a “distant second.” Thurman’s classmate Clarence Gresham, who went on to a long career in the black Baptist ministry in Georgia, told Thurman in a personal letter from this time: “I really believe that my success in life depends on my relations with you, God and myself alone being excepted.” Gresham was happy that their friendship had developed so well that “even the thought of a breach” was painful to him. Already developing as a personally mysterious but charismatic figure, Thurman had that effect on people.
His friend from those days stretching until the 1970s, Benjamin Mays taught psychology at Morehouse. Mays remembered the young student Thurman showing signs of possessing “more mysticism in his religion than the average person, so much so that I am inclined to think that he was considered queer by some of the students and professors. I believe he did not have the desire for constant city social contacts as most of the students had.” Mays, Thurman later reflected, had been educated in the North but knew southern life well; “he knew what distortions segregation had produced in most of us. But he had also tasted the joy of real possibilities beyond the Southern way of life, and when he spoke to us about such things we envisioned possibilities for ourselves beyond the limited boundaries of self-service, segregation, and the Southern style of social life.”
Mays the professor and Thurman the student gravitated toward each other at Morehouse and shared the lifelong bond of two black men, raised in poverty in South Carolina (Mays) and Florida (Thurman), who became intellects and educators of great distinction. With Mays and others as models, Thurman honed his teaching skills as a professor at Morehouse and Spelman. He became one of the most popular teachers at these flagship southern black universities; students felt they could discuss their intimate problems with him. Thurman always was as much counselor and personal mentor as professor.
Some of Thurman’s earliest oratorical efforts from his days as a Morehouse undergraduate contain seeds of thoughts that he would develop for years, even decades, to come. In “Our Challenge,” given at the annual Emancipation Celebration (held conjointly by Morehouse and Spelman), and later published in a joint Morehouse-Spelman literary publication, Thurman speculated on what progress African Americans had made but also on how far they still had to go. “We have become intoxicated with our own progress,” he said. “We have fallen asleep, now we are dreaming, yes, in a nightmare.” And during this slumber, hostile forces were shaping the African American future, with the result that “although our chains have been loosed, our minds have been more securely bound.” The problem was, the “psychic slavery” of the race was so profound that “though we are victims, we do not realize it.” Thurman continued with some florid “uplift”-style prose, urging his fellows to work harder and do better, to bring higher ideals to the black masses and thus soar “above the sordid ruins of our hinderances [sic] and set ourselves free.” Within just a few years, Thurman had learned to channel his prose more precisely; it was still sonorous but less sophomoric.
Thurman later remembered himself as a shy and awkward youngster with few friends. But Morehouse had precisely the effect its president and leaders intended it to have—it transformed him into an intellectually and socially ambitious young man, serious but not pompous, well liked and, more than that, well respected. His fellow students already saw him as a mystic, given to flights of contemplation that they admired but were also baffled by. They developed a good-humored but respectful attitude toward the young man who often seemed to be looking toward some greater spiritual experience.
Yet the young mystic was also ceaselessly active. As the Morehouse student representative to the YMCA, Thurman interacted with the generation that would prepare the way for the civil rights movement. And he was regularly corresponding even with such a distant and authoritarian figure as John Hope, to the point of baring his soul a bit about the difficulties and challenges he had experienced. “I thought that my Sophomore year was pregnant with experiences sufficiently exacting to fit me for many of the battles of my early years. But I find that they were but the calm before the storm through which I am now passing,” he wrote to Hope in the summer of 1921.
Hope responded to him that the burdens of life had to be borne, for they shaped and tested a man. But in words unusually perceptive for the austerely severe Hope, he told the young Thurman that he was “mentally and spiritually endowed to feel things very keenly, and you will no doubt always have burdens and sorrows, if not your own somebody else’s, but you must develop good cheer and great hopefulness as it is going to be your business in life to impart inspiration and to bring relief.” Later, as well, during his senior year, Thurman accompanied Hope to an interracial meeting at a local YMCA branch, with some black educational leaders and a handful of white liberals. The black concert singer Roland Hayes was to perform, and one white man announced proudly that the segregated seating had been changed so that it would be divided vertically, with the center aisle as the demarcation line in the main area and balcony. Thurman was disgusted at the “legerdemain” and walked out. Hope followed him and told him, by Thurman’s account, “I know how you feel about what is going on in there, but you must remember that these are the best and most liberal men in the entire South. We must work with them, There is no one else. Remember.” Thurman remembered the lesson; it “helped me grow in understanding,” he said.
Thurman’s affiliation with the YMCA elevated him into other groups and opportunities, including the young Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). The American branch was less than ten years old at the time and generally shared a pacifist, anti-imperialist ideal. In FOR, Thurman later wrote, he found “a place to stand in my own spirit”; and just as important, through his work with whites in FOR, especially George “Shorty” Collins, he discovered “the vast possibilities of reconciliation” between peoples of different backgrounds. Thurman’s life and message fundamentally involved exploring these vast possibilities. His heart yearned for reconciliation, even as his daily experience confirmed the relentless assault on the dignity of African Americans. The gulf between those two would define his career as a thinker and philosopher devoted to unity and as an important religious critic who would attack the social disease of segregation and oppression.
Upon completing his term at Morehouse, Thurman had a number of opportunities. John Hope thought he could perhaps teach economics at Morehouse after having his degree “validated” at the University of Chicago. (“Validating” a degree at a predominantly white institution was a common practice for African American students, who often did so before returning to black colleges to teach.) Churches were calling him to preach, and there was also the possibility of pursuing a PhD. But Thurman turned down these opportunities; in his initial letter to Mordecai Johnson, he expressed the desire to be a minister of the gospel. Theological training still drew him. And for a young man deeply immersed in the Baptist tradition, there could few better places to go than to Rochester Theological Seminary. Even more so for a young theologian already interested in modernist thought and immersed in the social problems of the day. The home of important theological scholars as well as social gospelers from the recent past such as Walter Rauschenbusch, Rochester cemented and furthered the intellectual directions Thurman already was taking. And Thurman was also following in the footsteps of his first mentor, and later colleague and boss, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, who had studied under Rauschenbusch.
In the fall of 1923, Thurman came to a northern institution where there was, in effect (according to his own recollection), an unofficial admissions quota of two black students per year, and those students were not to live with white students. Thurman, however, broke such barriers his entire life. Already a democratic socialist in political thought and a member of an international pacifist organization (FOR), he was not likely to follow some petty dormitory rules about racial separation. Soon, Thurman was a roommate with two white students and a friend to many others. Thurman’s room soon became a sort of intellectual salon, as a classmate later remembered, where Thurman led devotionals and Bible studies, interpreted the Scriptures for his colleagues, and led them in prayer. “In one of these sessions,” the classmate remembered, “I had the feeling that it was not Howard Thurman, but Jesus Christ, so much did his thinking emulate that of the master. I have never had another experience like that.”
As at Morehouse, he pursued a rigorous academic curriculum even while speaking and preaching in the area. He participated actively in the YMCA and FOR, published articles in the school newspaper, and immersed himself in the life of the local area. For the first time ever, he was a “minority,” living in a white world and realizing the extent to which his own personal “ethical awareness” had been bounded and constrained by the psychic barriers of segregation. He would never be the same for it.
The budding young ministerial candidates took courses such as “Jewish Life and Thought” and “Psychology of Religion” from professors well known to be theological liberals. Meanwhile, Thurman preached at churches around the area. He spoke to the Dewey Avenue Union Church of Rochester, for example, on the topic “The Faith of the American Negro.” On other occasions, local chapters of the Ku Klux Klan threatened churches that hosted him, but Thurman simply continued with his plans. He also officially represented the seminary at the Quadrennial Conference of the Student Volunteer Movement, held in 1924 in Indianapolis.
While at Rochester, Thurman spent his summers on the staff of the First Baptist Church of Roanoke, Virginia, where the pastor, Arthur L. James, mentored the young, aspiring minister. The two had a long relationship, dating from James’s time as the pastor of Thurman’s home church in Daytona; Thurman called him “Cousin Arthur.” The church published a sort of monthly newsletter, one of the earliest black publications in Roanoke, titled the Roanoke Church News; James ran the paper for the entire term of his pastorate, from 1919 to 1957. Thurman published articles in the paper periodically, including one titled “The Sphere of the Church’s Responsibility in Social Reconstruction,” in July 1924. In it, Thurman earnestly preached an internationalist social gospel that he had picked up from his years of study and work in the YMCA as well as from the general currents of liberalism from that era. The victors’ peace achieved at Versailles, he said, would mean nothing if social institutions were not fundamentally transformed. The institutions that had produced the disaster of the war could not win a just peace. “The conditions resulting from the world war are but a part of the great task of social reconstruction. Our whole social order is shot through with many inherently vicious principles working themselves out in a thousand human ills.” What was the role of the church in this situation? Church leaders hardly yet knew what that was. Some still insisted just on saving individual souls—“to give men a sample bliss capsule so as to fire their souls with earnest zeal for the life to come.” They insisted that Christian churches had nothing to do with “economic ills, political corruption and social injustice.” They could not see the role of the church in the reconstruction of this world.
Thurman reinforced this view with a piece for Student Challenge in 1925, where he noted that Christianity had been kept in an airtight container, such that “scarcely a drop of it has been allowed to give strength and vigor to the thirsty, dying plants of Brotherliness in the garden of every day living.” Much of the blame for that could be directed at ministers: “The people in the pew have been given a comfortable, one-sided gospel by those who stand in the shoes of prophets but who utter the soft, satisfying words of the Status Quo.” The minister was not just there to encourage and comfort but also to “serve as the gad-fly to a slothful, thoughtless, sin-bespattered generation.” In particular, the minister should exalt the “sacredness of human personality.”
Thurman drew from personal experience. He pointed to the revolutionary potential of the gospel in America’s racist culture. Thurman asked, Who would dare preach the true gospel in such a place—that what you did to the “least of them, you did it to me”? “Do those words mean that every time a negro is lynched and burned God is lynched and burned? Do they mean that God is held as a peon in certain parts of this land of ‘Liberty’? Do they mean that God is discriminated against, segregated and packed in Jim Crow cars?” Thurman listed an abundance of opportunities for ministers—when they spoke to local groups or to legislators, when they had city council persons as church members, when they delivered talks on religious education and could point to real community issues instead of dwelling “on glittering generalities about loving all men.” Such were the opportunities for ministers, although few took them. And thus, “as a general thing … Jesus is still unknown in this land that is covered with churches erected in his honor—absente Christo.”
Thurman kept busy as well with plans for the ministry both by preaching locally and by serving churches during the summer. He received his official ordination in August of 1925 from a former mentor of his at Morehouse, Samuel Owen. Thurman forged his own path in the ordination ceremony, as he did in most things. The examiners at the First Baptist Church in Roanoke quizzed the young, budding modernist warily over a period of four hours, with the questions “running the gamut of religious doctrine within the scope of Virginia Baptist orthodoxy.” One examiner later said he hoped one day God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit “may see fit to meet in your heart.” Thurman read them a statement of faith that he crafted, and he initially sought to avoid a traditional laying on of hands. Finally he received it, and it turned out to be a moment of transcendent significance. He later wrote that whenever “it seems that I am deserted by the Voice that called me forth, I know that if I can find my way back to that moment, the clouds will lift and the path before me will once again be clear and beckoning.” Always alive to religious experience in any venue he could find it, Thurman reveled in it even though it came (literally) at the hands of elders of a tradition he already had escaped.
Thurman bounced back and forth between his black Baptist southern world and the advanced theological training he was receiving in Rochester. Later during his time there he began studying with the well-known theologian George Cross, a person who, Thurman later said, “had a greater influence on my life than any other person who ever lived. Everything about me was alive when I came into his presence.” In addition to the three classes he took with Cross, they also met privately on Saturdays. The young Thurman tried out his own ideas, only to discover that Cross could take his arguments “down to ash.” Thurman’s other work at Rochester included a close study of John Dewey; one surviving school paper, significant portions of which are plagiarized from sources readily traceable (an academic sin he shared with Martin Luther King, as both were given to unacknowledged borrowing from secondary sources in papers submitted during their seminary training), suggests Thurman’s continued effort to balance the rational approach to working out philosophical problems with the acknowledgment of the role of intuition and flashes of inspiration on doing so. These two would form the basis of much of his future work and theological explanations.
Thurman embraced the kind of modernist thought about the Bible he was taught at Rochester. His papers there show he was enthusiastic about historicizing subjects that had been left to the supernatural. For example, he placed the virgin birth (incorrectly, as it turns out) within the context of “the failure or inability of primitive man” to recognize the role of human male-female copulation in creating life. He went through a history of men who were considered gods, ranging from ancient Greek and Egyptian myths to the Buddha and stories that arose from the courtiers of Genghis Khan giving him the title “Son of God.” “Familiar!” Thurman commented of this history, because effectively it paralleled the history of Jesus. “From these illustrations and many others, we see how widely disseminated and persistent has been this man-God legend. It remained for the Gnostic philosophers and early theologians to repeat and reapply an old myth to the interpretation of the matchless life of Jesus of Nazareth.” He concluded with a note that he simply sought to “trace the permanent primitive element” in the doctrine of the virgin birth as it had come to be applied to Jesus, one that “has its roots back in the dim shadows of a misty antiquity.” With this training fully in hand, it was little wonder that, on his first examination for ordination, the elders of a church queried him warily about his beliefs. Within a few years of graduating from Florida Baptist Academy, he developed into a Baptist modernist who had little patience with simply repeating the myths of the ancient worlds as if they were literal truths for the present.
Thurman’s longest and most elaborate surviving work from his training at Rochester was a paper, also plagiarized in some paragraphs, titled “Can It Be Truly Said That the Existence of a Supreme Spirit Is a Scientific Hypothesis?” It comes from his work with George Cross at Rochester, and also from summer courses he took at Columbia University while still a student at Morehouse in 1922. In this work, presaging much of his future thought, Thurman considers what might be the scientific basis for religious thought, and how personal experience and rationally derived knowledge could point to the same conclusions. In the paper, Thurman drew fairly extensively from various texts from the era, including from Laurence Buermeyer et al., An Introduction to Reflective Thinking, which he had studied at Columbia in 1922. Another work, Religious Certitude in an Age of Science, provided Thurman with conceptual ideas and, in places, exact wording. Thurman explains at length what exactly constitutes a scientific hypothesis and then considers that even the scientist engages mechanisms of faith, “from a confidence in the general trustworthiness of the sense perceptions to the dependableness and capability of the external world to be interpreted.” But the scientific man dealt only with “external phenomena and modes of behavior,” while “the affirmations of the man of religion deal not only with the objects but the subjects of experience.” The supposition of the existence of a Supreme Spirit invoked scientific knowledge but also involved “a much larger portion of nature and human nature in its sweep and it touches a wider environment.” Thurman concludes his work with deeply personal reflections, speaking of his consciousness that “I make contact with SOMEBODY and I know that I am not alone. Slowly there is taking place in my life a transformation which is more in keeping with the highest things that I keep and feel.” He could thus say not only “I believe” but also “I know.”
In this paper, Thurman broached ideas he would return to in subsequent decades. As a mystic and naturalist, Thurman loved science, particularly biology, and eagerly sought out scientific explanations. And he was keen to find empirical explanations of religious experience. At the same time, he understood that religious experience transcended science, and that intuitively derived spiritual understanding provided a kind of knowledge outside the bounds of science.
Thurman concluded his work at Rochester with a bachelor of divinity thesis titled “The Basis of Sex Morality,” one of his many efforts during that time to apply a modernist and historicized version of Christianity to contemporary social problems. This work is very unusual in that Thurman in his career rarely addressed issues of sex and gender, and nowhere else so explicitly as he did here. The thesis surveys a long history of sex prohibitions from ancient societies to the present, noting the ancient roots of myths about chastity and purity. Thurman continued from there to “the present orthodox attitude,” with its emphasis on the protection of virginity among women. Thurman recounted the “social sanctions” that enforced chastity, including an emphasis on the woman as a dependent, and as a dependent, therefore an “inferior.” Restrictions of dress and behavior arose to enforce the sanctions as well. Religious sanctions further reinforced them: “the sinfulness of everything having to do with sex is the very essence of orthodox religious teaching along this line.” A group of women Thurman had interviewed at an earlier conference told him they had been taught that it was “evil even to discuss sex under any condition and the ‘marriage relation was a concession made to the flesh.’” The thesis also argues for the connection between prohibitions on premarital sex and laws against miscegenation, a line of thinking advanced for his day.
Ultimately, the sanctions enforcing chastity were “external”; they were “not a part of the inherent respect for personality which one individual should hold for the other. The appeal has not been made to an inner response of the individuals but to a medley of external prohibitions and superstitions. It is built upon a false conception of sex and upon a false conception of woman.” Revolt against the artificial prohibitions was inevitable, and healthy, for the prohibitions toward premarital unchastity simply signaled the domination of men over women. Revolt against this was a part of the freedom struggle for women, which paralleled the “general wave of democracy that has swept across the world.”
Thurman wrote in his thesis about his long conversations with hundreds of college-aged men and women who could not understand the reasoning behind the old restrictions. They were asking why love itself was not a “sufficient ground for sexual intimacy.” Thurman quoted authorities who offered academic and abstract explanations for these prohibitions, but his prose wakened when he recognized “the great gulf between the religion of the ‘old Folks’ and the religion of the youth.” Students learned science, civics, geography, and history at school, while in Sunday school they were taught the old myths. The result was a tendency to rebel and simply throw overboard the antiquated teachings, and thus came the “undermining of the sanction of religion for conduct.” The old attitudes toward premarital sex, based on now untenable external authorities, had produced a reaction and rejection, based in part on newfound freedom for women and a more general revolt against external authority. What, then, would be the basis for a new sexual morality?
Here Thurman spoke not just to the topic of his thesis but more generally to his philosophical bent to Personalism. The basis for sex morality came from the individual, and “the authority for the conduct of the individual must be within, if such conduct is to be moral…. Whatever sanctions society may evolve must be verified by the individual before conduct.” For Thurman, as always, the key was connecting the individual and the social; there should be no conflict between the interests of the two: “If a normal individual has to stretch himself out of shape in order to be proper and acceptable to society, then the standards of society are such that the individual becomes immoral in forming to them.” Thurman concluded, finally, that in a properly loving relationship, “the sexual act becomes the highest compliment that the two individuals of different sex can pay to each other”; in any other kind of relation, it would be a “violation.” The key was the expression of flesh and spirit in tandem. On this latter point, Thurman gradually developed a philosophy that would permeate his preaching and writing. The “good life,” formerly defined by Christianity in a way that accorded with ancient myths and norms, had to be redefined. Original sin had dominated this conception, and within that conception human nature could only be seen as “impure, bad, lustful in the foul sense.” Flesh was evil. A healthier, modern interpretation saw the flesh as “the great vehicle whereby the Spirit expresses itself. The good life is the life in which there is perfect harmony, perfect coordination, unity.”
Thurman’s emphasis on the unity of life defined his career and is evident from the earliest years of his ministry. In 1927, he presented his address “Finding God” to the National Student Conference of the YMCA and YWCA in Wisconsin. Since God is the source of life, he pronounced, out of God comes an “underlying unity” for all. Life is about a “quest for fulfillment” that in reality is a quest for God. And what comes out of that “is an essential kinship of all the creations of all the people in the world, and if that kinship is true, is genuine, then I can never be the kind of person I ought to be until everybody else is the kind of person that everyone else ought to be.”
Meanwhile, Thurman’s energies were at their height. Sometimes so was his ire at the limitations of the student movements in which he had been so actively involved. Writing to Mordecai Wyatt Johnson sometime later, he wondered why all these conferences and grand meetings had produced so little actual result. He had been reading about quackery, nostrums, and frauds rampant in American society, and saw his task more than ever as releasing “to the full our greatest spiritual powers, that there may be such a grand swell of spiritual [energy] that existing systems will be upset from sheer dynamic.” His emerging ideas about nonviolence were evident here, as in later years he used similar language to talk about disturbing the “normal” flow of events.
Thurman’s excursions into the academic world of biblical scholarship for his Rochester classes hardly meant he had escaped the world of being a black man in white America. He was reminded of it every day, from the makeup of the seminary, from the interest shown by New Yorkers for his talks on race and religion, and from the hostile interest the New York branch of the Ku Klux Klan took in his doings. In 1924 he published some of his earliest reflections meant for a wider audience. In “College and Color,” in the magazine Student Challenge, he urged fellow students to cultivate a “sympathetic understanding” that was not patronizing or sentimental; by the phrase he simply meant “an attitude which says that a man of another race is essentially myself, and that I feel toward him fundamentally as if he were myself. His needs and cravings and the drives which lie behind his actions are similar to mine in their essentials.”
Thurman carried this message with him the rest of his days. He did so even when, as was most often the case later in life, he turned down offers specifically to speak on race issues, preferring to focus on what his teacher George Cross referred to as the “timeless issues of the human spirit.” Thurman asked the students to consider what would go through the minds of the black students at the universities when they were segregated in seating at the local theater, or when crowds of students laughed at racist jokes from a speaker. Black students, he continued (and the words ring true for much contemporary writing), encountered a bewildering variety of responses from their fellows, from a sense of paternalistic protection of unfortunates, to a kind of false sense of fairness from those who would say, “I have no prejudice”—“as if mere words meant much,” Thurman pointedly commented—to outright hostility. At least the latter group had the advantage of lacking any hypocrisy; their racism was unadulterated. The “steady, unswerving hand of tradition and custom” governed and shaped all these attitudes—“it is simply a question of what has been and what the particular environment will endorse.” But, in fact, any attitude that “strangles personality and inhibits its highest growth and development is wrong. For a Christian believer to have that kind of attitude is a crime against God.”
Given the dismal situation on most college campuses, what could be expected of social life more generally? What could be expected of “the great masses who never come under the stimulating influences of collegiate life? If we do not find tolerance in the colleges and universities, where liberal thoughts and democratic ideals are supposed to be fostered, where shall we go?” Indeed, “What a hard time Jesus of Nazareth would have if he matriculated at one of our colleges today!” Thurman asked the students to consider one simple course of action: “Think of the other fellow as essentially yourself and feel towards him fundamentally as if he were yourself.” This principle grew into one of Thurman’s fundamental concepts; he developed it into a fuller philosophy of human personality as sacred.
In 1925, still at Rochester, Thurman encountered the work of the South African writer Olive Schreiner. It remains one of the great curiosities of Thurman’s life that a South African writer who was occasionally given to racial epithets in her writing should have exercised such an influence, but she did. Some scholars have pointed out that Schreiner’s influence came not so much from generating new ideas for Thurman as from clarifying and supporting ideas that Thurman in effect already had. Surely this was true of Schreiner’s sense of the mystical in nature, something for which Thurman needed little encouragement. It was also true in Schreiner’s thought about the unity of life as well as the way in which individuals could fundamentally affect the fate of all humanity. Schreiner’s influence on Thurman was great enough that he named his daughter Olive after her. Thurman quoted Schreiner for decades afterward in sermons, speeches, poems, and prayers. Something in Schreiner’s unusual combination of traits simply touched a deep chord in Thurman and never stopped affecting him. Later in his life, Thurman put together an edited volume of Schreiner’s writings, titled A Track to the Water: The Olive Schreiner Reader. In a lengthy and moving introduction to that volume, he discusses Schreiner’s limitations as a “universalist in outlook” but at the same time “a member of the exploiting and colonizing community,” and a feminist and pacifist who could not extend full humanity to Africans. And yet, Schreiner gave Thurman one of his earliest languages to understand the “instinctual sense of the unity of all of life.” On reflecting upon his own encounters with nature as a boy, Thurman realized that Schreiner’s work allowed him to “make the experience itself an object of thought. Thus it became possible for me to move from primary experience, to conceptualizing that experience, to a vision inclusive of all of life. The resulting creative synthesis was to me religious rather than metaphysical.”
She also influenced Thurman’s thinking on sexuality and gender relations. It was not a topic he addressed often, but he did so in his seminary work “The Basis of Sex Morality,” which was in effect a sort of modernist view of healthy sexual relations between men and women. When people achieved “spiritual unity” in sex, it mattered little whether it was premarital sex. Thurman shrugged off conventional shibboleths about sex, just as he was doing in theology.
In 1926 Thurman graduated as the valedictorian (again) at Rochester, in a class of twenty-nine men. He received the bachelor of divinity degree (something not very common, which not even Mordecai Wyatt Johnson had achieved at the time of his graduation), which mandated the completion of a thesis during his term in school. Before moving on from Rochester, Thurman had a talk with his primary mentor, George Cross, and Cross’s words, both encouraging and admonitory, stayed on Thurman’s mind for decades to come. Acknowledging that he, Cross, was a white man who could not know what it was to be a Negro, he nonetheless urged Thurman to “give yourself to the timeless issues of the human spirit” instead of focusing his efforts on social questions of a “transitory nature.” It would be a waste if Thurman simply devoted his attention toward the race problem or put his energies fully at the “disposal of the struggle of your people for full citizenship.” Patronizing through they were, Cross’s words hit at a fundamental division in Thurman’s life and thought.
Thurman justifiably was dismayed at Cross’s lack of understanding and empathy. Cross simply could not see, for example, that “a man and his black skin must ‘face the timeless issues of the human spirit’ together.” In some ways, Thurman’s lifework was all about exactly that. In other ways, though, Thurman put into practice Cross’s advice at various points in his life, often rejecting speaking invitations that asked him specifically to represent the race in some capacity or another or to explain how “the Negro” viewed one issue or another. Such requests were equally patronizing, he felt, precisely because they did not ask him to speak from his training as someone with a broad exposure to many currents of spiritual thought, past and present. In other words, Thurman really did want to—and did—speak to timeless issues of the human spirit. Sometimes he did so (particularly later in his life) to the point of being bafflingly abstract and ethereal. In his best work, though, Thurman combined the tough realities of living with a black skin in America with the broader spiritual truths he gleaned from his deep study in myriad religious traditions. His most important work married the lived experience of people with grand truths of religious encounters.
Meanwhile, in 1926 Thurman was planning his own marriage to Katie Kelley, a graduate of Spelman and of a social work program at the University of Chicago, who had moved back to Atlanta in 1921 and worked closely with Lugenia Burns Hope, the wife of Morehouse president John Hope, in combating tuberculosis. Devastatingly for Thurman, Kelley eventually died of the very disease she had committed her life to defeat. In 1926, before the tragedy, Kelley was an accomplished young woman who seemed the perfect match for Thurman as he took his post at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio (he also hoped to continue his academic studies at Oberlin College).
From early in his pastoral career, Thurman moved his congregation at Oberlin in experimental and modernist directions, sometimes to the dismay of his own parishioners. Thurman experimented with new forms of thought, worship, and expression that he would bring to his leadership of the chapels at Howard and Boston University, and later to his nine years leading the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco. He was intent on liberating the inner spirit, to express the “meaning of the experience of our common quest and journey”; he was much less concerned with theological fidelity to any one particular tradition. And at Oberlin, he discovered as well some of the possibilities of interracial and intercultural fellowship. The church attracted various members of the Oberlin community, including a local Chinese-born man. Of Thurman’s services, he said, “When I close my eyes and listen to my spirit I am in a Buddhist temple experiencing the renewing of my own spirit.” For Thurman, this was early evidence that “the barriers were crumbling,” and that he was “breaking new ground,” even though it would take him years before he fully understood the results of this spiritual breakthrough.
At the same time, he continued his higher academic studies at the Oberlin School of Theology and carefully considered whether he should pursue a PhD. Eventually he determined that he was more interested in nourishing the “inner regions of my spirit” than in pursuing the highest academic degree. Thurman’s thoughts and ideas were turning inward. He described himself as undergoing “a veritable upheaval in my thinking.”
In these years, Thurman found his mature voice. He moved away from the YMCA pieties of his younger years and the formalism of his academic work. He developed a decidedly critical edge, something that fed into some of his more explicitly political essays during the 1930s and 1940s. That kind of work always was unusual for him. But in his correspondence and speeches in this era, he developed a blistering critique of American materialism and of the impotence of the churches in the face of it. “We are clothed and fed by a vast system built upon deceit and adulteration,” he wrote to Mordecai Wyatt Johnson. It would be the job of religious institutions, properly conceived, to release “such a grand swell of spiritual energy that existing systems will be upset.” He also tellingly understood the role of black religious leadership to be cultivating a sense of “ethical meaning” such that the mere building of institutions would not suffocate the spirit of Jesus.
In “Higher Education and Religion,” written in 1927 for the Home Mission College Review, Thurman expressed some of his earliest analyses of the legacies (both positive and negative) of African American religion, as well as the necessity of establishing “some sort of helpful relationship between young minds and religion”—exactly what he had written about in a more formal academic way for his bachelor’s thesis at Rochester. “We have as our heritage to-day a religion which is pretty largely apocalyptic,” he began, with a “procession of early Negro preachers [who] found themselves leading their hosts through a wilderness of suffering, oppression, and cruelty.” Somehow, with an intuitive insight, those “prophets of patience turned their attention to the hope beyond this world and found great refuge” in the Bible, something Thurman thought to be “apocalypticism at its best. God is the Real, the present world can give no peace.” Such a dire view, however, had placed a “barrier between life and religion,” and “the manifestations of religion under such circumstances tend to be more theological than ethical.” Here, Thurman repeated a common critique made of African American churches, and religion more generally: it had produced a powerfully affective theology but had neglected certain ethical issues of everyday life. But Thurman found these contributions of “apocalyptic faith” the most important: first, this faith “made for the development of creative and vicarious imagination under the aegis of religious symbolism,” and second, “under the powerful influence of religious zeal and emotion it made bearable an otherwise unbearable series of experiences without attempting to justify them.”
For Thurman, the conflict between modern education and older myths could prove dangerous; the resulting consciousness could result in “profound bitterness and cynicism because of the injustice of the present order,” with “little left of the apocalyptic hope to comfort and to bless.” This left students vulnerable to a “religion of materialism.” To those who preached a religion of economic uplift and power to African Americans, Thurman replied that such a philosophy could reproduce the same problems it was designed to solve. Ultimately, those who could save the civilization would be “those who have learned to live so as to reveal the superiority of the human spirit to the domination of things…. But we are rapidly forgetting it as we embrace the religion of materialism, a religion that has already made you drunk with power and might.” In the great debate from the earlier twentieth century between advocates of liberal arts education and practical training, Thurman definitively sided with the former.
Likewise, in “The Task of the Negro Ministry,” from 1928, Thurman presented his vision of African American religion as exalting not economic power but a spiritual insight into deeper things. The slave was not, and could not be, entrapped by the “tyranny of things,” for such things were denied to him or her. And thus the Negro minister of the present day, learning from this history, could see that “where the highest premium is put upon the possession of things, human life is relatively cheapened. And where life is cheap, ideals languish and the souls of men slowly die.” Thurman here also explored an idea that long attracted him, that religion operated more by “contagion” than by organization. As he said of the religion of Jesus, “we must put a vast faith in the contagion in the Spirit of Jesus rather than in the building of organizations to perpetuate his Spirit.” Black churches themselves could fall prey to this, the same disease that had consumed white church organizations. That would be a bitter irony given that black churches historically had been built with the sweat of lowly laborers who brought their hard-earned small coins, and for that reason had a “sense of possession” of their churches. The dynamic idea of African American religion inevitably took institutional forms after emancipation, and to some degree that was good and necessary. But “it is also true that just as a dynamic idea is conserved in some form of organization, it is also destroyed by the very organization that preserved it. Hence the paradox: The power that makes it breaks it.” Most important, the “Spirit of Jesus grows by contagion and not by organization…. In the final analysis a man’s life is changed by contact with another life.”
Thurman spent much of the next twenty years revisiting the topic of the spirituals, which were then being rehabilitated and understood as great American literature, initially by W. E. B. Du Bois and then by writers such as James Weldon Johnson and others from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Thurman later wrote that he addressed “a generation which tended to be ashamed of the Spirituals, or who joined in the degrading and prostituting of the songs as a part of conventional minstrelsy and naïve amusement exploited and capitalized by white entertainers.” In these early lectures, delivered at the chapel of Spelman College in October of 1928, Thurman worked out his ideas about the meaning of the spirituals. The germ of the ideas here, although more overtly theological and Christian than in later iterations, carried him forward for much of his future work. The “religious message” of the songs, he thought, had been forgotten or else “lost in the beauty of the melodies for which they are distinguished.” He began with “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” a song he thought expressed the idea that no situation was “so depressing, so devoid of hope, that the human spirit cannot throw itself into a realm in which these conditions do not exist, and live in that realm despite all the hell about them.” Through such songs, enslaved people said that their circumstances could not crush them, that they could live in a purer world amidst the hell among them.
The spiritual “Heab’n, Heab’n,” with its famous lines “I got a shoes, you got shoes, All o’ God’s chillum got a shoes,” and parallel lines of “I got a crown” and “I got a robe,” suggested that the true test of the religion of Jesus was “made in the intimate, primary face to face relationships of people who live together day in and day out.” For if the religion of Jesus could not “purify human relations,” then it was meaningless. The spiritual also suggested the difficulty of maintaining normal human relations of honesty in situations of radical inequality, which “robs people of the ability to be straightforward, honest, courageous” and “[turns] everyone in such societies into ‘monumental hypocrites.’”
Other spirituals explored the dilemma of human suffering, a theological problem acutely felt among slaves. Thurman used them to explore his own answer to the question of why human suffering existed. He knew that “there is something in the human spirit—to me, it is God—which makes it possible for the most tragic experience to be transformed into that which is sacred and beautiful and blessed.” Thurman’s lectures on the spirituals delivered at Spelman bore fruit later in his published works on the subject. In these lectures, Thurman demonstrated a keen sensitivity to the universal messages of hope contained within the particular form of Negro spirituals. Thurman resisted any overt politicization of the songs, seeing them more as vehicles of spiritual expression than as direct commentary on what should be done in the here and now. For him, the spirituals exalted human personality over oppressive conditions designed to crush the human spirit.
In these same years, Thurman also grappled with ideas of what nonviolence could mean in American society. Thurman’s most important work of that era, published originally as “Peace Tactics and a Racial Minority” and then in expanded form as “‘Relaxation’ and Racial Conflict,” marked his debut as a thinker of considerable influence on American social movements. Thurman centrally injected race into questions of pacifism and nonviolence, a major jump for many early proponents who held more generically philosophical ideas of pacifism. For Thurman, the daily violence directed at African Americans exemplified the damages wrought by violence more generally. Thus, addressing racial oppression would have to be central to American pacifism. Writing for readers of the religious Left and pacifists, he pointed out from the beginning that a kind of pacifism that ignored racial inequality in American society “becomes a mere quietus to be put into the hands of the minority to keep them peaceful and controllable.” Part of that involved empowering a small minority of the minority, giving them enough privileges to allow them to identify with the majority and thus look down on the rest of their class. In general, it was all too possible to “hate people so bitterly that one becomes like them. The man who attends to evil that he may not fall heir to it becomes like it.” At the same time, the Negro lived in a world where everything spoke to the will of the majority; “everything that he possesses tends to lose its significance if it is not validated by those who are in control.”
What did this mean for pacifism in America? Thurman concluded: “First, it means that white people who make up the dominant majority in American life must relax their will to dominate and control the Negro minority. Second, Negroes must develop a minority technique, which I choose to call a technique of relaxation, sufficiently operative in group life to make for vast creativity, with no corresponding loss in self-respect.” On the side of the majority, the will to dominate came “utilizing all of the machinery at its disposal to that end. Nothing is spared: the press, including the comic sheet and the highbrow journals; the church, including the pulpit; much that goes by the name of charity and many of the materials of religious education; and for the most part, the technique and the philosophy of education.” Thurman here recounted again his grandmother’s stories about plantation life, about how every day was an education in “where she fitted into the scheme of things … that she was a slave and that the will of the mistress must be the desire of her heart.” It may seem that relinquishing this will to control, the will to dominate, would be difficult, but in fact it could be just the opposite: “When the will to dominate and control is relaxed, then the way is clear for spontaneous self-giving, for sharing all gratuitously. This new spirit finds its direction in the will to love.” And through that the “relaxation of the will to control and to dominate becomes something very positive and dynamic.”
Thurman was addressing specifically educated African Americans, those who lived in the kind of veil described by Du Bois, with a double consciousness, and as a result with some bitterness toward whites and possibly contempt for those of their own group who were beneath them. The key was developing the ability to get away from the “class of minority and majority sufficiently to interpret the relationship between them in the light of a will to share and a will to love.” Thurman concluded: “all our attempts to bring about brotherhood, sympathetic understanding, and goodwill are dashed to pieces against an adamant wall. On the one side it is labelled: The Will to Control and Dominate. On the other it is labelled: The Will to Hate the Man Who Tries to Dominate and Crush Me. When there is relaxation, then the way is clear for the operation of the will to share joyfully in the common life—the will to love healingly and creatively.” Thurman explored this insight in numerous forms over the next decades.
By the late 1920s, Thurman had developed a national reputation as a speaker and thinker, and he received job offers of prestigious black pulpits and academic positions appropriate to his stature. The First Baptist Church of Charleston, West Virginia, tried to recruit him to replace Mordecai Wyatt Johnson in that prestigious pulpit. Various black universities sought him to be a chaplain. But Thurman and Katie Kelley Thurman needed to be in a place where Katie’s health could best be protected, and that was back in Atlanta, where she spent considerable time at the McIvar Training Hospital on the campus of one of her alma maters, Spelman College. Thurman took a position as professor of philosophy and religion, teaching both at Morehouse and at Spelman. During his time there, and in spite of Katie’s failing health, Thurman wrote and delivered his lecture series on the spirituals. During this time, as well, as he taught philosophy and religion at Morehouse and courses on biblical literature at Spelman, he developed his particular modes of classroom teaching, which were less concerned with imparting knowledge and more consumed with leading students through deep explorations of both the course material and their dreams and visions for their lives. He developed personal relationships with students as well through his cooking, an avocation he delighted in. He enjoyed bringing students over on a Saturday, serving them his special roasted peanuts or homemade sherbet, and exploring with them questions both philosophical and practical. Over the subsequent decades, Thurman exercised a profound influence over his students. He honed his own personally quiet but charismatic style as a young professor in the late 1920s. At the same time, he also clashed with the white president of Spelman, Florence Read, a foretaste of his frequent battles with academic administrators (black and white) in the years to come. As Thurman saw it, Read patronized students and faculty alike, arranging their schedules and activities to her own liking. He also saw that Spelman students “lacked models for themselves as black women.” In later years, Thurman spoke kindly of Read (and vice versa), but in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the paternalistic white administration of African American colleges in general, and Spelman in particular, left him seething.
But the central event of his younger intellectual life came in the first half of 1929. Using funding provided by the National Council of Religion in Higher Education, he embarked on a six-month plan of study with Rufus Jones, a leading Quaker thinker and author who taught at Haverford College. Jones’s book Finding the Trail of Life had captivated Thurman when he stumbled on it at a bookstore while a minister at Oberlin. He read the book entirely in one sitting and immediately “knew that if that man were alive, I wanted to study with him.”
It’s easy to see what captivated the young minister. Jones wrote of how “mystical experience is much more common than is usually supposed” among children, which certainly fit Thurman’s experience, and how “they are more sensitive to intimations, flashes, and openings. The invisible impinges on their souls and they feel its reality as something quite natural.” For Jones, natural beauty was the surest evidence of God; “I felt His presence in my world rather than thought out how He could be there. When I was moved with wonder, awe and mystery, I was always reaching out beyond what I saw and touched, and I had a religious feeling even if I did not have a sound theory to go with it.” As he finished his schooling, he felt himself “in the condition of the wild geese whom I had so often watched migrate. They kept a fixed direction but they did not know where their terminus was to be.” Jones concluded the memoir of his youth with this line: “there are no more important epics than those of the inner life.”
Finding the Trail of Life captured Thurman’s spirits, sentiments, and youthful philosophies and experiences perfectly. Along with George Cross, Jones would be Thurman’s closest white intellectual mentor. Thurman came to Haverford for the semester, met with Jones for discussions of readings, and used Jones’s library on mystical thought on religion, a virtual intellectual playground for the intellectually voracious Thurman. This was a “watershed” period, as Thurman later described it, from which “flowed much of the thought and endeavor to which I was to commit the rest of my working life.” Those days reinforced his “deepest religious urges” and “framed in meaning” what he had learned in his studies to date.
Much as he did with Olive Schreiner, Thurman returned repeatedly to the inspiration Jones provided him. Most important, Thurman’s future work carried on Jones’s emphasis on uniting mysticism as an internal practice with social activism and public experience. Jones, he later said, “gave me confidence in the insight that the religion of the inner life could deal with the empirical evidence of man without retreating from the demands of such experience.” Jones’s mysticism was more Christian than Thurman’s, but Thurman took his lessons and applied them broadly in his work over the next decades, always emphasizing that the point of mysticism was not simply internal insight but also involved external action toward ethical ends. “The distinctive feature of Jones’s mysticism,” writes Thurman scholar Walter Fluker, “is that it provides the basis for social transformation.” Thus, in their conversations, they spoke not just of the mystics of the past but also of contemporary conflicts, wars, inequality, and poverty. They apparently did not talk about race, but it was no problem for Thurman to extend those conversations toward his own life experiences. Some years later, in his lecture series “Mysticism and Social Change,” Thurman put much of what he learned in this era from Jones together with his own developing work on the religion of the disinherited. In the process, he created a theological structure and framework of critical social thought that allowed him to connect abstract theology and concrete social realities in a way very few others could.
Thurman returned to Atlanta intellectually enriched. But nothing could prepare him for the loss in December 1930 of Katie, then just thirty years old, with their daughter Olive just two years of age. It is a time of his life nearly unrecoverable for the biographer, as he said or wrote little about it then or afterward. It’s even difficult to tell, really, how close he was to Katie; he evidently later told Sue, his second wife, that Katie really had not been the love of his life. Sue later told him that Katie had assumed a certain mythic place in Thurman’s own well-worn recounting of his life for his fans and disciples, because Katie suffered a “Tennysonian” tragic death, like a figure in a nineteenth-century European novel. Notably, Sue wrote this in the early 1970s, in some notes she quickly scribbled in reviewing a manuscript of a potential Thurman biography. In these notes, Sue expressed some exasperation at her husband for implicitly, and perhaps unconsciously, subsuming Sue as a separate person into accounts of his own life he gave to interviewers and biographers. Mostly, however, the extant materials, and Thurman’s relative silence about the events of those years, are just too sketchy to draw many conclusions about the relationship between Howard and Katie.
Following Katie’s death, together with his close friend of many decades Herbert King, Thurman wandered through England, Scotland, and parts of Europe in early 1931, living at one point on a sheep ranch in Scotland. What little evidence survives from this period and from Thurman’s later reflections suggests that it was a dark period of brooding and recovery. He returned to Atlanta to teach in the fall of 1931 and found himself borne down by the sheer weight of racist oppression in the city. It was also, of course, a dark time in America more generally, as the crushing weight of the Great Depression sank in. Somehow, Thurman found in the time some of the beginning inspirations for what became his most important life’s work in terms of theological writing: understanding Jesus as a member of a “despised circumscribed minority group.” As Thurman later remembered it, “The racial climate was so oppressive and affected us so intimately that analogies between His life as a Jew in a Roman world and our own were obvious.”
Thurman’s darkest time coincided with the beginning of the relationship that would shape his life most fundamentally in the years to come. For some years he had known Sue Elvie Bailey, the daughter of Isaac and Susie Ford Bailey, from Arkansas. Her parents had been well-known educators and political activists in the state, and Sue thus came from a family deeply rooted in the black Baptist tradition. Sue went to Spelman (and spent one year at Morehouse, taking particular courses not available for Spelman women) for high school and college, finishing there in 1921. During that time she roomed with the mother of Martin Luther King Jr. and first met Howard Thurman. In 1922, she moved to Ohio to attend Oberlin College, where she served as cochair of the World Fellowship committee of the YWCA and pursued her interests in arts and music. She also made friendships with white women, which “opened up to me a window where I could look out, and see a much larger world that was opening up. I had the duty to … open windows, and break down walls.” Sue spent the rest of her life (she lived until 1996) doing exactly that.
Sue Bailey Thurman was the first black student to graduate from the school of music there. Her musical talents already had garnered her notice. She ended up on the faculty of music at Hampton Institute, another black Baptist institution, in Virginia. Bailey soon emerged as the leader of a student revolt at Hampton after the Virginia legislature passed a bill ending integrated seating in the public auditorium in the town of Hampton. The administration at Hampton, led by a white president, clamped down on the students, and Bailey left with a friend for New York City, where she became a national secretary for the YWCA, traveling the country organizing for it, and developing the intense interests in African American social history and international relations that would mark her life. She spent the rest of her life making good trouble. Sue Bailey Thurman was herself a veteran of battle with paternalistic white administrators of black colleges; she understood Thurman’s frustrations at Spelman.
Sue Bailey and Howard Thurman reconnected at Spelman in 1931, when Thurman was there delivering an address and Sue was on the stage with him as part of the event where he was speaking. Friends had forewarned Sue that Howard, known for some personal peculiarities and for being an absent-minded-professor type, might be doodling on paper and showing little awareness that she was even around. And indeed, he was doodling, as she recalled, but he managed to send her a note inviting her to breakfast (some friends later remembered this slightly differently, basically as a setup engineered by those who recognized the potential for this match). Later, she came to his home, still darkened and the shades shut. She opened the curtains to let the sunshine in.
The effervescent, outgoing, and also fiercely outspoken Sue Bailey would spend much of the rest of her life doing the same thing for other people. She was not afflicted with the kind of melancholic brooding that sometimes tormented Howard Thurman; yet, at the same time, the two shared a joy and zest in life that they communicated to others. And their love and joy in each other are evident, to some degree, in Thurman’s published papers, and even more so in unpublished correspondence, scraps of paper where Sue scribbled brainstormed thoughts, family memorabilia, and letters from Sue’s mother (who evidently shared with Sue an outgoing personality given to vocal and often playfully spontaneous expressions of love for those close to her). In his public writings and in interviews, Howard was not given to revealing himself in deeply personal ways; he tended to repeat a particular set of life stories that exemplified for him intellectual turning points or themes he explored in his intellectual journeys for the rest of his life. But it’s clear that he and Sue had an open and egalitarian relationship. Howard would become an intellectual celebrity, but Sue’s lifework of major intellectual contributions and social/political activism came with Howard’s enthusiastic support.
The two married on June 12, 1932, and did so, fittingly enough, following mutual attendance at a YWCA and YMCA conference in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. It was the place where Thurman had seen his first intellectual hero outside of his teachers at Florida, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, and where he first felt a larger inspiration that led him to his understanding that shaped his younger years: “my people need me.”
He was about to move to Howard University in the nation’s capital, where he, Sue, Olive, and the new daughter of Howard and Sue, Anne Spencer, quickly assumed a central place in the life of the university, and really in black America more generally. There, Howard and Sue spent twelve of the most intellectually and socially fulfilling years of their lives. Sue, especially, thrived in the intellectually and socially adventurous climate of Washington during the New Deal years. She began the work of recovering materials for African American history that would become one of her most important contributions to twentieth-century African American life, and she also cultivated international relationships that fundamentally shaped her vision of the African American connection with international movements for freedom. Sue Bailey Thurman deserves her own biography, and some of the scholars listed in the bibliographical essay have sketched a path toward this aim. But such a project will be difficult. Sue’s careful pruning of the Thurman papers after Howard’s death, including the disposal of much personal correspondence and more intimate details of the interaction between them, demonstrates both how much she cared about the Thurman legacy and her understanding of what might interest snooping scholars and biographers. Still, her central place in twentieth-century African American history, as a figure separate and distinct from Howard, has yet to be fully appreciated.
Shortly after submitting his resignation from Morehouse and Spelman in February 1932, a few months before his marriage to Sue Bailey, Thurman spoke to the First Congregational Church of Atlanta on a Sunday evening. The pastor, William J. Faulkner, wrote him appreciatively: “God is bountifully blessing you as a teacher and prophet in pointing the way to the light for our people in these troublous times. It will be a keen personal loss to me to have you leave this community. I regret now more than ever that I have denied myself a closer fellowship with you during the past few years. But I shall always count it a source of genuine hope and inspiration that I have known you.” Thurman had grown and matured as a college student in Atlanta, later as a husband and father, and then had suffered his greatest personal trauma. By the time he left Atlanta for good, he had come into his own as a nationally respected minister and author. He embraced larger visions and a bigger public and national audience in his next fourteen years in Washington, DC, and in India.