You must live and proclaim a faith that will make men affirm themselves and their fellowmen as children of God. You must lay your lives on the altar of social change so that wherever you are there the Kingdom of God is at hand.
Coming home from India, Howard Thurman was physically and mentally exhausted—and broke. Yet he also was infused with new visions for what would be required for racial transformation in American life. During and after his sojourn in India, Thurman came into his own as an intellectual, an idealist, and a renowned preacher. His experience there taught him that sacrificing everything for the right cause could be the key to finding one’s meaning in life, that men and women were “under great obligation to find something in our world, some cause or purpose to which we may give ourselves in utter devotion.” He urged young black people to accept his new visions for what would be required for racial transformation in American life. At North Carolina College for Negroes in 1942, he spoke of the gulf between democracy and the American way of life, and that blacks were acutely aware of “the loss of democratic principles of life. We must constantly be calling to these ideas,” for blacks would be “largely responsible for the soul of America. We are called at this moment of crisis in our nation’s history.”
A reporter who interviewed Thurman in 1942 called him a “mystic with a practical turn of mind.” He represented a “Christian likeness of many of the best qualities of Gandhi and Nehru,” one of the few men “around whom a great, conscious movement of Negroes could be built,” like the Indian one. But that was not Thurman’s role. Thurman’s primary influence always was that of a teacher, preacher, counselor, and mentor. And at no time was that influence greater than during his last eight years at Howard, when his intellectual powers took flight in sermon series, talks, addresses, and speeches throughout the country. In those years, he taught students and interacted with figures such as Pauli Murray and James Farmer, younger people who stood at the forefront of the civil rights struggle to come. They looked to Thurman for inspiration and guidance.
Sitting in his class at Howard in the late 1930s, where he was a divinity school student under Thurman’s tutelage, James Farmer remembered Thurman’s penetrating philosophical questions, queries that challenged students to think beyond becoming complicit in the American racial system of oppression. “We would leave the class with no answers,” Farmer later reflected, “but many intriguing questions that had not occurred to us before. It was Thurman’s belief that answers must come from within, from the bit of God in each of us.”
Born to a family of Texas Methodists, Farmer grew up witnessing the scars of segregation around him and determined to do something when he could. Thurman loaned books on Gandhi to Farmer. Later, Thurman connected Farmer to Fellowship of Reconciliation. Farmer subsequently decided to veer away from a projected path of Methodist ministry and instead focus on destroying segregation. When his father queried him about it, Farmer replied that he would have “something to do with mass mobilization in the use of the Gandhi technique.” For him, the key was mass nonviolent action, “not an individual witness to purity of conscience, as Thoreau used it, but a coordinated movement of mass noncooperation as with Gandhi. And civil disobedience when laws are involved. And jail where necessary…. Like Gandhi’s army, it must be nonviolent. Guns would be suicidal for us. Yes, Gandhi has the key for me to unlock the door to the American dream.”
With his training from Thurman and others, Farmer became one of the founding members of the Committee (later Congress) of Racial Equality (CORE) in Chicago in 1942. From its beginnings, Farmer later remembered, CORE determined that people, not experts or professionals, should lead the struggle for racial justice based on the principles of nonviolent direct action. CORE members pioneered the practices of nonviolent civil disobedience in the 1940s. They initially focused their efforts on segregated institutions in Chicago, which garnered limited attention nationally but set a model for future use. The missing ingredient was the “mass” in “mass mobilization,” something that could occur only with the active involvement of African American church people. The radical legacy of Thurman, Farmer, and CORE eventually found its way to the ministers and church communities in southern cities, who began organizing boycotts and crusades early in the 1950s. Later, Farmer and a group of others from CORE organized the Freedom Rides of 1961, when groups of integrated passengers boarded buses traveling through the Deep South, intending to test Supreme Court cases mandating segregation in interstate travel. The violence and bombings that met some of the travelers dramatized the brutality of segregation.
During his years at Howard following the sojourn in India, Thurman traveled tirelessly, preached constantly, lectured to myriad groups, and spread the gospel of nonviolence. He planted the seeds of what would become the gospel of nonviolent resistance. He worked out his ideas, expressed later in Jesus and the Disinherited, that Jesus spoke specifically to the oppressed in American society. Thurman had come to see that segregation was in effect a will to dominate, and that it could be defeated only through powerful forces of resistance. His goal, as historians Peter Eistenstadt and Quinton Dixie explain, was to “rip people from their complicity and complacency with evil. Only in this way would people in power relinquish ‘their hold on their place.’ It is not until something becomes movable in the situation that men are spiritually prepared to apply Christian idealism to un-ideal and unchristian situations.” Full preparation to do nonviolent battle with Jim Crow, Thurman said, would require “great discipline of mind, emotions, and body to the end that forces may not be released that will do complete violence both to one’s ideals and to one’s purpose.” Nonviolence was fundamental in both the means and the ends of the struggle for social justice.
Thurman himself embodied this quest for internal spiritual enrichment and external engagement with the world. He understood that making the church a social service organization would rob the church of the spiritual energies that made it what it was in the first place. He also understood that disconnecting the church from the world was heresy of a different sort. As always, his vision incorporated the internal and the external together. One must tend to the state of the soul and the state of the world together. In doing so, he universalized certain African American Christian traditions and blended them with theologies and ideas he had picked up from Gandhi, from Quakerism, from his natural propensity to see God in nature, and from poets and authors whose words he wove into his sermons. Thurman’s synthesis of ideas reached its peak of expression in this era. Thurman felt called to broadcast his ideas, and his speaking fees supported the family. For Thurman, necessity was the mother of intellectual inspiration.
Thurman stood in special relation to the institutions of black higher education that he attended and worked for. His mentors and colleagues, and those in the administrations of academic institutions when he was younger, recognized his talent immediately. For years they attempted to recruit him as dean or president of numerous institutions, ranging from Florida Baptist Institute (where he had gone to high school) to Morehouse College. As well, churches pursued him for pastorates. But consistently, until the opportunity for his “great adventure” in San Francisco arose, he turned down opportunities and offers. Whatever his other flaws, Thurman knew his own strengths and weaknesses. His training was in religion, and his strength lay in preaching and mentoring. He had little interest in fund-raising and administrating. Prior to the appointment of Benjamin Mays as president of Morehouse in 1940, the outgoing president, Samuel H. Archer, for whom Thurman had a deep personal affection, tried mightily to recruit him to the post. Thurman replied, kindly but firmly, “I am not at all sure that such a thing would be in keeping with the will of God, for my own life.” That was a no, in Thurman-speak.
Thurman also developed his tough critique of the nature of black educational institutions, joining colleagues in criticizing their tendency to reproduce the status quo. Thurman himself was about as good an example as can be imagined of the talented tenth that Du Bois had in mind when he critiqued Booker T. Washington and the rise of industrial/practical education as a primary focus of black institutions. Thurman had received a rigorous academic training starting in high school and continuing through his college and seminary days, and was a proud Morehouse man. But when speaking at Shaw University in Raleigh in 1938, he attacked the tendency of education simply to reproduce and “perpetuate the established order.” Institutions did this for a good reason—they needed to survive, and could not do so outside the framework of what was required by state governments, philanthropic institutions, and wary whites. Black students in both the North and the South learned the same attitude white students did, but upon graduation, they soon discovered that they were still part of the disinherited class: “For this reason I have never seen an educated Negro who was not discouraged in a very definite sense. He stands ever in the presence of an overwhelming frustration.”
Whatever his critique of black education in general, the cohort of scholars at Howard aimed to change what they themselves had experienced. Thurman, E. Franklin Frazier, Rayford Logan, Charles Hamilton Houston, and other professors were among the black scholars of that generation given just enough opportunity to experience first-rate graduate and legal educations but not yet afforded the opportunity to pick where they would make their careers. One of the ironic effects of segregation was to concentrate black educational, economic, social, and intellectual power in bases within the black community. Howard served that purpose, but did so only through skillful leadership and a generation of dynamic teachers and scholars. For example, by 1938 there were thirty-nine college graduates in seminary training in the School of Religion at Howard. By the end of 1939, Howard had more African American college graduates in master’s-level religious training than any other institution in the United States, forty-three, all with college degrees. The mysteriously charismatic Thurman drew in interested students.
Meanwhile, Thurman and others pursued new ways of expressing a religious vision in the real world of an America that segregated and demeaned African Americans, a symptom (for Thurman) of a larger denial of human personality in the modern world. As the scholar Anthony Siracusa has expressed it, Thurman “articulated how a religious way of being could become a powerful way of practicing the politics of nonviolence,” one defined by an “insurgent, nonviolent action.” In doing so, he provided an intellectual foundation for a way of being that underwrote the nonviolent struggle against Jim Crow.
Thurman’s work on Jesus as political insurgent inspired others under his tutelage. Thurman supervised master’s theses exploring his favorite theme of Jesus and the disinherited, and the meaning of active nonviolent resistance that he taught to his students. One of his students, for example, prepared a thesis titled “An Examination of the Thesis That Christianity in Its Genesis Was a Technique of Survival for an Underprivileged Minority.” The argument about Jesus paralleled Thurman’s argument about whites needing to “relax” the will toward domination and violence, and the necessity of creative action by the minority. This was not simply “protest” but rather a way of being in the social world that valorized human personality. Another thesis produced under Thurman’s tutelage, from 1941, “Educating Young People on the Philosophy and Technique of Nonviolence,” took Thurman’s lessons from Gandhi and applied them to young black Americans. The key again was the marriage of religious being and nonviolent political action.
At the base of Thurman’s thought was his understanding of the meaning of the life of Jesus, and its relationship to the contemporary social world. He was to present those ideas in full form in lecture series in the late 1930s. Here he made fundamental contributions to American religious philosophy.
Thurman’s lectures and addresses from the time he returned from India to the beginning of the Second World War marked one of his greatest periods of intellectual ferment and national interest. These were unpublished addresses; his books and publishing career arrived some years later. But much of what he then published came from the material he developed during the second half of the 1930s and early 1940s. He inspired a generation of Howard students and other frequent attendees at his addresses at the Howard Chapel, which regularly drew crowds of five hundred or more to hear his careful, deliberately delivered orations. Thurman had no evident interest in jazz in his life, but he knew how to use silences in his addresses just as Miles Davis knew the same in his tunes—the implied note that wasn’t there, or the silence that left the audience anticipating what was to come, was indispensable to his oratorical repertoire, just as were silences to Davis’s jazz modes. “Most of all people are overwhelmed by his silences,” a writer for Crisis said. One young Episcopal woman and student at Howard who frequented Rankin Chapel to hear Thurman said that he was the “first really exciting person I met in the area of theology. I always characterized him as a mystic, the only black mystic I know”; Thurman portrayed Jesus as a “model, not Savior,” a revolutionary thought for many. His student James Farmer later remembered (with some sly humor) that Rankin Memorial Chapel “was packed” when Thurman preached, and that “though few but theologians and philosophers comprehended what he was saying, everyone else thought if only they had understood it would have been wonderful, so mesmerizing was his resonant voice and so captivating was the artistry of his delivery. Those who did grasp the meaning of his sermons were even more ecstatic.”
Much of Thurman’s thought that he had developed in seminary and in his early years at Morehouse and Howard emerged most clearly in a series of lectures he gave in early 1937. Sponsored by the Student Christian Movement, the same organization on whose behest he had toured India, Thurman lectured on “the significance of Jesus” before crowds of college students in Canada. Thurman approached these lectures differently than usual. He wrote out most (five of the six) lectures carefully, rather than extemporizing from notes. He wanted to make his most coherent statement to date, weaving together the various strands of his thought and his career. Thurman’s addresses drew interest from publishers such as Scribner’s, but they were never published fully in any definitive form. Rather, bits and pieces of them found their way into Thurman’s work for years thereafter. Moreover, in the lectures Thurman brought together parts of his intellectual world derived from modernist thought and higher criticism, and from his work with groups such as Fellowship of Reconciliation and other Left and pacifist groups on the American political spectrum.
Thurman spent much of the rest of his career balancing the diverse parts of his intellectual background and career, and his thoughts in “The Significance of Jesus” put them clearly and forthrightly. Thurman still felt called to speak to African American audiences and minister to African American students in particular. From his own travels (including a trip later that same summer of 1937 to St. Louis, a segregated city), he well understood the enraging and humiliating struggles African Americans faced. No doubt he used the Green Book, as did other African American travelers, even as he yearned for the day when friendly men would meet under a friendly sky.
Thurman also had received thorough training in modernist interpretations of the Bible and had used it in his sermons, including those he delivered in Canada in 1937. Thurman comes across as more of a Christian in this series of talks than in many he gave later, simply because of the emphasis on Jesus as a figure. He began by requesting his audience to “approach the life of Jesus stripped bare of much that is metaphysical and theological and mystical.” Instead, the starting point simply was Jesus the poor and underprivileged and disinherited Palestinian Jew, shorn of power and citizenship in the Roman Empire, who nonetheless had fundamentally changed the entire direction of the world. But that left a fundamental question: What distinguished Jesus from the other Jews of his time? What made Jesus into Christ?
“There is one overmastering problem that the underprivileged always face,” Thurman continued. “What must be their attitude towards their master, their oppressor?” Ancient Judaic traditions offered various responses to this dilemma, including violent revolt (the solution of the Zealots), alliance with the ruling authorities (the response of the Sadducees, Thurman said, basing his arguments on historical assertions that have been undermined or discredited in more recent scholarship on the ancients), withdrawal into communal asceticism (as did the Essenes), and others. Jesus offered another answer, but only after facing his period of temptations. Jesus saw that he could be a “creative harmonizer” and “interpret the world and life in terms of some creative purpose out of which life arose and that all aspects of society are constantly under the judgment of such a purpose.” And thus his teachings would remain “simple, direct, always under this inexorable scrutiny of God.” Everyone, no matter their social station, had to live “under his Divine scrutiny.” There could be no escaping that.
In his lectures, Thurman explored the balance between individual and social transformation. Thurman insisted that pursuing individual righteousness would not be sufficient to ensure social transformation, but also that a social transformation in and of itself would not produce righteous people. As he expressed it, “Experience reveals one of the potent fallacies of Orthodox religion, namely, that that world can be made good if all the men in the world as individuals become good men—after the souls of men are saved, the society in which they function will be a good society.” That was at best a “half-truth,” because in fact people were caught up in “a framework of relationships evil in design,” meaning that their gestures toward the good could be used as instruments of evil. Such was the case with the segregated South, for example. Thurman summed up his view in his second lecture: “The two processes must go on apace or else men and their relationships will not be brought under conscious judgment of God. We must, therefore, even as we purify our hearts and live our individual lives under the divine scrutiny, so order the framework of our relationships that good men can function in a good framework to the glory of God.”
Thurman also developed a sustained argument about economic relationships and the role of private property. Here, with unusual clarity, Thurman’s economic and social radicalism became clear. “When property becomes sacred, personality becomes secular,” he argued. Property as an end in itself blocked the expression of love shorn of self-interest, because the sacralization of property “renders individuals in society who are without property, without security. It makes individuals possessing property identify their status and their significance with the amount and value of the property they possess. They seek to organize themselves for defense against all efforts toward distribution and confuse all sharing with those outside their property class as either charity or philanthropy.” Thurman never joined the Communist Party and was more of a sympathizer than an activist for socialism. A socialist by sentiment, he upheld human values over the rights of property. But he was not involved in any organized socialist movement.
In Thurman’s view, the Good Samaritan story should be normative rather than exceptional. The response of Jesus to those in need exemplified this world. When confronted with a woman who had committed adultery, Jesus responded with his famous words about casting the first stone. For Thurman, this showed how Jesus “met the woman where she was and treated her there as if she were where she should have been,” a variation on a basic philosophical maxim of Thurman that he repeated frequently in various forms. Loving people involved meeting people “where they are, and we treat them there as if they were where they ought to be, and by so doing, we believe them into the fulfillment of their possibilities and love becomes an act of redemption. We place a crown over their heads that they are always trying to grow tall enough to wear.”
Thurman returned to these words frequently; they became something like his trademark. In speaking at the seventy-fifth anniversary of Morehouse College in 1942, he noted how this philosophy had been put into effect by the school’s founders after the Civil War. They referred to it as a college, even when it was something like a primary school for newly freed African Americans. The founders had followed the philosophy Thurman advocated. They had met the freedmen, “many of them fear-stricken, chronologically old, and they treated them there as if they were where they should be, where they were destined to be. By doing that, they buoyed them into the fulfillment of a possibility that staggered their imagination, by putting over them a crown that for the rest of their days they are trying to grow tall enough to wear.”
In preaching about the cross of Jesus, Thurman emphasized Jesus as a man without full knowledge of the meaning of his sacrifice. And the resurrection was not a part of the meaning either. Instead, Thurman was primarily interested in the symbolics of sacrifice. Jesus provided the model for the religiously inspired activist against social evil. Jesus exemplified the life of those willing to risk everything, including their lives, in the pursuit of social justice. What could be learned from the cross of Jesus? “There are some things in life that are worse than death,” Thurman responded. It was Jesus’s death, more than his life, that turned him into a Savior: “For here is revealed that a man’s life becomes meaningful and whole to the degree that he is willing to stake everything on a conviction that what he does when he is most himself has the approval and the imprimatur of the Highest.”
That did not exempt the Christian from conflict. The Christian projected “his ideal into the midst of a world that is organized on other than principles of kinship and brotherhood. He demonstrates that he cannot escape conflict.” Thurman saw little reason for the church other than to commit to “struggle in the world.” Thurman saw “too much agony, too much hunger, too much poverty and misery everywhere, too many flagrant denials of kinship and brotherhood all along the line.” There was no time to wait for some imagined divine intervention in the future: “Something concrete must be done now,” because “to wait for moral pressure to work its perfect work may be too late. The oppressed may be annihilated meanwhile.”
Thus, the Jesus follower might employ some form of shock therapy to tear people away from their “alignments in the kingdom of evil, to free them so that they may be given a sense of acute insecurity and out of the depths of their insecurity they may be forced to see their brotherhood with the oppressed.” Thurman could not understand those who saw Jesus simply as an ethical teacher but “cannot be bothered very much with his religion. They are inseparable as I think of it; for Jesus knew, as did Aristotle, that for man to see the right thing is not for him to do the right thing.” The world presented so much organization of evil, with much to depress and little to uplift or inspire. Loving involved doing, for the sake of love itself, “what no power in heaven or hell could make me do if I did not love.” Love allowed one to encounter and appreciate the brilliance in the world: “when I love the sun seems to shine more brightly, the colour of the leaves is a richer green, for somehow I have tapped a source that whispers to me the secret of the mystery of existence. Whatever else God is He must be like this.” The defining characteristic of God was not power but love. And so the meaning of Jesus was that he placed before us “an impelling dream, growing out of a fundamental interpretation of the meaning of life—human life—all life; a methodology by which that dream might be translated into living power—in a living community.” And he showed us a power to work out love within community, “without inner defilement and without self destruction.”
Thurman’s own philosophy came under a severe test later that year when he traveled to St. Louis to deliver his address “The Sources of Power for Christian Living” at the National Methodist Student Conference. One organizer suggested to him how important it was that, at the Methodist event, the black speakers would not be confined to topics of race relations. This appealed to Thurman’s desire not to be slotted as a “race speaker” before mixed-race or white audiences. As Thurman explained to another correspondent a few months later, “My training and main interest are in the field of religion. I do not accept invitations to discuss the race question; not because I do not think the race question needs to be discussed, but I am determined to make my contribution along the lines of my preparation and my chosen field of activity. I cannot do this if I become merely a propagandist or a sociologist.”
Thurman was not aware that the hotel where he thought he was staying would not accommodate him that evening. Thurman returned to the event for his address and explained to the audience what had happened. He left the event after his talk and made his way directly to the train station, sleeping on the train to Oxford, Ohio (his next speaking engagement), his fury no doubt resulting in the migraine headache that plagued him en route. Thurman normally flourished in environments such as the one in St. Louis, where he could address a mixed-race audience on his preferred themes of religion in general and not race in particular; but his experience at the hotel reminded him again of exactly where he was in the American racial system. The sponsor of the Methodist conference, H. D. Bollinger, apologized to Thurman afterward, indicating that “the best that I can do is to pledge myself all the more to the practice of Christian brotherhood” in future Methodist assemblies. Thurman responded with appreciation but indicated that “recovery from such things is most difficult.” He drew one main lesson from the incident. Trust between blacks and whites was nearly impossible to achieve because “the framework of the relationships is so completely without high ethical quality that even the most simple ethical advances challenge the entire society.”
“As a Christian,” Thurman said, “I must see to it that what I condemn in society, I do not permit to grow and flower in me.” That was a struggle for a black man of Thurman’s intellect and sensitivities. Incidents such as those in St. Louis filled him with a rage that he internalized (manifested in physical symptoms) and, only occasionally, externalized in sermons and addresses directly commenting on American racial politics. Simply waking up and going about one’s business constantly confronted black Americans with their status as disinherited noncitizens, American untouchables. How could one avoid cultivating an internal rage? One could not, Thurman responded. But one could channel rage constructively.
Following this humiliation, Thurman somehow summoned the will to deliver his best and most original addresses. Speaking to the National Assembly of Student Christian Associations in late December 1937 or early January 1938, Thurman advanced a critique of the relationship of traditional Christianity with nature. It was one of the earliest-developed statements of African American Christian environmentalism. In this work, Thurman draws most extensively on one of his primary intellectual influences, Olive Schreiner. The South African author, essayist, poet, and nature mystic reinforced Thurman’s ideas, expressing them in a poetic language that appealed to Thurman’s love of that genre. Thurman’s talk, “Man and the World of Nature,” at the National Assembly draws from Schreiner and other recent work in science. In it, he presents a kind of early eco-humanism emphasizing “reverence for all expressions of life.” It certainly was true that nature was “red in tooth and claw,” Thurman acknowledged, but traditional Christianity had radically (and falsely) separated man and nature. This was a false dichotomy that ended in the destruction of nature and the fueling of human aggression. Man prepared himself for a battle with nature, and then one day discovered that nature was not the enemy, but instead that “he is a part of nature and that every judgment that he passes upon nature is a judgment that nature passes upon itself.”
In this way, humans could understand both the beauty and the harmony, as well as the brutality and the aggression, in nature—and that this was a part of human nature as well. Seeking to understand the contradictions of human nature, people turn to psychology, theology, or other fields of inquiry that might provide insight. But the “ethical insights that we have are built for the most part upon the false line that was drawn in the past between man and nature.” In the future, theologians would work toward a reintegration of man and nature in their own work toward an ethical synthesis. The result would be a new respect and reverence for life and a recognition that a proper understanding of nature provided the key to comprehending ultimate significance.
Thurman followed this short but fruitful address with another, “Christian, Who Calls Me Christian?” In this speech aimed at a student audience, he presented, in a more pointed fashion, ideas that he had worked out in his series on the significance of Jesus.
In what way, he asked, should Christians act in a world that demanded moral compromise? First, as he had argued elsewhere, he insisted that “I must not permit to grow and flower in my own heart and life what I condemn in society or in my fellow man…. I must be rigorously honest with myself there. I must not permit my mind to do clever tricks with me so that I shall give to my own sin and my own weaknesses high and holy names as I pour out invectives and condemnations upon those same things in society and in other people around me.” But that alone was not enough. For to be a Christian was to seek and “devise methods and techniques and ways, personal and group, by which it will be possible for an increasingly large number of people to live the good life in time and space without external limitations.” The Christian was in brotherhood with both the powerful and the weak, but how could the committed person best approach the question of inequality and ruptures in human relations? Perhaps “some form of pressure more drastic and more immediately devastating than moral pressure” would be necessary, a point of action that might loose the oppressor from his security “so that for one breathless moment or for one breathless week he becomes the brother in experience with the insecure and the weak; and while he is in that condition it may be that the spirit of God can take advantage of the looseness of his situation and effect another combination before he settles down again.” And perhaps it could even come to the point of offering one’s life as a sacrifice against the workings of evil regimes; indeed, it could be a “great spiritual act to know when the moment for martyrdom has arrived.”
What would be the sources of this kind of certainty or commitment? And how could one distinguish it from fanaticism? “There is the freedom of mind that comes with a great commitment,” one that causes an “orderly recklessness of action” but could be difficult for the intellectual person to reach. Fellowship with Jesus was one answer, for “he becomes for us not the product of any age or any race or any school of thought, but a great benediction to all the races of men.” And other goals could be accomplished with a “sustained relationship with an inner group of like-minded, like-dedicated people.” Both in fact may be necessary, but neither was sufficient. Only a relationship with God, the infinite power, accomplished through meditation and prayer, was equal to the task. In a critical passage, Thurman expresses it this way:
But in the great task which involves the transformation of the world, and the redemption of the individual human spirit from evil, only primary releases from God may apply. For the task is infinite, and only an infinite power can address itself to an infinite need. We get this in the life of meditation and prayer and discipline; in moments of quiet I hold, at the center of my spiritual focus, the cause to which I am dedicated. This gives an abundance of freedom and joy because it destroys fear—fear of failure, fear of death, fear of being misunderstood, fear that I am mistaken in the thing that I am undertaking, fear that all my life long I might live for a cause only to find at the end that the cause is wrong. In moments of profound meditation I become sometimes for one transcendent moment only a central part of the purpose of life.
Such a discipline was both clarifying and cleansing, because through such practices “against the darkness of the age I can see the illumined finger of God guiding me in the way that I should go.” Above the clamor of daily life and the struggle for power and status, “I can hear speaking distinctly and clearly to my own spirit the still, small voice of God without which nothing has meaning.”
During these years, as well, Thurman thought deeply about what it meant to practice pacifism, on the one hand, and actively combat racial prejudice on the other. And he was bitingly critical of reformist groups, such as the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. They had attempted to amend or ameliorate, rather than annihilate, segregated institutions. “The time has passed for the theoretical and the merely discussional approach to the question on group conflict in the South,” he wrote to John Nevin Sayre of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in May of 1936. Thurman worried about the peace movement in the United States being “essentially a ‘high brow’ movement. Its effectiveness among the masses of the people is not as great as the energies put forth would justify.” He hoped FOR would not be another group slowly tilling the ground of “education … to bring about reconciliation and harmony,” but would take an approach more “in the area of action including propaganda.” Thurman remembered fondly his relationship with leaders such as George “Shorty” Collins, a student pacifist leader he met while at Morehouse and who became his friend over the subsequent decades. Thurman later praised “Shorty” (so named because he was six feet five inches tall, towering over Thurman, who was about five feet eight inches) for encouraging him to “stand in my own spirit—a place so profoundly affirming that I was strengthened by a sense of immunity to the assaults of the white world of Atlanta, Georgia.” And during these years, Thurman carried on a correspondence with Howard “Buck” Kester, whose daring actions in going undercover in Florida to investigate a particularly brutal lynching there had won him admirers. The Kester of the 1930s was precisely the sort of white ally that Thurman wanted to enlist to take on segregation as directly as possible.
Through these years, Thurman elaborated at length on his ideas of the nature of American Christianity and the relationship of African Americans to it. Blacks in America, the disinherited minority, faced a profound crisis of self-confidence. It came from the fact, he told one audience in Nashville in 1938, that “we have been so consistently despised we have at last begun despising ourselves.” And it was worsened by the place of blacks in an American system set within a broader world of imperialism and colonization. The imperialism of their era, Thurman argued, came not so much from a struggle to dominate resources. Rather, it continued because the powerful sought connection with the powerless, who still had some connection to “the roots of life” and could then suck the vitality, the life, out of the powerless: “That is the psychology of imperialism: It is not because one man wants to kill another man so much, but because people who have grown up as powerful people in the world have grown mean and emaciated and sterile and they are looking around for a luscious people of the earth and laying on them to suck their strength.”
And yet, Thurman continued, this is also why the soul, the spirit, of enslaved people could not be defeated. The slave could not be killed “because he laid hold on life, elemental life, with such an abiding enthusiasm that the only way you can destroy him was to destroy life.” And it taught the enslaved to laugh in the face of these circumstances, to have the laugh of someone who knew he was not, and could not be, spiritually defeated, to mock the spiritual pretension of their oppressors.
Here, and through much of his writings about the spirituals that came from this era, Thurman proposed a fundamentally psychological interpretation of the sorrow songs. The depth and profundity of his writings from that era were matched only by Du Bois’s essays in Souls of Black Folk. Thurman resisted the tendency of others to fit slave culture into some kind of neo-Marxist resistance framework. Instead, he was more interested in the root psychology of a situation. Thurman certainly had a strong moral critique of contemporary economics and power dynamics, and held fundamentally socialist economic views. But ultimately, those were not his primary animating focus. Rather, Thurman fixated on the question of the relationship of the dispossessed to Christianity. He queried why his forebears had “embraced the religion of the men and women and of the civilization primarily that had victimized them.”
He proposed a variety of answers through his writing but always returned to his fundamental insight: the disinherited of America had seen in Jesus “a messenger and a signal for the underprivileged and dispossessed,” a vision unavailable to those in privilege, those having power. And thus they had the wisdom and the maturity not given to the powerful, to effect a “great creative spiritual inspiration” and to redeem the religion “that had been disgraced in their midst.” They found a hidden spiritual truth, that being “a confidence of God that belongs very essentially to the hearts and minds of the people,” without which there could be no peace. Thurman vividly portrayed the spiritual struggles of the disinherited: “When you can absorb, make room for our spirit, squeeze all of the violence out of all the things that meet you, it is then you are a master of life. And if you can’t do that you will be a slave of life. Now, that is a confidence in God stated in simple language. That is the great ghost that drives you on. Drives me on, drives you on; and everything you touch, everything, if it is to have meaning, must be summarized in terms of some kind of absolute meaning.”
Similarly, as he told an audience in Northfield, Massachusetts, that same year, prayer was a vehicle through which “we who pray the prayer become channels—literally channels—through which the knowledge, the courageousness, the power, the love, the endurance needful to meet the infinite needs of the world may flow. For only infinite energy is able to meet infinite need, and we who pray this prayer become channels through which God’s life of healing and redemption may flow. We must search more and more creatively how to devise methods by which good may supplant evil, by which the hearts of men may be redeemed, and by which the world in which those hearts must function may be redeemed.” As always, for Thurman, the personal was both spiritual and social at the same time.
Through the 1930s, Thurman championed the African American spirituals; he preached around the country on the significance of Jesus most especially in the lives of the disinherited; he held audiences captive at Rankin Chapel at Howard with his weekly sermons exploring the connection between the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of Christianity; and he compared the oppression of power in imperialism abroad with segregation at home. Already, just in this short list, Thurman brilliantly wove together numerous threads of American religious thought and practice. And he brought another intellectual tradition to the discussion as well: mysticism.
Here, Thurman drew directly from American nineteenth-century mysticism, originating with the generation of Emerson, Thoreau, and others. Emerson defined religion as “the emotion of shuddering delight and awe from perception of the infinite.” Thurman never quoted that line, and yet his thought on mysticism explores that concept, refracted through his study with Rufus Jones and the tradition of Quaker mysticism.
“Fundamentally, the mystic rests his case upon the meaning of a primary contractual experience of God,” Thurman began. “It is first hand. He considers himself as standing within the experience itself…. The assumption is that the finite and the Infinite are not two fundamentally separate universes of discourse but that they are grounded in a transcendent unity.” The contradictions of life were not ultimate; below them lay a fundamental unity, one that could be grasped in a mystical experience that then pointed the way toward social engagement.
Thurman distinguished between rational and intuitive knowledge, discursive reasoning and more immediate realizations. But even while the two were different, they could work in tandem, because “even in discursive reasoning there is a leaping quality in the mental process. In the moment of intuition the mind leaves behind the process and its grasp of knowledge is immediate and comprehensive.” Here, Thurman actually forecast some developments among intellectual historians of the future, notably Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Like Kuhn, Thurman emphasized how knowledge advanced over time with incremental gains and then, in one massive, intuitive leap, an entire new understanding of something, a new paradigm, came alive. Kuhn and others were not exploring those ideas in any religious context, but they were structurally similar to Thurman’s ideas as presented here. Except that, for Thurman, that intuitive leap had to emerge from spiritual insight.
The problem for any form of mysticism was how to verify the experience as something more than just a figment of one’s imagination. After that leap of intuition, the knowledge could be made secure with logic, the “road map that can be reproduced indefinitely and made available to all intelligent travelers.” Thurman pointed out that “in intuitive knowledge more of man’s personality is involved than in more rational knowledge.” Intuitive knowledge was “more personal,” and thus in effect was more real and could be a deeper take on reality. The mystic’s deepest religious knowledge came through such intuition, arriving to him “with overwhelming conviction and certainty,” striking him “with the vividness and clarity of a sensation. He sees the vision; for the vision breaks in on him when he is ready to receive it. All of his disciplines are preparatory to his moment of vision.”
The mystic’s vision was immediate, and “only when it is broken down into manageable units of intellection” did it become part of the “sequential totality of experience.” The mystic, too, was “always looking for one symbol that is sufficiently inclusive of meaning” that it could serve as a direct route to God. For the Christian mystic in particular, that symbol came in Jesus Christ. For some Christian mystics, Jesus essentially dissolved into God, while for others, including (he implied) Thurman himself, Jesus was an “inclusive symbol of God,” the “fullest expression in time of what is disclosed to him in his own moment of illumination.” The ultimate goal was to be “unified with but not dissolved in God.”
The result of the mystical experience bore elements of regeneration, or conversion, a “profound recentering of the personality.” Often it came as a result of an “excruciating agony of spirit and mind.” For Thurman, such experiences had come through nature. He remembered, here for one of the first times and later recounted in his autobiography, his encounters with nature as a boy:
When I was a boy I was always driven to worship when I saw a storm come up on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean on the Florida Coast. A stillness pervaded everything. The tall sea grass stood at attention. As far out as my eyes could go the surface of the sea was untroubled, quiet, but expectant. I could almost hear the pounding of my own heart against my ribs. Then, as if by magic, there came a stirring of the wind, increasing in intensity and expansiveness until the sea grass, the loose dry sand, the surface of the ocean were all caught up in an increasingly maddening fury—the storm had come.
It was, for him, the last bit of silence before the arrival of God. He now could intellectualize how forces of nature placed “solar and phallic symbolism” at the end of “the whole language and literature of religion.” Thurman recounted how his religious experiences as a youth were tied up in the sun and the sea, the rebirth of spring, summer thunderstorms, and all the manifestations of nature that “have somehow united with certain powerful inner urges of the human spirit.” But Thurman rejected a mere mysticism of pantheism, because for the truest Christian mystic, the struggle and pain evident in nature were a “symbol of the moral struggle of human life.”
And for this reason, true knowledge of other people came through intuition, just as was the case with God. “We cannot expect to find the meaning of another person at the end of a syllogism,” is how he expressed it in his lectures, and “We cannot expect to find God at the end of a syllogism.” True knowledge of God could not come through strictly discursive reasoning but only through “knowledge of love. We must approach Him along the same avenue by which we seek a deeper knowledge of each other’s personality.” Knowledge is power, but so is spiritual intuition.
But then, what distinguished the knowledge that derived from spiritual intuition from a “vague glowy feeling about the world of nature and man”? Thurman asked. How could we know if we had experienced the truths of the mystics and not just the shallow warm glow of a false sense of oneness? Here he injected the key component of ethics into mysticism. A mere “diffused transcendency” was not enough, because the “Christian mystic in his experience of intentness, intensity, ineffability and passivity, is conscious of being grasped by a reality that is focal and frontal.” How, then, could a mystic “carry the reality of his vision which is monistic in its very nature into the ordinary commonplace experience of life”?
Thurman’s third lecture in this series specifically approached the question of mysticism and ethics. What most critics of mysticism failed to understand, he said, was the simple reality of evil, something the true mystic first discovered in his own spirit and then found in the social world around him. The mystical experience of alone-ness, that sense of unity with God, the moment of spiritual fulfillment when tensions were resolved, did not absolve the mystic of the question of how to manifest that unity in the social world of “time-space relationships,” and how that would influence the conduct of his life.
The challenge for the mystic was to maintain the sense of unity, the kind that had completely penetrated his soul. Over time, inevitably, conflicts and blocks would arise: “the struggle with impulses, with inner divisions, unworthy desires, purely self-regarding tactics including the whole world of egocentric manifestations, all these are regarded by him as an indispensable part of the defect of his vision.” For many, asceticism was the route to control the struggles of the flesh and maintain the original spiritual vision. The ascetics understood the reality of evil; in a sense, it underlay their entire set of practices. The mystic-ascetic sought the “inner equilibrium” so as to be ready at any moment “for the direct visitation of God.” And thus “the greatest mystic-ascetics in the Christian tradition have turned the whole stream of Christian thought and achievement into new and powerful channels of practical living.” Here was Thurman’s crucial tie between the mystical and the practical, the visionary spiritual aesthete and the committed activist for a better world.
And in Jesus, explained Thurman, the Christian mystic could see “the meaning of the triumph of the spirit over the body; the transcending and triumphant power of God over the most relentless pressure and persistence of things that divide and destroy. To know Him in the fellowship of his suffering seemed to the Christian mystic the key to his victory.” And thus, the ultimate meaning of mystical asceticism involved not withdrawal from society but instead “a steady insistence that one’s human relations conform more and more to the transparency of one’s inner graces, one’s inner equilibrium in which is his consciousness of the active presence of God.” The inner active presence of God could be made visible in the external social world.
In his final lecture in this series, “Mysticism and Social Change,” Thurman explained how the “realistic mystic” came to understand that his full personality could “only be achieved in a milieu of human relations.” In this lecture, too, Thurman deployed the term “affirmation mystics,” a usage he got originally from the Quaker scholar Rufus Jones. Thurman explained how, in the Christian tradition, “social sin and personal sin are bound up together in an inexorable relationship so that it is literally true that no man can expect to have his soul saved alone.” And so the affirmation mystic joined the socialist, the political organizer such as Eugene Debs, and those who identified with the disinherited, in joining his destiny with sufferers everywhere. Indeed, Thurman repeatedly turned to the example of Debs, the Christian socialist activist who set his sights on an identification with all who were oppressed.
The problems all mystics faced involved living in a human society dominated by unequal forms of political and economic organization. The mystic could face economic insecurity, and thus be unable to achieve the good “even in his simplest relations with his fellows because of the difficulties involved in establishing a basis of trust between him and them that will not victimize him in his effort to maintain himself in the world.”
And thus practical reasons dominated the thought of the affirmation mystic. He was not primarily a humanitarian, nor was he motivated by any particular economic theory. Rather, he took interest in social action “because society as he knows it to be ensnares the human spirit in a maze of particulars so that the One cannot be sensed nor the good realized.” He sought a society in which men could freely pursue their religious visions. That could only happen with freedom from the constant, grinding, life-and-death struggle for security. The achievement of economic security, in effect, lessened the “imperialistic will” for power, and thus the spiritual insight of the mystic could have relevance “without seeming to be unrealistic, romantic, or sentimental.” The affirmation mystic could not escape in “mere asceticism,” but instead he would have to “embrace the social whole and seek to achieve empirically the good which has possessed him in his moment of profoundest insight.”
And here the affirmation mystic could make his most profound contribution. The powerful in society naturally would resist any tendency toward equality, toward furthering human community. They would seek to hold the masses in a state of “depersonalized individualism” and use the power of the state to reinforce the status quo. But the affirmation mystic would then refuse to give in to violence and coercion as a response. He (Thurman always used masculine pronouns to refer to humans in general) would work toward the achievement of human community, even while waiting patiently for its realization in the social world; he could see that “working and waiting are two separate activities of the human spirit.”
Thurman explored this linkage between the natural, internal, and social worlds in numerous addresses and sermons during this era. He wanted people to explore what it meant to enact and realize God’s vision for the natural and social world, accomplished in concert with groups of like-minded individuals. Men’s physical environment did not match God’s desire, nor the “conscious end to which I think Jesus Christ calls the human spirit.” The physical environment was one of imperialism, war, and ecological degradation. And so the challenge remained, for Christianity, “to make the physical environment become the very agency of self-conscious creative material and spiritual ends.” The same could be said for the social world. The Christian should demand that his inner self be brought in line with an “inner harmony based upon a profound consecration to God,” and the same with the “resourcefulness and the harmony and beauty and richness of nature.”
Thurman’s structure of imagining God’s vision also encompassed the Christian’s relationship with the social world. As a self-conscious act of will, the Christian would consecrate the social world. That involved crying out against injustice. But doing so required personal penitence. The affirmation mystic would see that one was a part of the “manifestations of evil and injustice that are not under the control of the will and the purpose of God, but represent the unrestrained manifestations of creative egoistic impulses in man.” And so even the seeker, the holy individual seeking justice, would participate in injustice simply by virtue of belonging to an unjust society. “I cannot continually restrain myself in the presence of the challenge to do good and to be good without paying for it in terms of moral and spiritual disintegration. Much of the cynicism of modern life hinges upon the fact that moral man has not been willing to recognize the relationship that exists between the amount of moral and spiritual atrophy in his own spirit and the things that he is willing to do from day to day.” The consecrated individual would seek to minimize his participation in evil social arrangements and in all cases identify with the dispossessed; here he returned again to Debs, the same source that inspired a famous passage in The Grapes of Wrath, the famous novel from exactly this same time (later 1930s): “I must see that while there is a lower class I am in it, where there is a criminal element I am of it, while there is a man in jail I am not free.” And he would look for ways to implement practically some means of social transformation. He would do so without giving in to hate, the flammable toxin that “burns up the moral and spiritual bearings of the hater and leaves him with a stranded corpse on the shores of his desolate experience.”
Jesus’s central concern was “the realization of a kingdom of friendly men upon the earth. A kingdom of friendly men in which the security of one man is guaranteed by all men.” At every point, Jesus was concerned to alter the nature of relationships “so that any individual man would feel free to relax his tension and fear of insecurity and even of death…. For Jesus has identified himself primarily with the best that the mind of man can dream of as man contemplates the good life for himself, and for his age, and for his generation.” Thurman looked to the great power that “comes from meditating upon the life of Jesus Christ, and then the strength that comes out of that fellowship of men and women of a common dedication around a great purpose.”
Still, the “ultimate source of power is God.” And the method of contact with that ultimate power was “worship, meditation of prayer,” the time when one became “fully conscious of the ultimate source of power.” Prayer allowed for a renewal of the spirit, by freshening the spirit and touching the center of one’s “spiritual focus.”
Thurman developed similar themes in his sermon “Fellowship with God and Prayer,” in February of 1943, part of a series investigating how individuals could summon strength in demanding times. Thurman’s focus remained on contact with God, the source of all strength, the “ultimate spiritual resource for human life.” Only that was sufficient “in the task that calls for the faithful transformation of our individual lives and the redemption of man and society from evil,” when “only an infinite energy can meet the exhaustive demand…. Anyone who has faced the abysmal churnings of evil in his own spirit out of which come in crimson stream deeds that fill the life with shame and the days with anguish, knows that only God is sufficient.” Only God could move our desire such that one could “desire to desire the right.” And that could only come from prayer and meditation, bringing the mind to focus on God, “centering down” on God (as the mystics put it). The detritus of daily life, the trivialities ordinarily filling the mind, would be replaced with a focus on the essential, the profound. And in doing so, “One’s will to act the Kingdom of God and to make life everywhere yield its maximum weal for every man, takes on a new dynamic.”
In his sermons, addresses, and shorter publications on Jesus, the natural world, and the nature of an affirmative mysticism that engaged fully with the social world, Thurman linked together key themes of his thought and career. And he found an audience, both black and white, eager to hear those themes. The Depression years were a time of broader ferment, from various sides of Christianity. Fundamentalists railed against Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal as a kind of harbinger of the antichrist of socialism, a theme obviously picked up with even greater force following the Second World War. Meanwhile, progressive Christian activists, some of them linked to New Deal ideas and programs and others well placed in seminaries, explored new ideas of what Christianity could mean with the old shibboleths destroyed by the great storm of the Great Depression. Black people, disproportionately affected by the Depression, migrated, struggled, and organized through churches, labor unions, NAACP chapters, Communist Party cells, and in colleges and universities.
Thurman himself trained a cohort of young scholars who would take his teachings directly into the early civil rights struggle. Thurman was thus part of, and yet a singular figure within, the broader world of the liberal Left of American Christianity in these years. And he balanced his more abstract and ethereal sermons and addresses with more direct commentary on economics, race, migration, and war. Although not ordinarily given to direct political commentary, sometimes it simply was necessary. On those occasions, Thurman spoke plainly and powerfully about the insidiously evil nature of American racism.
In 1940, addressing a Chicago meeting of the Conference of Christians and Jews, Thurman delivered one of his more memorable speeches specifically directed to racial inequality in the United States, and more specifically in northern cities. “The Negro in the northern city is not a citizen and his position is a perpetual threat and constant disgrace to democracy,” he insisted. The problem for northern blacks was simply “crass, elemental, physical survival.” Thurman summarized the roots of racial inequality from slavery to the present and reinforced the conclusions of early black sociologists of that era. And he anticipated much “whiteness” scholarship in examining how immigrants to northern cities learned to secure their place in American society by differentiating themselves from Negroes. Nonetheless, black Americans sustained an interest in Christianity; they had taken up the task of “the redemption of a religion that has been disgraced and prostituted in a new world.” The earlier world war had brought some opportunity for citizenship for blacks, for then “the future of democracy was dependent upon [them],” but then the situation was radically reversed after the war. “In my opinion, not until churches, schools, governing boards of all kinds, political, secular and religious, guarantee the Negroes’ right as a citizen to belong and to participate in the common life will he [cease] to be merely an individual, eating, occasionally sleeping, breathing but remaining the perpetual threat and condemnation of democracy. He must be given responsibility and the incentive to exercise a free initiative if life ultimately is to be sane and secure for us all.”
World War II presented a massive challenge to American pacifists in general, and certainly to Thurman. But Thurman was perhaps less agitated intellectually than many of his peers, because he knew a part of his ministry involved counseling young black men destined for the military. He thus maintained pacifist views as a personal philosophy, but, as he explained repeatedly, he was not absolutist in those views. He would not simply withdraw from his responsibilities to assist students and black servicemen and servicewomen, nor would he forsake his role in the “Double V” campaign—victory against racism abroad and at home.
Thurman explained to one correspondent, regarding the war in Asia in 1937, that he did not share her view that if China did not surrender to Japan, it would simply fall under the power of the white man. The correspondent had written to Thurman, “I am a Negro, and I want to see the darker Races become as strong as possible,” especially since “I feel that the white Races have been congenitally united against the dark Races.” Thurman replied politely, but firmly, restating his opposition to imperialism in any form, “whether the imperialist be black, yellow, white, or any other color.” He thus opposed Japanese aggression in China. As a “member of the darker races,” he understood the sympathy with Japan, but since he was foremost a pacifist, “I am opposed to the whole sordid struggle that is going on between China and Japan.” But he understood the point of view of the correspondent—there was, after all, an effort “on the part of the white race as a whole to hold the darker races in subjection if not in complete servitude.” This was in 1937, but it was the first of many letters in which Thurman explained the dilemmas he faced as someone who advised many young black men who were going into the military, while retaining his status as a pacifist and conscientious objector. As he wrote to one correspondent in 1941, “Now that we are at war and the plight of Negroes becomes increasingly more tragic, in the army and out of the army, something like a great blight has settled upon us everywhere. Every waking moment, I am involved in this at one point or another.”
Thurman held no illusions about what might come in the “good war,” or what had resulted from the wars in the past. He viewed all wars as connected to imperialism and exploitation. “If nations for hundreds of years can build their empires out of the blood and vitality of millions of defenseless and so-called backwards peoples,” he wrote in one sermon from 1940, and if they could “exploit and abuse and torture human life and squander their resources until there is nothing left but a mockery of decency and self-respect—if nations can do this as they have done in Europe for several centuries and not be bathed in the blood they themselves have caused to flow up on the earth, then the moral order itself is an illusion. The history of a nation is the judgment of the nation.” The consecrated mystic would seek ways to maintain his light in the darkness, because “Your light becomes darkness when you lack the courage and the will to do what you know to be right.”
In his correspondence with A. J. Muste, the so-called American Gandhi and linchpin of American pacifism for decades, Thurman explained his conflicted position in regards to his pacifism and his service for Fellowship of Reconciliation. In September 1940 Muste asked him to be vice chairman (one of three) of FOR. Thurman accepted but asked him to understand that “my work makes such absolute demands on all of my time and energy that there is simply nothing left” for much additional labor. In particular, as part of the buildup to war, black men and women sought him for counsel, and the “complications of our social order make it very difficult to keep clear of critical conflicts.” And indeed, the letters extant in the Thurman papers show the extent of his correspondence with younger black men involved in the military, including his colleague from the India trip, Edward Carroll, who had been posted to the Alaskan islands. He noted how, when black men went into army camps, they could not simply be left to the devices of white men “whose normally weak scruples as to treatment are almost thoroughly routed by the customary moral disintegration opened by war. And yet I know war is not only futile but is thoroughly and completely evil and diabolical.” Hence his dilemma, and hence his plaintive comment that “what my duty is as a Christian is sometimes very obscure.”
It was a little clearer for Muste, who corresponded frequently with Thurman on plans and ideas for how he could use his time most effectively. At one point, early in 1941, Muste urged Thurman to work on unionizing black workers for Ford in Detroit. Thurman, characteristically, demurred at this kind of direct political commitment. The problem was complex, he told Muste, for blacks saw working for nonunionized Ford as preferable to belonging to unions that previously had excluded them. They had been so “exploited in so many ways that it is hard for them to believe in anybody under any circumstances. Least of all, any group bearing a union label.” Much education would be required to overcome that, he concluded.
Meanwhile, Thurman explored other opportunities prior to moving to San Francisco, the most serious of which was the pastorate of Olivet Baptist Church, the flagship Baptist church in Chicago. He visited there in March of 1941 and preached what was in effect a trial sermon before an appreciative crowd. “I was profoundly moved by the response of the rank and file of the people,” he wrote to his host in Chicago. “I believe that what our people need is to have the religion of Jesus taught to them in order that they may understand what it is that is required of them,” he said. Referring to his style of preaching in contrast to the emotionalism that stereotypically characterized the black pulpit, he noted that “I took a text that belongs to the ‘war horses’ and the ‘whoopers,’ but I wanted to appeal to the minds of the people, being confident that the feelings would take care of themselves.” Thurman was surprised by the “completely positive impression that the experience made upon me” and asked officers of the church to be discreet if they were interested in offering him the pastorate. As it turned out, ironically, the pastorate went to Joseph H. Jackson, a power broker with the black Baptist convention who later became an enemy and obstacle to Martin Luther King and civil rights leaders.
Thurman’s fame as a lecturer continued to grow in the early years of the war. In “Our Underlying Spiritual Unities,” an address delivered in Chicago in the spring of 1941, Thurman expressed some of his deepest hopes for that era, in spite of the darkness engulfing the world at that time. It could seem that men were caught in forces beyond their control, he noted, but closer scrutiny revealed a different story. Something in the human spirit insisted that social change could come, and that the “contradictions of experiences” were temporary rather than ultimate: “Sometimes blindly, sometimes with little hope of vindication, often with wild irrationality, the spirit of man dares to affirm that the ultimate end of man is good.” Such a hope was an anchor in despairing times. And these were such times. Even as man had greater technical and psychological knowledge than ever, and the ability to conquer diseases as never before, so he had “less confidence than ever in the ability of the mind of man to administer to those deeper needs of the human spirit for faith in each other, for hope, for growth, and security.” And the church was deeply culpable. “How dare we undertake to teach reverence to children when we ourselves do not believe in reverence for life in general or life in particular as a valid concept in our kind of world,” Thurman said.
Shall we teach lies to children? … Can we teach trust when we are bound by a vast network of impersonal social relations which create the kind of climate in which trust cannot possibly thrive? Or can we teach trust even as we confess how little trust we have in each other in our cause and in our God? I wonder. What do we mean when we teach the brotherhood of man? When over and over again we give the sanction of our religion and the weight of our practice to those subtle anti-Christian practices expressed in segregated churches, even in segregated graveyards. Can we expect more of the state, of the body politic, of industry than we expect of the church? How can we teach love from behind the great high walls of separateness?
In “The Will to Segregation,” from the summer of 1943, Thurman wrote out (for the magazine Fellowship) one of his most complete statements on the effect of the war on citizenship rights for African Americans. The war had extended new citizenship opportunities to those normally shoved into second-class roles. The nation needed Negroes to participate, to buy bonds, to be drafted, and to contribute to the entire range of the war effort. “It is unfortunate that it took a global war with its concomitant effect upon our national life to give the Negro a fresh sense of significance and power,” he noted ruefully, but such was the case. And as the war made more clear what exactly the practice of democracy would mean, so rose the frustration of African Americans “in direct proportion to the degree to which the meaning of democracy is made clear and definite.”
The war gave the nation the chance to examine, and relinquish, its “will to segregation.” In this section of the piece, Thurman anticipated the arguments that soon were to emerge in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, with its emphasis on the psychological effect of segregation. “Segregation dramatizes a stigma, and becomes a badge of inferiority,” he explained, and those segregated always lost a degree of self-respect and experienced an attack on mental health (surely Thurman had himself in mind here, as his internal rage at being a Negro in a segregated society manifested itself in episodes of depression and physical pain). Those who were the despised of society could not help but despise themselves in turn, and could thus, in equal and opposite reaction, develop tendencies toward their own expressions of chauvinism. But in moments of national crisis, the despised could take opportunities to attack at its root the system that repressed them, a fundamentally “sound instinct of self-preservation” that could lead to constructive ends. On the white side of the color line, the segregation imparted a “false sense of superiority.” It simply could not be otherwise, when the white child grew up suffused within a culture that exalted his kind but degraded others.
For Thurman, the solution lay in freedom of choice. Segregation in the church, for example, came from the exclusion of Negroes. Desegregation would not necessarily effect an immediate drastic change, but freedom of choice would be available and thus the will to segregation broken. Thurman concluded with words anticipating the revolution to come over the next decades. The time would come when “I cannot wait for the thing to work itself out.” With poverty and misery and oppression everywhere, the call for concrete action would not “wait for moral pressure to work its perfect work”; that could be too late. What should be the answer then? Boycotts, noncooperation, or other shocks to the system that could “tear men free from their alignments to the evil way, to free them so that they may be given an immediate sense of acute insecurity and out of the depths of their insecurity be forced to see their kinship with the weak and insecure.” The dominant class would not give up its privilege, and the situation had to be given shock treatment to move men to “apply Christian idealism to un-ideal and unchristian situations.” To Thurman, this was exactly what groups such as Fellowship of Reconciliation and others were doing. But, he warned, “action of this kind requires great discipline of mind, emotions and body to the end that forces may not be released that will do complete violence both to one’s ideals and one’s purpose.” Or, as he put it in another commencement address, at Garrett Bible Institute in Evanston, Illinois, that summer of 1943,
It is your divine assignment to announce that man lives his days under the persistent scrutiny of God—that God is at stake in man’s day. How men treat each other, what they do to the environment in which little children must grow and develop, how they earn their living—all things in the making of which they play a significant part stand bare before the eyes of God. You must live and proclaim a faith that will make men affirm themselves and their fellowmen as children of God. You must lay your lives on the altar of social change so that wherever you are there the Kingdom of God is at hand.
Through his other correspondence, addresses, and personal writings, Thurman continued exploring the connection between the struggle for racial justice at home and the anti-imperialist movement abroad. Thurman had objected strenuously to the people chosen to accompany him on the student delegation to India, Edward and Phenola Carroll, but once there he did his best to give them opportunities. In the years afterward, Thurman kept up an occasional, cordial correspondence with Edward, who ended up in Alaska, as chaplain of one of three black units of the US army during World War II. Carroll found himself in this outpost with “oodles of time to read heavy books, study the Bible, and scrutinize people,” and wrote Thurman inquiring about job prospects at Howard after the war.
More important for our purposes, Carroll referenced an address of Pearl Buck that had criticized a certain provincialism among black American leaders. They were, she thought, not fully able to connect their struggle with the struggles of nonwhite peoples abroad suffering under imperialism. “If I have a criticism to make of the colored people of our country,” Buck said, “it is that they have been too selfish in their interest in equality. They have thought too often of equality only for themselves in this one country—and by so doing they have limited their own struggle and robbed it of size and force and meaning for the whole human race. You are not simply a group of people in one country—you are part of the great war of the peoples for freedom.” Carroll objected, asking Thurman if he agreed that “she doesn’t know that Negro soldiers are thinking broadly concerning enslaved peoples all over the world.” Thurman agreed, noting that Buck “approaches the problem of Negros from her background of work with the Chinese,” which limited her vision.
Buck knew little of the deeply internationalist roots that lay behind the coming civil rights movement, nor of the work of leaders such as Thurman (and many others) in cultivating that. Thurman himself was involved with other educators and black leaders from that era in pressuring President Franklin Roosevelt to press the cause of Indian independence. Thurman felt a special closeness to the cause. They asked FDR to work out a provisional war government for India, leading to independence. “Lead the world boldly to victory,” they demanded, “and to the building of a society which befits the dignity of man.”
Meanwhile, struggles at home occupied Thurman’s attention, including one case in which a Virginia sharecropper was sentenced to death for killing a farmer in a dispute over rights to crops. Kay Beach, a conscientious objector during the war, wrote worriedly to Thurman about the possible consequences of the case. Thurman responded that blacks had been “far too docile,” something confused with “meekness and cowardliness.” Because of this, many had turned away from nonviolent techniques, thinking that this simply worsened this aspect of cowardice. “The problem, therefore,” Thurman said, was to “maintain in non-violent action an increment of courage that would be dissociated from the so called ‘hat in the hand’ attitude.” Thurman had seen the possibilities for violence flare up everywhere. He had traveled through the country in 1942 and saw the same thing everywhere—“sporadic outbursts of violence, meanness, murder, bloodshed, and a great paralysis in the presence of it all.” That made all the more important the work of “small groups in communities all over the United States demonstrating courageous, peaceful action, carefully planned and carefully executed.”
During this time, as well, Thurman appeared frequently before the Young People’s Inter-Racial Fellowship in Philadelphia, a kind of precursor to the Fellowship Church in San Francisco. Its cofounder Marjorie Penney had created the fellowship as part of the Friends’ Young People’s Inter-Racial Fellowship Committee on Race Relations. Thurman was impressed enough to express interest in becoming a full-time pastor if the project turned into a regular congregation. Penney delighted in Thurman’s preaching; he expressed a “Fellowship point of view,” she told him. And no wonder she thought that, given Thurman’s deep immersion in Quaker thought during his time at Haverford College and his talks with Rufus Jones. As well, Thurman corresponded with William Worthy, then the secretary of the Inter-Racial Fellowship. They wrote of the case of William Sutherland, a conscientious objector during the war who, afterward, became an antinuclear activist and active in international radical and anticolonial politics in Africa. Worthy explained to Thurman that they were carrying on Sutherland’s work to build an organization with the goal of “total democracy now.”
Thurman, James Farmer, and others worked deeply through issues of nonviolent protest action during the war. In late 1942, A. Philip Randolph had proposed initiating a Gandhian campaign, one that would entail African Americans not in the armed forces or in particular situations at work to “disobey any law which violates their basic citizenship rights, such as Jim-Crow cars and all forms of discrimination.” But Farmer expressed his worries about the idea, fearing that such a course could lead to massacres of blacks and generally a setback to the nonviolent philosophy. Eventually, Randolph aligned his efforts with Fellowship of Reconciliation and with the Congress of Racial Equality. Thurman explained to Farmer that he too saw dangers in Randolph’s plan, because “non-violent civil disobedience is a technique that presupposes very definite discipline. It is an act of the will arising out of a profound spiritual conviction, which by its very nature is devoid either of ill-will, contempt, or cowardice.” Thurman reflected back on his experience and talks with Gandhi, who had told him that similar plans for civil disobedience in India had collapsed because “the masses of the people were not able to sustain so lofty a creative idea over a time interval of sufficient duration to be practically effective.” Moreover, civil disobedience was a kind of last resort, and black Americans still had access to court challenges. Certainly nonviolent protest and civil disobedience were valuable tools, but they required particular spiritual disciplines and fortitude “so that the masses of the people will not be inspired by fear, revenge, or hate.” It would take a future generation and an expansion of the tactics and philosophy of the civil rights movement to modify Gandhian ideas to fit the black American context. When that happened, Thurman was delighted; but in the 1940s, intellectually he could not truly foresee what was to come when his own ideas came to be applied in a mass movement of nonviolent civil disobedience.
In the early 1940s, Thurman was well placed at Howard, had an adequate salary to support his family, and, despite his increasing conflicts with Howard’s president Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, was happy in his post.
It was, then, a shock to all when he took a new, highly uncertain position with an experimental church in San Francisco, where he would be a copastor initially with a somewhat difficult white Presbyterian. Thurman’s years at Howard had provided him major challenges and epic experiences abroad; now he was to embark on what he himself came to see as his “great adventure”: to strike directly at the heart of the disease of segregation thoroughly embedded in American Christian churches. And yet, nothing brought Thurman more satisfaction in his life than his work with the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. It was one of the first self-consciously multiracial congregations in American history. It began as a sort of experimental mission run by Presbyterians and ended as an experiment in remaking Protestantism in America, in terms of both its interracial attendance and its worship methods.
Thurman’s cosmopolitan vision expressed itself in the church that he served from 1944 to 1953. He took great pride in it, and his face long afterward remained the symbol of the church and its hopes. Thurman also worked to balance church as church, a place where people sought spiritual sustenance, and church as a center for activism and working out visions for a new and better world. He envisioned the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples as a tool to do precisely that. He was ready to lay his life on the altar of social change.