There was kindling in my mind the possibility that this may be the opportunity toward which my life had been moving.
Howard Thurman moved to San Francisco in July of 1944 to pursue his dream of an interracial fellowship. He had visited San Francisco for the first time in the late 1920s and had taken immediately to the city. In his published memoirs, he recalled attending staff meetings of the national YMCA held in California in the early 1930s. One summer, as he recollected, “when I disembarked from the Oakland ferry and walked down Market Street, I had a sense of coming home that I never felt any place else in the world.” The city by the bay was, from that point forward, his real home, even during his years in Boston from 1953 to 1965. Little wonder that he moved back west after his retirement from Boston University and lived out his days on Stockton Street, near the north bay and Coit Tower, where he served as a mentor to a small but influential group of disciples who would go on to careers in the church, in academia, and in social activism.
Thurman moved to San Francisco to pursue what he considered one of the great adventures of his life: to establish an interracial congregation in America “that was capable of cutting across all racial barriers, with a carryover into the common life, a fellowship that would alter the behavior patterns of those involved.” He wrote to a correspondent, “If Christianity cannot do this, then we shall have to find some other faith, and there is no other faith on the horizon.” It could be, he thought, the fulfillment of the vision he had at Khyber Pass. When spirits spoke to him in natural settings, Thurman listened, and remembered.
His work with the Fellowship Church seemed to embody his thoughts in “The Meaning of Commitment,” when he wrote: “Commitment means that it is possible for a man to yield the nerve center of his consent to a purpose or cause, a movement or an ideal, which may be more important to him than whether he lives or dies. The commitment is a self-conscious act of will by which he affirms his identification with that he is committed to. The character of this commitment is determined by that to which the center or core of his consent is given.” Then in the prime of his powers, Thurman wanted to “find out for myself whether or not it is true that experiences of spiritual unity and fellowship are more compelling than the fears and dogmas and prejudices that separate men.”
Leaving Howard University behind, he came to San Francisco during an era of rapid transition. It was a city of 630,000 just before World War II; of those, only about 5,000 were African American. By the end of the war, thanks to westward immigration, approximately 32,000 African Americans lived in the city (and many more lived across the bay, in Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond). The Fillmore District, just west of Van Ness Avenue, grew into a black neighborhood. Many lived in small rooms and apartments recently vacated by Japanese Americans; about 5,000 Japanese Americans from San Francisco ended up in internment camps. One local NAACP leader in San Francisco noted that “Caucasian San Francisco turned to the machinery already at hand for the subjugation of the Oriental and applied it to the Negro,” referring to residential segregation and unequal treatment in nearly all areas of municipal life.
The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, originally located in the Fillmore and thus identified as a congregation in a black neighborhood, eventually found its home in the Russian Hill neighborhood of the city. The eventual results of his great experiment suggest much about what Thurman did and did not accomplish with his dream of a cosmopolitan American Christianity. In answering a query about interracial churches nationally, Thurman had written that “there is an increasing concern within the church for interracial justice and fellowship, but I’m convinced that the church is unwilling to solve this dilemma. It is committed to a revolutionary ethic and diluted into thinking that the revolutionary ethic can be implemented in less than revolutionary terms. It is for this reason that the church has been content with various expressions of the missionary impulse.” His goal, in part, was to change that, to implement the “revolutionary ethic” in a revolutionary way, and in the context of a permanent church deeply embedded in a multicultural environment. His venture in San Francisco failed to produce the long-term results he hoped for, but his life’s work, including his congregation in San Francisco, proved influential in the broader movements of American religion after World War II.
A cautious man generally, and one ever sensitive to financial strain, Thurman was not one to gamble big or act impulsively. And his venture in San Francisco was not an impulsive act.
Months of correspondence preceded the move. The nonviolent activist A. J. Muste served as a sort of intermediary, talking with the Reverend Alfred G. Fisk, chairman of the Department of Psychology and Philosophy at San Francisco State College, about recruiting a black copastor to work for a projected interracial congregation in San Francisco. In 1943, Fisk contacted Thurman about finding a part-time divinity student who might be interested in participating in the experiment. At first, Thurman later said, he did not see a connection between himself and the church, but later realized that San Francisco was the “ideal center” for his religio-racial experiment, “with its varied nationalities, its rich intercultural heritages, and its face resolutely fixed toward the Orient.”
Together with Fisk, Thurman helped plan what soon came to be called the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. It was one of the first self-consciously multiracial congregations in American history. There were predecessors from the nineteenth century, including Tremont Temple in Boston, and more recently, a variety of interracial religious experiments in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other cities. But Thurman had something more permanent in mind. Just before his arrival, Thurman wrote to Fisk that “we must keep in mind constantly that the kind of church that we are building has never been built in the United States before. We must not hamper the creative form that the spirit of God may inspire, by clinging to the patterns with which we are ordinarily familiar.”
Initially, Fisk saw Thurman as someone who could recommend good candidates for an African American copastor. “We are committed to a real equality between the races in all aspects of church organization,” Fisk wrote, including the church boards, the choir, and in all the other normal church activities. “It should be of and by and for both groups,” Fisk wrote to Thurman. The initial post for the copastor would be part time but could grow into full time. “Could you suggest to us the man? We are very anxious not to delay too long, lest we lose the enthusiasm we have now,” he pleaded.
Thurman did indeed have some men in mind, most notably his close friend Herbert King. Thurman recommended King as someone with “wide interracial experience”; and in fact, King had just lost his position as national secretary for the Student Division of the YMCA, a bitter split that angered Thurman and motivated him to seek out other opportunities for his friend. But King was a little uncertain about the proposed post. Aside from the low salary, he wondered if he would have to accord with the position of Fellowship of Reconciliation. Though not a “militarist,” he explained to Fisk, “I am not a Pacifist.” Ultimately, the position was not suited to King.
But more than anyone else, Thurman had himself in mind, initially not so much in a conscious way but in a way that betrayed himself in his answers to Fisk. He felt “excited” about the prospects for the church and wanted to take some time away from Howard University to help out. “It seems to me to be the most significant single step that institutional Christianity is taking in the direction of a really new order for America,” he told Fisk in October of 1943.
Thurman connected his experiences to the opportunities opened up by the war. As always, he was horrified by the war itself but understood that it had created breaches in the racial wall that would not be there otherwise. “It is for this reason that war, despite its terror, wreckage and stark tragedy, makes so great an appeal to men, women and even children,” he told one audience, because it gave the sense of being “engaged in a total enterprise that is meaningful.” For the ordinary individual, war provided a means of counting for something—“his country cares about what he does—all secondary and tertiary citizens becomes citizens, first class.”
In Thurman’s case, the chance to open the Fellowship Church as a national model for a truer fellowship of Christianity was irresistible. It could be, he thought, both the culmination of his life’s work to date and the model and springboard for a national movement that could remake the implicit racial rules that had stifled American Christianity. If such a church could be established in every community, he thought, “the Church itself would once again set in motion those spiritual processes which gave to it its original impetus and power.”
Fisk moved quickly to embrace Thurman’s enthusiasm. After giving him a brief history of the activities to date, he continued, “And now if Howard Thurman could come, it would be a climax in this movement toward the firm establishment of a socially integrated community. What a testimony it would be to ‘the new world a-coming.’” Fisk noted that the church had little to offer yet by way of a solid membership or even a salary. It was probably a place more suited to a seminary student, and even then Fisk would have to tell him, “You must be able to see the invisible, as a prerequisite for coming.” Yet Thurman’s coming might produce the change they hoped to see in the world. Thurman’s star status nationally could draw congregants and thus financial stability for the nascent congregation. “Shall I say that the destiny of San Francisco hangs in your hands,” Fisk asked rhetorically. “I must be realistic—but I hope for the best,” he concluded.
In their correspondence in late 1943, Fisk hoped to persuade Thurman to come by the end of the year. “San Francisco, so it seems to me now, is doomed if you do not come…. There is no one in the nation who could do what you could do here.” But Thurman’s commitments at Howard as well as family matters—the pressures of caring for his mother, a daughter about to go to college, and a musically talented daughter whose lessons had to be paid for—all detained him. Fisk kept trying, but July 1944 would be the earliest possible opportunity, although Thurman said he could possibly visit during the Christmas holidays.
In the meantime, the two corresponded on matters of both grave and minor importance. One was simply the name of the church; some wanted to call it Neighborhood Church, but that didn’t fit with Fisk’s broader conception for the role of the congregation; he hoped for something like Fellowship Church, with a subheading “For All People.” Fisk also noted the real, albeit loose, connection with the Presbyterian denomination (his home) but admitted he did not even know what denominational connection Thurman had. Later the question of denominational connection would create something of a rift between the two. Fisk was a Presbyterian by birth and training, and he understood the church to be the extension of a Presbyterian mission project—the Presbyterians had loaned them the building and money for the budget, he pointed out to Thurman, without even requiring them to put the name “Presbyterian” on the sign outside the church. Yet younger people in the church sought less of a Presbyterian, or even a Christian, commitment, and thus Fisk sought Thurman’s advice and views on the nature of the church affiliation.
Fisk wanted to know where Thurman thought he would fit into the project—as a pastor with a total commitment to the local church or as more of a guest star preacher, speaking to the congregation on occasion but more involved in addressing broader audiences in the area and nationally. Fisk had recruited a young associate pastor to work there temporarily, the Reverend Albert B. Cleage, whose later work in leading black nationalist congregations in Detroit made him well known in the 1960s. But Fisk and Cleage clashed almost immediately, and Cleage’s internship at the church ended before Thurman arrived. Thurman and Cleage apparently never met in person.
Fisk went over various possibilities for halls or auditoriums that the church might rent that could accommodate the hoped-for growth of the congregation. The church found its first home at 1500 Post Street, just west of Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco, in the Fillmore District, then a majority black area, next to the formerly Japanese neighborhood of the city.
Thurman responded in early 1944, outlining his plans for working with the church during what was projected to be a year or two leave of absence from Howard. He hoped to see “how well and intimately two men of different races sharing common leadership of a church can work themselves into the life of a community made up of different races.” Thurman worried about being consumed by other activities outside the congregation, leaving little time for calm reflection. Yet, “On the other hand I do not want to seem to be some kind of ecclesiastical prima donna.” He looked for some medium point between those extremes.
During these months, Thurman kept up his public writing and speaking, including a short essay titled “The White Problem.” He published it in 1944 as part of a series of articles on race, inspired by Gunnar Myrdal’s work An American Dilemma, on the problem of race in America. Thurman explained his philosophical views on personhood succinctly. The race pride and arrogance of the dominant powers that had led to the world war could only be replaced by a “will to brotherhood” that would mean “placing a crown over every man’s head and using all of one’s powers to enable him to grow tall enough to wear it.” The test of true religion, especially Christianity, would be ordering social life on this ideal: “If Christianity cannot resolve racial prejudice, notions of white supremacy and class conflict, it is doomed to become merely an esoteric sect stripped of all power and redemption.”
As Thurman prepared for his move, Fisk kept him informed about the doings of the church, fund-raising possibilities, and problems that already were emerging between his rather more traditional view of the church and those of the Sakai group. This was a small group of radical women who lived in a house owned by a Japanese American who had been detained in a camp during the war. They subscribed to the tenets of the British pacifist Muriel Lester. Thurman later also clashed with these congregants, who had a more explicitly political vision of the role of the church itself.
Fisk already experienced philosophical conflicts with the temporary associate pastor Albert Cleage. Their relationship broke down completely shortly after Cleage arrived. As Fisk saw it, Cleage had alienated congregation members: “He is said to stand for Negro ‘nationalism’—which I really doubt, but he certainly has a defeatist outlook.”
But Cleage’s views were close to Thurman’s views ideologically, although he was more outspokenly political. Much later, Cleage told a biographer that “an interracial church is a monstrosity and an impossibility,” despite the well-meaning attempts of its founders. But at that time, Cleage in fact had asked Angelo Herndon, an African American activist and writer, not to publish a story about his dismissal from the church, for fear that it would impede the work of Thurman, and Thurman expressed his gratitude: “the general opinion is that venture[s] of this sort simply cannot work. Any publicity revealing friction simply jeopardizes the possibility of the fulfillment of the idea.” Later, Thurman told Fisk that he was glad Cleage would stay until late June, just before Thurman’s arrival, as the appearance that Fisk and Cleage simply couldn’t work together would feed suspicions more generally about interracial cooperation. And at the time Cleage indicated that he saw the church as a “live and vital force in the community concerning itself with all problems effecting the rights of the Negro.” In October of 1944, moreover, Cleage had expressed warm support for the church. The next year, in May 1945, Cleage asked Thurman to recommend him as pastor of an interracial church in Detroit: “I am sincerely interested in the inter-racial church idea and feel that its extension during these critical days is a most significant contribution to the building of a more Christian world. My experience in San Francisco might be of value to a new project,” he wrote to Thurman, who provided the recommendation, calling Cleage a “socially minded, intelligent young man.”
What a “more Christian world” entailed, exactly, differed from what Fisk had in mind. Cleage saw the interracialism of the church as a means of addressing the “socio-economic framework” that kept blacks in submission. And he saw opportunities to cooperate with various political groups. As Cleage saw it, the basic weakness of the church was the lack of a “common social philosophy,” because “people cannot work together to accomplish any program, however small, unless they agree in their interpretations of the total world in which they live.” This was not just confined to the new church in San Francisco but was the dilemma of liberal Christianity in the United States more generally: “Liberal Christians everywhere can no longer avoid their total responsibility to society by making pleasant and ineffective gestures in restricted and isolated areas of living.” The true Christian church could not just be a place where people of different races worshiped together but must “function in every area of life as a united liberal force striking fearlessly out against all forms of oppression, bigotry and inequality. Its friends are the friends of human freedom no matter what the banner beneath which they march, and its foes are the oppressors of mankind, even though they march beneath the banner of Christ.”
Thurman straddled the respective visions of Fisk and Cleage; his notion of the church was less traditionalist than Fisk’s and less overtly political than Cleage’s. But that is not to say that he shied away from embracing figures or causes controversial in the public mind. At one point, Thurman had suggested enlisting his friend Paul Robeson, the talented African American singer and political activist (long associated with causes of the Left and with the Communist Party), to give a benefit concert on behalf of the church, a prospect Fisk found “thrilling.” In writing to Robeson to see about the concert, Thurman described for him the vision for the church. “Is it possible to create an island of religious and racial community in a sea of religious and racial tension and animosity?” he wondered. Would it be possible for a white man and a black man to share responsibilities equally, and to minister to all equally “on the basis of their respective gifts rather than their racial affiliations”? Thurman hoped to use the church to explore creative worship possibilities, to host intercultural talks and lectures, and to foster in the children of the congregation an “appreciation of religion as a part of life of other people and their culture as an important increment of democracy.”
At the end of his term at Howard, Thurman went over the demands of the previous year at Rankin Chapel, noting that “to the most casual observer it is clear that the collapse of so many stable things in our world has heightened a deeper sense of social and personal stability in the lives of countless people.” It was there that the “chapel has rendered a service unique in the university and of profoundest significance.” But that too had come at a high cost. As Thurman expressed it, “The demands for counselling grow out of the Sunday Services [and] move in a continuous stream. All of this means that the Dean of the Chapel finds it impossible to get any one single day of complete rest. He has no Sabbath, no day of rest!”
Thurman was to find no rest upon his arrival in San Francisco, either. Although not one to keep personal diaries, Thurman’s reflections on his first two months in the city by the bay suggest much about both his excitement regarding his “bold adventure” and his immediate recognition of the challenges that would face him. Thurman got off the ferry after his cross-country trip, and Fisk, whom he described immediately as “a highly nervous and tense individual with a deep sense of mission and a profound sincerity” but one whose “goal tends to stifle his imagination,” immediately took Thurman to meetings and conferences lasting most of the day. “This is the kind of zeal that Alfred Fisk has,” Thurman commented warily. Perhaps aware of his own propensities toward hyperactivity, Fisk later wrote to Thurman, “I think that I do need your ministry of spiritual quietness.”
Thurman also noted the general impression of the church as a haven for pacifists. But Thurman’s extensive work with black men in the military had given him a different vision. He may have been a pacifist, but he was not an “absolutist.” He was not so “because I do not have the wisdom to be that. The Pacifism of the church should express itself in the quality of life that emanates from the place rather than from pronouncements of one kind or another.” Thurman also sensed early on the problems he was going to have with the Presbyterians. “The church is so completely dominated by secularism that it expects to behave just as business does with reference to investments,” he noted. The Presbyterians expected to exercise control over the congregation, forgetting that this was a “unique venture” in which God’s free and creative spirit should be given ample space to move.
In his first missive back to friends and supporters at Howard University in October 1944 (when he still was on a one-year leave of absence, soon to be a two-year leave), he detailed the kinds of community work he had plunged into in the city, including consultations with the Conference of Jews and Christians, the San Francisco Council of Churches, and other local and national organizations; and for Sue, a whirlwind of activities ranging from the local PTA to serving on the board of directors of the International Institute of San Francisco. Howard’s first daughter, Olive, was set to attend Vassar, and the daughter of Howard and Sue, Anne, pursued her musical talents and found her place in the Junior Workshop of the Fellowship Church. But Thurman also enjoyed being a tourist, visiting Fisherman’s Wharf and Chinatown, describing the two great bridges of the city, Golden Gate Park, art museums, and other delights: “You will have a gay time in this queen of cities,” he assured his friends back east. (Thurman could not have known the double entendre his word choices would imply for readers of later generations.) Significantly, as well, Thurman mentioned Pauli Murray’s pursuit of a law degree at the University of California in Berkeley and Thurgood Marshall’s service in the Port Chicago incident (an explosion at a munitions-loading shipyard north of San Francisco that killed or injured over two hundred African Americans in the navy, after which a group of survivors received court martials for refusing to load ordnance on the ships).
Thurman arrived in San Francisco during the last year of the war and delivered sermons and addresses around California on the subject of wartime conditions and postwar aspirations. He soon had the church involved with the early gatherings of the United Nations, an organization that seemed to embody many of Thurman’s dreams of international cooperation. Dating from the formation of the United Nations, Fellowship Church and its members were actively involved in the work of its constituent organizations, including UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). Twelve members of the Intercultural Workshop, led by Sue Thurman, had attended the UNESCO Plenary Conference in Paris in 1949, including the Fellowship Quintet, under the leadership of Corrine Barrow Williams, the music director of the church. While at the UNESCO house, the delegation had met with Reinhold Niebuhr, a supporter of the church. The group subsequently toured the United States, and Sue Thurman also led workshops on “the Indian in American life.” Meanwhile, the church had been involved with a work put on by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, held at the War Memorial Opera House (location of the meeting where the UN was born), with Howard Thurman serving as a narrator for a musical setting of the Psalms.
Thurman had called listeners to ask the question, “How can a nation engaged in total war provide for the internal survival of those values with which in its most lucid moments it identifies life itself?” The answer would come from those “who are willing to be Apostles of Sensitiveness for the whole nation.” They would be advocates for the “ideals and ideas of democracy,” who would never permit those ideals to be subverted and would resist every effort to be labeled as Reds or subversives. They would keep alive “the flickering torch” that would “remain alight in the postwar years,” keeping the ideals alive even during a wartime when they “seem most irrational and fanciful.” Moreover, minorities were particularly well placed to serve as apostles of sensitiveness, precisely because they were “most directly and immediately exposed to the effects of the breakdown of the democratic ideals in the body politic. The more stigmatized is the minority, the more tragic the plight the keener will be this awareness.” In the end, the apostles of sensitiveness would serve as “nerve ends for the body politic,” exposing to others the “open sores in the democratic national life.”
Just after the war, Thurman further developed his concept of the apostles of sensitiveness, in a sermon delivered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. He preached:
There can be no love among men even on the most intimate levels of their experience, if they are not alive to each other, if they are unable to have a sense of what is vital to, and within, another. This is the authentic basis of respect for personality. In essence it means meeting people where they are, and treating them there as if they were where they ought to be. By so doing, one places a crown over their heads that for the rest of their lives they are trying to grow tall enough to wear. To have a highly developed sense of fact with regard to other people is the searching demand of our faith, if we are to be in the spot which we occupy—Apostles of Sensitiveness.
The apostles would also have a developed sense of alternative visions of life, of freedom. They would know that what they saw around them did not have to be. “However barren may be the manner or the circumstance,” he said, “the growing edge is implicit in the fact of existence and it becomes not only reasonable but also mandatory for the human spirit, brooding creatively over any aspect of experience…. The Apostle of Sensitiveness is profoundly aware of what is vital, quickening and alive and becomes the very point at which God breathes into circumstance, the breath of life.”
For Thurman, even during the days of dramatic developments in public life, the inner life was still determinative. “What he seeks in the world of activity,” he wrote of the spiritual seeker just after the war, “is that of which he is already deeply aware in his inner life. The clue to the outer world of relations is found in the inner world of experience.” The advance of the tools of destruction in the modern world meant that “nothing short of a profound revolution in the basic structure of our thought about human life and human destiny can be of any avail.” The words of Jesus remained revolutionary two thousand years after he lived precisely because so little progress had been made in realizing them; they were “timeless” only because human inaction had made them so.
The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples had a rocky start. Originally connected with, and heavily subsidized by, the Presbyterian Church, the congregation was quickly pushed by Thurman in a different direction. The last thing he wanted was a mission church, and even less so a “neighborhood church,” when it was clear that racial segregation defined American neighborhoods. If the church remained in the Fillmore District of San Francisco (where it originally was located), he realized, it would quickly become a black church, and nonblack congregants would disappear; this would defeat the entire purpose of the enterprise. In any event, the church soon outgrew its original location, and it became necessary to move simply for practical reasons of space. He resisted being made the object of “charity and condescension” by Presbyterians, however well meaning they might be, because in that case “the crippling disease that has dogged the vitality and the health of the Christian enterprise would have overtaken us—the deadly disease of condescension. Very quickly we would have become a dumping ground for uplifters and the challenge of the development of an integrated religious fellowship would have bounced off the conscience and hearts of the people. For herein lies the great temptation: If a man can feel sorry for you, he can very easily absolve himself from dealing with you in any sense as an equal.”
Eventually, Thurman moved the church out of the orbit of the Presbyterians. It became an independent congregation, subsidized in part by a national group of supporters and also by fees from Thurman’s near-constant speaking engagements. Thurman lived on trains as much as he lived in the city itself. His star was in its ascendancy, his presence sought everywhere, his name growing into a celebrity theologian and minister.
As Thurman settled into his new role as pastor of Fellowship Church, first in conjunction with Fisk but soon by himself, he avidly, and uncharacteristically for him, publicized the church by writing articles in journals and periodicals, sending fund-raising form letters to current and potential supporters, and drawing in celebrity supporters such as Paul Robeson and Eleanor Roosevelt. This was exactly the kind of work that led him always to reject roles in academic administration. But for the church, and in support of his great adventure, he struck out on new paths.
The church, he wrote in 1945, less than a year after moving to accept its copastorate, was a dream that had “haunted” him for ten years. He recounted his affiliation with the fellowship congregation of the American Friends Service Committee, the germ of the idea. But the Fellowship Church in San Francisco intended to have a full-time pastor and represented a “creative experiment in interracial and intercultural communion, deriving its inspiration from a spiritual interpretation of the meaning of life and dignity of man.” The church was there to show that the God of life and the God of religion were one. Therefore, relationships between men should be based on warm fellowship rather than “distrust, prejudice, and strife.” He noted as well the importance of placing this experiment within the “framework of historical Protestantism.” To Thurman, if his venture could spread to other cities, then the “Church itself would once again set in motion those spiritual processes which gave to it its original impetus and power…. To those of us who have dreamed of it for years, it represents an authentic growing edge for far-reaching social change in making possible communities of friendly men in a world grown gray with suffering and hate.”
Thurman consistently resisted several models he had seen in the past: the mission church, which invariably became an object of condescension; the social mission or activist institutional church, which could easily lose its spiritual moorings; and the church with no connection to social life, which could easily lose its ethical imperative. His vision was of a church with strong spiritual grounding that would prepare, strengthen, and fill with God’s love those who carried on a struggle for justice in the social world. The church had a social mission, but not one that was direct; it was not the job of the church to organize protests, to become social service agencies, or to directly involve itself in political life. Rather, as Thurman saw it, individuals in the thick of the struggle should have a place to “be able to find renewal and fresh courage in the spiritual resources of the church…. The true genius of the church was revealed by what it symbolized as a beachhead in society in terms of community, and as an inspiration to the solitary individual to put his weight on the side of a society in which no person need be afraid.”
By 1949, the church numbered about 285 members, with whites composing about 60 percent of the total; a few years later, whites made up about half, and blacks about 40 percent, of its 345 members. Some congregants envisioned the church as a center for social activism and protest, more so than was ever the case with Thurman. The church became Thurman’s own, a kind of trial project for his ideas. The initial commitment spoke of congregants seeking “after a vital interpretation of God as revealed in Jesus of Nazareth whose fellowship with God was the foundation of his fellowship with men,” and of people desiring “to have a part in the unfolding of the ideal of Christian fellowship through the union of men and women of varying national, cultural, racial, or creedal heritage in church communion.”
The black press publicized Fellowship Church as well. During a meeting of the UN Conference on International Organizations, the church brought in speakers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, and others. The church also hosted a dinner for black journalists who were there to cover the opening meetings of what would become the UN; Sue Thurman, representing the National Council of Negro Women, was one of several unofficial delegates to the founding meeting. Characteristically for her, she registered her dissatisfaction with the representation of people of color in the new organization, and the way imperial powers had sought to control the proceedings.
A reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American wrote of how the church contrasted with other experiments, communal ventures, and charismatic messiah figures that had arisen in black life:
Dr. Thurman, working with a white pastor, is operating a church in which the race question has been abolished. The important thing is that the members are not cultists or fanatics, or screwballs—just plain everyday substantial citizens from all walks of life who believe in cooperation and practical Christianity. There are no mystic rites. Nobody thinks he’s God, there are no angels and nobody pretends to be blessed with eternal life. This takes the stigma off of interracial mixing. The divisionists have cleverly perpetuated the idea in America that if white and colored work together they are members of the lunatic fringe. This keeps a lot of decent people in the same old rut.
Here, in praising Fellowship Church, the journalist took a swipe at the various new religious movements (most notably Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement), generally portrayed as “cults” in both the white and African American press. Thurman’s intellectual sheen and emphasis on high culture in services stood in contrast to other marginalized groups, and drew warm praise for that.
A year into his tenure at the church, Thurman moved to separate it from its Presbyterian affiliation, sending a polite but firm letter of his intention to the denomination’s Board of National Missions in July 1945. Before then, Thurman had met with Jacob A. Long, who managed urban mission work for the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the two determined that their visions were simply not reconcilable. Long wanted a neighborhood church serving a very particular (and largely African American) local community; Thurman envisioned something different. Long told Thurman that the Presbyterians could not support independent projects, and that he wished the Fellowship Church could have maintained its “community character” even while retaining an affiliation with the denominational organization. Thurman replied, in August 1945, that the church sought to establish an independent identity, outside the bounds of a mission or neighborhood church. There would come a time, he noted, when “internally the interracial and intercultural core of our Church is so well established that we can do a community job without our becoming a racial Church,” but he implied that time had not yet come.
The pride Thurman took in his work is evident in his letter to Eleanor Roosevelt in March 1946, documenting the growth and progress of the church from a small group of 35 when he first arrived to a racially diverse group of 150 less than two years later, now organized permanently “as an Interdenominational, interracial, as well as intercultural Church.” He saw that racially diverse groups could worship together harmoniously, and this spirit could carry over into community life: “This is of the profoundest significance both for Democracy and for Christianity.”
Through these years, Thurman kept up his correspondence with Mary McLeod Bethune, his lifelong friend and perhaps the person he admired the most outside of his own family. In one letter from 1950, in which he hoped Bethune could arrange for a fund-raising dinner in Washington, DC, for the church, he made known his concern about the seeming distancing from the church by Bethune’s friend Eleanor Roosevelt. “When it was in the dream stage, she was very greatly interested and enthusiastic and became one of our first National Members,” he wrote to Bethune, but he now found Mrs. Roosevelt’s attitude puzzling. What Eleanor Roosevelt stood for in the United Nations was precisely what the church was doing at the grassroots level. Perhaps if she had a greater awareness “of our experience here,” he suggested, it would strengthen the former First Lady “as she undertakes the same kind of work project on an international and world-wide scale.” This particular entreaty, however, proved unsuccessful.
The same war that provided opportunities also extracted its cost from Thurman. As the war ended and black soldiers returned, seeking education and opportunity, Howard University boomed in enrollment. Thurman had to choose whether to resign his post at Howard permanently or to return. He tried gamely to persuade President Mordecai Wyatt Johnson to understand that he could combine both sets of work. They could in fact work in synergy, he thought, with Fellowship Church operating both for the good of the national church community and for Howard University. Earlier, he had written to Johnson that “when I secured my leave from Howard I did not feel that my work there had been completed.” He hoped to continue his ministry to returning war veterans, feeding their desire for deeper religious experience. But Johnson would have none of it. He told Thurman to make his choice.
Pulled between his various plans and desires, his love for Howard University and his desire to do something revolutionary within the world of American Christianity, Thurman in 1946 had to commit his energies fully. Johnson apparently had implied that Thurman’s frequent speaking engagements and travels had made him less central to life at the university; he resented the insinuation, pointing proudly to his building up the program at Rankin Chapel over twelve years, his work through innumerable nights and weekends, and the connection of his speaking and work at other churches and universities with fertilizing religious life at Howard (including his fostering of student exchanges, for example). But in April 1946, Johnson wrote to inform Thurman that all leaves of absence would end by June. Thurman would need to return to Howard full time or resign. This was not due to any lack of regard for the work Thurman was conducting with the Fellowship Church, but simply because the demands of educating the postwar students required “the full-time attention of the ablest personnel we can secure.”
Johnson’s position made perfect sense; the end of the war and the GI Bill created a massive demand for college education, and most black students had a limited selection of universities that would accept them. That was not how Thurman saw it. Angered and frustrated, Thurman sent his letter of resignation on May 13 directly to Johnson, adding that he did so “with emotional lacerations and a deep sense of personal loss.” Thurman genuinely loved Howard University; “the students and faculty are a part of the very fiber of my life,” he noted, and he regretted that the actions of the trustees had made it impossible for him to split his time between his church in San Francisco and Howard. In a separate letter to the chair of the Department of Religion at Howard, he noted his sense of a “deep urgency and an exhilaration” coming from his decision to sever his ties but regretted that he would not be able to use Howard to cultivate possible ministerial candidates to carry on his work of leading institutions such as the Fellowship Church. In another letter to a friend, he described his decision as the most “crucial” one of his life, “because it means burning bridges behind and sailing forth in the open independence of the sea. There is a deep sense of quiet confidence that has come over me now.” This joined the loss of his first wife as Thurman’s emotionally crucial turning points as an adult.
Around the same time as his resignation from Howard, in the summer of 1946, came the separation from Alfred Fisk and the end of the experiment of copastoring the congregation in San Francisco. Fisk wrote to Thurman that August, indicating his dissatisfaction with the Fellowship Church as a place for his family, most particularly for its lack of any particular family programs. He criticized the lack of any significant ceremony for joining the church and becoming a Christian. That was a spiritual event that should be marked, he thought, with a ceremony at least as significant as that of becoming a United States citizen. Fisk had criticized “churchianity,” but at the same time he had lived his life within the organized church and still felt it could greatly influence and benefit society. He had wanted to stay with the church because of his “earnest commitment to interracial brotherhood,” but his commitment to his family came first. Fisk seemed to experience the same “emotional laceration” at the break as Thurman experienced with his resignation from Howard. Later, Thurman spoke warmly about Fisk, but the two had no real personal interaction following Fisk’s withdrawal from the church. In any event, it seems likely that Fisk simply recognized that Thurman was the star, and there was not that much of a place for him as copastor.
Starting in 1947, the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples was Thurman’s own. He was the star attraction as preacher, and while the church was not that large in size, its influence was outsized. Sue, meanwhile, pioneered in developing intercultural education in the church educational curriculum, continued assembling an impressive doll collection from around the world, and led a group of church members on an international excursion to participate in one of the first UNESCO meetings in Paris in 1949. Sue also collected materials related to African American history in California, later to become part of her work Pioneers of Negro Origin in California, and kept up a steady correspondence and interaction with an international community interested in the church’s doings. Sue continued her activism within the National Council of Negro Women and in the Aframerican Women’s Journal, and in 1947 participated in the Primero Congreso Interamericano de Mujeres (First Inter-American Congress of Women) in Guatemala City, where the assembled women organized on behalf of peace, justice, and international women’s rights. Sue shared Howard’s internationalist vision of the postwar world but developed her own black feminist thinking that went beyond Howard’s relatively few public considerations of questions of gender equality.
A 1947 pamphlet produced by the church gave one of the earliest accounts of its conception and development, from both Thurman’s and Fisk’s perspectives. Thurman’s part, subtitled “The Historical Perspective,” provides one of his many accounts of the “Khyber Pass Experience” in the winter of 1936, at the end of the journey to India. He had seen then, more clearly than ever before, that there was a “fundamental contradiction that lay like a malignant growth at the heart of the Christian movement as it had expressed itself in our own country,” making the church “one of the strongest bulwarks in American life defending and exemplifying racial prejudice and the discrimination resulting therefrom.” Christian and Hindu Indian students reminded the two founders forcefully of that fact. At the same time, Thurman became interested in the experiment in interracial congregations led by Marjorie Penney in Philadelphia but ultimately concluded that it “did not seem to meet the situation that was at the heart of the problem.”
Upon his return from India, Thurman had engaged in experiments in creative worship at Rankin Chapel at Howard, testing not only new worship patterns but also an idea: the “growing conviction that if the Ideal is big enough and the commitment of implementation sufficiently profound, differences of race or color become superficial and trivial.” And, after all, “What bigger ideal could there be than the deepening of an experience of the living God through intercreedal, interracial and intercultural worship and the practical influence of this experience in the stream of life?”
That set the backdrop for Thurman’s response to A. J. Muste and then to Alfred Fisk in 1943, and his move to the city in 1944. Thurman came determined not to fall into certain traps that historically had hampered the work of American churches. The location of the church itself was one; a church committed to desegregation, placed in a normally segregated American neighborhood, would simply replicate the very patterns that it was supposed to eradicate. Moreover, Thurman expressed his contempt for turning the church into a sort of community settlement house, “for this would merely make of the church a kind of ‘dumping ground’ for uplift and sacrificial helpfulness that often is terribly degrading to the personalities of all the people involved.” Thurman’s vision also involved being related to a historic Christian denomination but not being a direct church of that denomination. The Presbyterians provided crucial early support, without which the church could not have survived, but Thurman’s dream was that a denomination could see the church as the “growing edge of a radical implementation of the Christian ideal in human relations,” an ideal not replicable at present within the framework of historic American denominations. And thus the growing edge would serve as “both a challenge and as a leaven within the church itself.” But that proved to be impossible, the failure itself showing the “historic dilemma” of race and American Protestantism.
As Thurman conceived it, the church should be a church, with a focus on worship, choral singing, and opportunities for encounters with God. The fact that the church was “born essentially in the womb of a social issue” created difficulties in maintaining its spiritual center: “the social issue is so acute that it required tremendous care to vouchsafe the religious genius.” Thus, Thurman empowered study groups in the church to focus on “an understanding of mystical religion as the dynamic for such action.” Ultimately, the dream was to “combine social awareness, spiritual motivation, and creative fellowship in a single unifying experience.” It was not a church of just whites and blacks, or a neighborhood church, but one that sought to achieve “authentic fellowship across denominational, class, cultural, and racial lines,” with a local and national membership, associate members, and support from friends “whose concern for the ideal to which we are dedicated is greater than the tendency to separateness and exclusiveness that is the curse of America and so often the disgrace of Christianity.”
Toward the end of his term at Fellowship Church, a longtime friend of Thurman’s, Dorothy Henderson, expressed her enthusiasm for Thurman’s project and her qualms about how much could be accomplished within the world of organized religion. Thurman had written her that “it is important that we keep the frontiers moving lest we be overtaken by normalcy.” Henderson responded, “This community idea is a tremendous one, for it is at this point that the church (so-called) has delighted itself with theories and generalities thus avoiding the necessity of even taking very definite stands on anything. We worship very happily in our little cloisters; then feel pretty free to adjust all over the place when we come out into the really big test of community living. This has always been my own big concern—but any effort of a lone individual seems pretty futile in the face of the well-oiled machine of organized religion.” She worried too about the “delicate transference” involved when a figure such as Thurman leaves, for “when a movement is built around a personality, it is a difficult time for the movement when power moves from that one to others.” Her forecast proved accurate.
In 1951, Harold E. Fey of the Christian Century magazine provided one of the most complete summaries of the history of Fellowship Church and snapshots of the present-day organization. Fey trumpeted a grandiose vision for Thurman’s dream: “Today Gabriel stands where the Pacific Ocean, no longer a barrier but a bridge between peoples of different races, rolls through the Golden Gate. His trumpet is ready to sound.” While raising some reservations and criticisms, Fey championed Thurman’s fundamental idea that such an interracial and intercultural fellowship could ultimately “exert an influence out of all proportion to the size and wealth of its membership,” precisely what Thurman himself had projected. And it would do so not as a self-conscious vehicle of social justice achieved through politics, but as something that would flow “directly from the power released in the lives of its members through Christian faith.” That would take time to catch on, the more so, Fey said, because the church refused to “magnify its most distinctive characteristic into its one reason for existence. Its main quest is for spiritual illumination rather than to crusade against segregation or anything else.” The church sought to magnify “that of God in every man.”
Fey quoted from the Growing Edge, the church’s newsletter, to give Thurman’s firsthand views of his work. As Thurman reflected on his decision to take up the interracial project in San Francisco, he sought some understanding of why the church had made so little impact on the “tensions and the tragedies of human relations.” He wondered why the church was the “chief of sinners in the matter of racial separateness and prejudice”? While in India, he determined that he would eventually have to “leave the relative particularism of an academic atmosphere and move into a situation in an environment not under control where an honest attempt could be made to test the validity of the religious faith of men of good will.” When he was contacted about the San Francisco opportunity, he knew this was it, “if I dared to accept it”; it was precisely the “kind of opening for which we had hoped and prayed.” And the result was that he “sallied forth without any assurance beyond a dream in my heart and mind and a small group with which to work.”
In his own Quaker-like way, Thurman sought “the inner light of personal guidance and power,” rather than pressing people directly or overdramatizing the message. Fey commented: “He has reverence for personality, but not much for the mass psychology of the typical American Christian group.” He sought to give people a complete Christian experience, with much emphasis on music and the arts. Thurman reflected in everything he did, the article astutely emphasized, “the powerful influences of his Baptist and Quaker heritages, in which quietism continually struggles with a revolutionary urge to direct action.” Thurman challenged the church to confront the fact that American Christianity had betrayed the religion of Jesus, with the result that the one place “in which normal free contacts might be most naturally established and in which the relation of the individual to his God should take priority over conditions of class, race, power, status, wealth or the like—this place is one of the chief instruments for guaranteeing barriers.”
Thurman and Fisk both were involved in ministry to Japanese Americans and integrated Asians into the congregation. In California during the war, Thurman later wrote in his work Luminous Darkness, one saw “billboard caricatures of the Japanese: grotesque faces, huge buck teeth, large dark-rimmed thick-lensed eyeglasses. The point was, in effect, to read the Japanese out of the human race; they were construed as monsters and as such stood in immediate candidacy for destruction. They were so defined as to be placed in a category to which ordinary decent behavior did not apply…. It was open season for their potential extermination.”
The Fellowship Church took on the project of reintegrating Japanese Americans into San Francisco society. In January 1945, the copastors held a dinner honoring returning Japanese Americans (many returning from internment camps), and the church attracted a few prominent local Japanese Americans to be members. In May 1947, Thurman wrote to James Baker, a Methodist minister and bishop in the state, about acquiring the services of Hiroshi John Yamashita, a second-generation Japanese American who served Methodist congregations in California. “Because of the general climate on the Pacific Coast that in some ways is not congenial to Japanese Americans,” he told Baker, “we are particularly anxious to provide an experience of complete integration within our religious fellowship for Japanese Americans on all levels of participation in what we are doing.” Thurman sought to place a Japanese American in a position of religious leadership in interracial congregations, after Japanese Americans had sustained “a profound injury both spiritually and psychologically from which it is extraordinarily difficult for them to emerge with some measure of vitality and health as American citizens.” He did not succeed in securing Yamashita as a pastor, but the Japanese American Methodist frequently supplied its pulpit during Thurman’s absences. That provided an opportunity, Thurman said, for Yamashita to “give wings to his thoughts and his spirit that in the very nature of the case, he cannot experience in a segregated church.”
Meanwhile, Thurman observed patterns of discriminatory behavior against African Americans in San Francisco, a city where black workers had been packed into small neighborhoods, without adequate social services. When Thurman became aware of San Francisco public buses passing up black patrons, he complained to the superintendent of transportation in the city, who thanked him for the note and indicated that the crew could be disciplined if the charges bore themselves out. Again, despite his reputation as a mystic floating above social life, Thurman for decades directed his efforts against racist practices at local officials and institutions. He looked to break racial barriers where he could.
During these same years, he had to consider how his daughters Olive and Anne would fare as black women in a racist society, given the unusually welcoming environments in which they had lived. Olive had graduated from Vassar in 1948, and Anne was soon to be the first black graduate from the storied Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, the oldest and most renowned girls’ preparatory school in the country; the school housed a number of supporters of the Fellowship School. Later, Thurman wrote a friend of his plans to have Anne spend some weeks in the summer at Fisk University (a historically black college in Nashville, where W. E. B. Du Bois had once taught) in a seminar about black life. Having effectively grown up in the interracial cocoon of the Fellowship Church, Anne would need some grounding in the racial realities of everyday American life, apart from the idealistic congregation they had created in San Francisco. “This land of ours,” Thurman explained, “is still a bitter place for a sensitive Negro man or woman,” and lacking a training in that would leave her “vulnerable to the poison arrows of a socially sick environment that expresses itself in gross and refined hostilities.” The world of the Fellowship Church extended only so far; the world of hatred, violence, and racism lurked just beyond its doors.
Thurman doubtless was also thinking of the experience of his mother. She passed away in his home on May 2, 1950, after having been too frightened to stay at the hospital associated with Stanford University despite being cared for there by Thurman’s own personal physician. Alice Thurman Sams had lived the life of the dispossessed, never fully able to escape its psychology that her son had so brilliantly dissected and analyzed.
Thurman had a long history of close and intellectually intense relations with white mentors and advisers, but there was always a veil between them. Thurman did not use the term “double consciousness” exactly as Du Bois had, but he meant much the same when he reflected on some of these experiences. He often referred to one of his final conversations with George Cross, in which the noted theologian and his esteemed professor at Rochester had urged him to “attend to timeless issues of the human spirit,” without recognizing the kind of white privilege implicit in such a statement.
But on occasion, Thurman found places of fellowship with whites that transcended race. Perhaps his most important relationship in this regard was with George “Shorty” Collins. A graduate of the University of California in 1915, Collins had served in World War I. After seeing its horrors, he came home a committed pacifist, joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and became its southern field secretary in 1923. In that capacity, he traveled to universities in the South to advocate for FOR’s position, and when visiting Morehouse College impressed the younger Thurman. The two did not see each other in person often over the years, but they always were friends. Collins had a magnetic personality and an ability to find the right advice or reading suggestion for people. Collins introduced the young nature mystic Thurman to the work of Olive Schreiner, his lifelong muse and influence.
In 1951, Thurman wrote Collins, after having missed seeing him in person in California, to thank him for what he had meant in Thurman’s life. He still remembered when Collins had “invaded” the South in the early 1920s and “established little islands of understanding and fellowship in a very stormy and turbulent sea of racial tension.” What Thurman especially appreciated was that Collins had done that without resorting to the kinds of paternalism that affected Thurman’s relationship with many other white mentors. Collins did so “with a smile and a winsomeness and great directness.” Collins acted as if he did not know how far outside of the mainstream of white Americans he was; that is what gave students confidence in him—his manner of “simple naturalness.” It laid the groundwork for “many creative expressions of goodwill” in the years to come. When Thurman found whites with whom he felt a sense of affinity and spiritual kinship, he treasured their friendship and spirit. The fact that it happened so infrequently, even with fellow Christians, suggested how much the apostle of sensitiveness still lived behind the veil.
On occasion, albeit not often, Thurman’s writings took a political turn, as in his essay “The Fascist Masquerade” from the period just after World War II. A supporter of Henry Wallace–style left-progressive politics, Thurman viewed with alarm the rise of right-wing fascist groups. He deplored in particular their association with the term “Christian.” “To be American is to appeal to pride of country, and, what is more important, pride of section that gives to the average individual a certain sense of separateness…. To be a Christian American is to be but less than an angel,” he wrote of one such organization based in Houston, Texas. What explained the appeal of such groups? One attraction, Thurman posited, was simply the military style of such organizations and the sense of urgency they brought to their tasks; such was the genius of Father Coughlin, the “radio priest” who organized his listeners to act on behalf of his version of a quasi-Catholic fascism. The groups also inspired sacrifice and a “sense of collective destiny.” They were also empowered by the fact that large groups of alleged Christians nationally “have stood, and, at present, stand on the side of a theory of inequality among men that causes the Church to practice in its own body some of the most vicious forms of racial prejudice.” And so, hate groups had established “squatter’s rights in the minds of believers because there has been no adequate teaching on the meaning of the faith in terms of human dignity and human worth.” The church had the great responsibility of teaching this great truth. In not doing that, it had tacitly given support to fascist-style pseudo-Christian movements.
The demands of the state, the realities of having to advise people on whether to sign loyalty oaths, and the general atmosphere of America in the late 1940s and early 1950s left Thurman in delicate situations. For example, one church member sought his advice on involving the church with the Civil Rights Congress, a group that had some connections with the Communist Party. Thurman was deeply sympathetic to the goals of the Congress, but not at the expense of filling his church pews with government agents, surveilling the activities of the potential members or activists in the Congress. Neither did he approve of organizations that were not fully forthcoming with their allies and allegiances. “My own theory is that the channels through which I work must be channels in which I have abiding confidence,” he wrote to a church member. He felt the same about the California Labor Council—ironically, precisely the kind of group that Albert Cleage had encouraged in the church during his brief internship prior to Thurman’s arrival, and the focus of much animosity between him and the cofounder of the church, Alfred Fisk. But for Thurman, direct involvement of the church in potentially controversial groups ill fit the mission he saw for the congregation. Involvement with organizations branded as fronts of communism or directly involved with it, he told the congregation in 1948, would require the church to be allied either with its advocates or with red-baiters on the other side. And in either case, “we find our tongues tied.”
Thurman continued preaching for years on the state of the postwar world and maintained periodic contacts with those he had met in India. A member of an international Christian organization wrote to him in 1952, remembering his time there and his talks on improving the relationship between India and America. He requested that Thurman write an article for the group’s publication about black-white relationships in America: “I remember you telling us, particularly Mrs. Thurman, that the position was unfortunate. She was telling this with considerable feeling.” He hoped the war might have improved matters, but “we are still reading in the papers about lynchings going on here and there in your country though not in the old extensive style. Still the problem seems to remain there.”
Like everyone else who had paid careful attention to India, Thurman was devastated by the news of Mahatma Gandhi’s murder on January 30, 1948, just six months after India gained its independence. The passing gave Thurman a chance to reflect on the meaning of Gandhi’s life. He did so in a sermon/eulogy preached before the Fellowship Church in February 1948 (the eulogy was a form in which Thurman excelled). Thurman told the congregation of his conversation with Gandhi, and in particular his query about why the ideal of nonviolence had failed. Gandhi had replied that ahimsa could not function before the masses had been disciplined and trained to understand it profoundly.
But they could not, for two reasons. One, they had more basic physical needs that outstripped any idealistic expression of this philosophical ideal. And so Gandhi had withdrawn from some political activity, hoping to redeem Hinduism. He returned to the spinning wheel, hoping that by taking care of the “elemental physical basis” of life he could provide a base for a new “moral and spiritual vitality.”
The second reason, the one that surprised Thurman, was not that the British had broken the self-respect of Indians but rather the brute force of untouchability within Hinduism. Gandhi started by changing their names from outcasts or untouchables to Harijans, a word that meant “child of God.” Gandhi had said, according to Thurman, “if I can make a caste Hindu call an outcast a Child of God, every day, I will create finally the kind of moral problem deep within his spirit that cannot be resolved until he changes his attitude towards him.” And so Gandhi had seen, ultimately, that “peace is the byproduct of righteousness, of social and economic justice.” If the peace advocate could work for that justice, for a society where men could live without fear, then (and only then) could the concept of peace spread to nation-states and the possibilities of international comity exist. Such a new order of human relations started on one’s own street.
For Thurman, this could be the great contribution of Christianity to India, that the spirit of Christianity, the religion of Jesus, could “work towards the release and the redemption of the untouchable.” But the “greatest handicap” to the spread of the word of Jesus, Gandhi told Thurman, was simple: “Christianity.” Thurman would carry that distinction—the religion of Jesus versus organized Christianity—throughout his life. Thurman concluded by comparing Gandhi with Jesus. Gandhi had told Thurman of his ability to wait, that he was not in a hurry, because “God cannot be defeated in India.” Gandhi’s expressions of love for all put him among the “great redeemers of the human race,” along with Jesus, because Jesus also believed that true liberation from oppressive states came from loving the oppressor. Because he projected that idea to his followers, “there was let loose on this planet, a faith in the possibility of love that provided a psychological and social climate in which Gandhi could do his work.” Without Jesus, Gandhi simply would have been slaughtered, “but because of what Jesus had thought and taught, but more important released in the climate of life, men had adjusted themselves to the notion of the possibility of Ahimsa.” And so, although Gandhi now was dead and violence had won a battle, he remained confident that “only love will win the war.”
In March 1949 Thurman gave four lectures to the YWCA, then meeting in San Francisco, analyzing the America of the Cold War. The challenge posed by Axis totalitarianism had been stark, precisely because the fascists were so clear in their goals and aims—they sought a “new order based upon the doctrine of the inequality of man,” and that doctrine empowered their vision of a collective destiny. The democracies had to respond with a unified collective statement, which response was hindered by the difficulties they faced, for example, in disagreements between Roosevelt and Churchill over the Atlantic Charter and the future of colonialism. And now the same fears had been replaced by paranoia about Russian communism, something that arose “in direct proportion to our lack of faith in democracy.”
The task of the day was to find a “common faith to guarantee the unity of the race.” And to learn a fundamental principle—“the experience of unity is more compelling than the dogmas and prejudices that tend to divide.” The experience of unity, of wholeness, was “the very essence of stability, of peace of mind, of security within. God is one—life is one. There are no divisions in the world except those man has instituted…. The human creation achieves a wholeness that relaxes tension, that transcends turmoil and that makes for tranquility.” As always for Thurman, the apparent contradictions of life, so evident on the surface, masked deeper unities below.
Thurman’s years in San Francisco, especially the late 1940s, also coincided with the flourishing of his career as a published author. He had long been interested in publishing his work (his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding) and had queried some publishers before and issued mimeographed and more informally produced copies of his sermons. In the later 1940s, however, his career as a national lecturer took off with the Ingersoll Lectures on Immortality, delivered at Harvard University in April 1947. The publication of those lectures later as The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death gave him a national audience beyond the smaller circle of friends, congregants, and admirers who formerly had followed him. And they clearly fueled Thurman’s desire to write. During the next two decades he published more than twenty books, many based on sermon collections or formal lectures delivered for churches or universities. For example, Thurman gave an address titled “The Genius of Democracy” to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in June 1947. Earlier he wrote to its executive secretary that his views on democracy were those of an American citizen, not just those of a Negro, and he wished to speak on that subject in general terms (presumably the original request was for a talk on a racial theme).
Thurman took pride in, and at times (uncharacteristically for him) boasted about, his successes in public speaking, often mentioning the standing ovations and letters of commendation he received. After his appearance before the Commonwealth Club, as well, he expressed his pleasure at his reception, noting that “the name Fellowship Church is becoming a part of the vocabulary of San Francisco. This is very much in order because the plans that we have call for a first mortgage on the city.” The poor young black boy from Florida was enjoying his bit of national fame from his experiment in San Francisco.
Thurman’s sermons during his tenure at the Fellowship Church deepened the themes he had preached on for years at Howard. In “The Tragic Sense of Life,” from late November 1948, for example, Thurman explored the gulf between our highest aspirations and our actual struggles. Although not generally a fan of the apostle Paul, Thurman here explored many of the same quandaries expressed in the New Testament: why we do the things we don’t want to do and do not pursue the things we most desire for ourselves. This gulf produced in us a “restlessness,” Thurman said, a desire to be further along than we were. What did this restlessness mean? “The gulf between what I saw and what I am able to achieve, the gulf that is never quite filled in,” Thurman said, had this religious significance: “that man finds that he can never be complete in himself, that life isn’t and can never be complete in itself, that the meaning of all of the struggling of life is that life is trying to spell out an ultimate meaning.” Thurman concluded with words that in a sense summed up his own life’s journey: “Life is trying to learn how to say ‘God.’” And because of that, he argued, “all religions, in the last analysis, are trying to say the same thing.” Thurman here produced his own twentieth-century version of nineteenth-century Transcendentalism.
Thurman publicized the philosophical quests of the church in its newsletter, which he initiated in 1949, the Growing Edge. He had long since taken to that phrase, something he derived from his nature mysticism and his love for the nature writings of Schreiner. He turned the phrase into the title of the church’s publication, meant for both a local and a national audience. For him, the phrase signified, as expressed by Thurman scholar Walter Fluker, “a sign of the purposiveness of life, always surmounting problems, always rising to new levels.” The “growing edge” of something was the part of the organism “striving to come to its own realization.” The growing edge was the unrealized potential that was “symbolic of life, a creative manifestation of life. Life seems, at its heart, to be irritation, some form of agitation that is trying to reveal a hidden something not disclosed.”
For Thurman, the meaning was both biological and social; as was often the case in his writings, he drew from life science metaphors (even if, sometimes, from outdated biological concepts). He saw in those ideas a means to reflect on how to overcome deep social evils. Beyond the hatred and sin and violence of everyday life, there was something there, the growing edge, the potentiality of overcoming social systems of hatred. For Thurman, the fascinating paradox of life was that “it is working always for fulfillment, transcending the status quo, transcending that which is, in anticipation of that which is not. So it becomes symbolic of growth, and the destiny of the growing edge is finally to ‘get there.’” But once “there,” “it shoots past the goal to the next thing. So the paradox is that the growing edge is always working to be finished, to stop being a growing edge, to settle down and be; and yet the very nature of the growing edge makes that state forever impossible…. Nature is always finally against that which has arrived, that which is ripe, that which has completed itself.”
Here Thurman reflected philosophically on his own life, a constant set of explorations, never quite finished. As well, the passage touches on his love for the mystical derived from metaphors of nature. “I must always be working toward completing something that I never complete; for if I complete it, life is through with me,” he concluded.
The same held true for his vision of Fellowship Church, perfectly represented in the title of its newsletter. Thurman hoped it could be a place where interracial and intercultural religious experience would simply be accepted as “rational and normal,” and proven so because in living together as a congregation “we can demonstrate it and feed our faith with the facts of our experience.” If they could do this, then God’s presence would “keep our minds always churning with ideas that have not been tried, with dreams that have not been fulfilled, with hopes that stagger us, but yet will not let us alone.”
In “Love Your Enemy,” another sermon from this era, Thurman thought deeply about how to overcome “the necessity” of hatred. “God expects men to be like him,” he began. This is incredible, because “the creative mind and spirit of God dares to assume that it is within the range of possibility for human life that man shall become and shall behave and perform like God.” This gave a particularly “radical interpretation” to the “meaning of dignity and human worth.” People were of infinite worth, and thus worthy of respect, even if they were enemies. “I have in myself a basic confidence that there is in me that which is holy and divine and beautiful,” which is easy to extend to friends. But how was it possible to do so with an enemy who had stepped outside our sense of “oneness and understanding,” and thus outside our compass of “any sense of moral obligation or moral responsibility or moral relationship to him.” Thurman here reflected back on his conception of whites as a boy, as people who simply existed, entirely outside of his moral universe.
Jesus did so by putting enemies under the umbrella of their own worth, an action that could lead them to understand their own deeds and complicity in oppression. That was the lesson of Jesus and the tax collector. But could that be applied to an entire system of oppression; could an early Christian love Rome, the “great impersonal enemy,” for example? The same principle applied, Thurman argued. Jesus allowed a person to see how to come out from under “Roman necessity” and become just a person: “This centurion thus became one with all of the mass of human beings who have experienced great affection and tremendous frustration in fulfillment of it. And when that happened, Jesus saw no longer just a Roman centurion, no longer even a Roman at all, but a human spirit emancipated by selfless love.” And so Jesus taught us the more general lesson about how it was possible to love one’s enemy: “Somehow I must work at the job of making my enemy come out from under the type of necessity that makes him my enemy. And I must come out from under the necessity that makes me his enemy. Then, together, we can see ourselves as children of God.”
Thurman sought to apply the more ethereal experiences of encountering truth to the harsh realities of injustice, violence, and hatred. In “Judgment and Hope in the Christian Message,” he asked, “Is it reasonable to assume that the universe is grounded in a limitless vitality that can sustain the revolutionary demands of the Christian ethic?” For Thurman, the “guarantee of the ethical demand is to be found in the underlying vitality of the universe as expressed in the aliveness of life, which in turn is sustained by the God of life.” But it was never far, as he saw it, from the grandest visions of this kind of mysticism to the realities of race in America. “If it be true that the normal relationship between men is activated kinship, grounded in a common dynamic origin,” he explained, “then attitudes of mistrust, of fear, of prejudice, whatever may be the extenuating justification for them, are a repudiation of the ethical meaning of life.” Those who sought brotherhood, therefore, could depend on God to sustain them even in the moments of deepest frustration, and most especially in “discovering techniques of implementation that will make so great a commitment a common part of the daily round of experience. Our hope is in a devotion to life in this dimension and our judgment is in the barrenness which we sustain in not living this religion.”
Thurman was sometimes attacked for being an idealist, drawn to a mysticism that could not ultimately deal with the realities of life. His response came in numerous works, written and oral. One of the most memorable was a sermon in 1948 in which he repeated his common point that humans found it easy to show courage in areas not necessarily involving their own security, but in matters of their own security, the tendency to self-protection took over. And the same applied to the world situation. People resisted having “theoretical idealists” take over the control of institutions, but Thurman asked, “The world has been run by practical, hard-headed people who know what the score is. And what has happened? Two world wars in twenty-five years, hunger everywhere, madness everywhere, fear everywhere. It is the practical man who has created that kind of impasse. It may be a fairly decent idea to give another sort of man a try at it; he can’t do anything worse than have another world war, nor make more mistakes than have been made.” Similarly, in an Easter sermon that year, Thurman explained to his congregation how the meaning of life came to one in a flash of intuition, that moment when “it seems that at last all the meaning of life has broken open in our mind. And without knowing, you understand, and without trying, you are…. It is the God in life that does that. The vision of the great creative ideal, the simple methods and techniques by which that ideal may be implemented and become a part of the warp and woof of human experience … a power, limitless in resource, and infinite energy, available to all who reach out, or reach in.”
Thurman’s sermons also reflected on the grace of God, which he compared to the “grace note” of a musical performance, the part not written on the staff that gave a special quality to human relations. The extra note, the “something more,” he thought, “becomes an expression finally, in religion, of a movement from God into the life of man that has as its purpose the development and maintenance of a creative and harmonious relationship between the individual and God.” God’s grace gave us the best part of ourselves, and the part that we had in common with every other living thing. It had to do with “inner qualities,” the “qualities of mind and qualities of personality,” the “extra something” in a person that makes us love him or her—like a grace note in music “over and above what appears on the lines and the spaces” that gives the music its “glow.” And so, finally, grace was “a movement from God into the life of man that has as its purpose the development of and the maintenance of a creative and harmonious relationship between the individual and God.” Grace was always a movement of God toward man, but it is also a recognition that “God is already in you and moving back towards himself. And that’s how it bridges the gap between the finite and the infinite.” God was moving back toward himself through human personality: “It is the God in you that is moved to respond to God.” Because everybody was a recipient of grace, everybody had that something extra, the plus that represented God’s movement in the soul of a person.
Thurman saw the development of the statement of commitment of the Fellowship Church as more evidence for the movement of God in the souls of the people. This statement went through various iterations, reaching its final form in 1949. Through three drafts, it moved partly away from being a Christian statement to something referencing Jesus but more universal. The Declaration of the Church called the church a “creative venture in interracial, intercultural, and interdenominational communion. In faith and genius it is Christian. While it derives its inspiration primarily from the source of Hebrew-Christian thought and life, it affirms the validity of spiritual insight wherever found and seeks to recognize, understand, and appreciate every aspect of truth whatever the channel through which it comes. It believes that human dignity is inherent in man as a creature of God, and it interprets the meaning of human life as essentially spiritual.” The statement in part reflected Thurman’s own move away from the Christianity of his youth and toward a more universal vision of cosmopolitan spirituality, humanitarianism, and what he called “sensitiveness”—what we might call a kind of mindfulness oriented toward social action.
A prominent liberal Unitarian minister, John Haynes Holmes, rejected the initial draft as “disastrously limiting” for focusing on “a vital interpretation of God as revealed in Jesus of Nazareth whose fellowship with God was the foundation of his fellowship with men.” For Holmes, religion was “universal—its revelation everywhere, in every great prophet, and in every human heart. I should be faithless to my own spiritual conviction if I attempted to bind [it] in any way to a distinctively ‘Christian fellowship.’” Holmes abhorred divisions within Christianity and “the larger divisions of religion itself…. There is one God, and all men of every diverse faith are children of that God, and therefore brothers one of another.” Thurman resented the “pontifical” tone of the letter. But such sentiments, doubtless aided by those in the congregation who sought a more universalist vision, had their effect, as the final commitment statement retained the reference to Jesus but placed him within the context of the “other great religious spirits.”
The final version, which came to be the church’s official statement in 1949, was the product of three iterations. Thurman cared deeply about this project and saw it as building a “floor upon which people of … radical diversities may stand together.” Thurman preached several sermon series, explicating the commitment point by point, particularly emphasizing those points that had not been changed. The final commitment read like this:
I affirm my need for a growing understanding of all men as sons of God, and I seek after a vital experience of God as revealed in Jesus of Nazareth and other great religious spirits whose fellowship with God was the foundation of their fellowship with man.
I desire to share in the spiritual growth and ethical awareness of men and women of varied national, cultural, racial and creedal heritage united in a religious fellowship.
I desire the strength of corporate worship through membership in this Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples with the imperative of personal dedication to the working out of God’s purpose here and in all places.
Thurman emphasized that there were many inequalities in men—in income, abilities, and nearly everything else in social life—but there was one great equality—the infinite worth of the individual. Every person was a “creation whose worth can never be measured in any terms that are quantitative.”
That worth would be extended through the act of corporate worship—the worship of God, not of Jesus Christ. It was in the worship of God that congregants had an “immediate awareness of the pushing out of the barriers of self, the moment when we flow together into one.” And such an experience was available to all, even to nonbelievers, for God could wipe out all barriers that separated people in worship. Everyone could be caught up in the “all-pervading worship of God; that the ground of life, and the essence of life and of the brooding creative spirit that hovers over all the aspirations and the yearnings and the desires of men, can bring each man into His presence with a new and wonderful transcendence. We believe it in this church because we experience it.” All could have the “vitalizing, purifying, exciting moment of Presence.”
Thurman also used the church as a venue for experimentation in worship aesthetics, especially music and dance. With the help of noted musician and arranger Corrine Williams, Thurman developed a music program at the church, later to be led by Raymond Fong. Thurman took pride in the choir as evidence of his ideas about worship as “the highest act of celebration of the human spirit,” in which the “worshiper sees himself as being in the presence of God. In His presence, the worshiper is neither male nor female, black nor white, Protestant nor Catholic nor Buddhist nor Hindu, but a human spirit laid bare, stripped to whatever there is that is literal and irreducible.” The key to the church was not the mixture of peoples but rather the “duality of the individual’s religious experience achieved through worship and the effect of that experience on daily behavior.” He saw Sunday morning as a time that “for each person present” was “a moment which becomes his moment in the presence of God.” This was consistent with Thurman’s larger vision of churches as centers of spiritual nourishment, from which people could then be empowered to pursue social transformation.
“As I moved more and more into the center of the process at the church I began feeling the urge to put into written form some of the things that were stirring within me,” he later wrote in his account of the church, Footprints of a Dream. One of those things stirring was the “weekly meditation written out of the heart of my own spiritual struggle,” which appeared in the church calendar. Soon people demanded that these meditations be more widely distributed, and his written words became a “means for a wider participation in the fundamental idea and an ideal upon which we had set our course.”
In part through the venue of his church, Thurman was becoming a national celebrity. Life magazine featured him in 1953 as one of twelve “great preachers” in the country (at a time when such a list still mattered); he was profiled there with Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Fulton Sheen, and others. By that time also, he had become known for Jesus and the Disinherited, his most powerful and influential published work.
The book Jesus and the Disinherited began as the Mary L. Smith Memorial Lectures at Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas, in April of 1948. The five lectures in the series constituted a “very fateful moment,” Thurman told a friend upon recounting the enthusiastic reception he had received, but he could not possibly have known how fateful they would be for the history of the civil rights movement and liberation theology in the United States. Jesus and the Disinherited was, in fact, a foundational text for both.
The publication of the actual text was, by Thurman’s autobiographical account, rather fraught, although in his correspondence, now published in his collection of papers, he seems forthright and pragmatic in his responses to some rather heavy editing the book received (including a complete revamp of the introduction). Certainly Thurman was not used to the intrusive hand of editors, picking apart his prose and simply dismissing what had been a lengthy introduction. The editors, moreover, wanted him to amplify the original text, as it was not quite at the length or heft that would fill out a book.
Abingdon Cokesbury Press, associated with the Methodist church of the South, had first rights of refusal on the book, and Thurman assumed the “southern bias” of the press would lessen or eliminate its interest in the manuscript. But, in one of the many ironies surrounding the publication of the text, that was not the case. The editor of the press, Nolan Bailey Harmon, hailed from Meridian, Mississippi. He served for years as a circuit-riding minister, then journal editor, then bishop for southern Methodists. Harmon had a long history of racial paternalism and support for versions of a “Lost Cause” theology extolling the virtues of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Most notably, Harmon was one of the eight southern “moderate” religious leaders that fell under the withering condemnation of Martin Luther King’s 1963 classic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” a missive that actually condemned southern moderates as a greater enemy to racial progress than the Ku Klux Klan. Harmon had joined in a letter to King urging that civil rights protestors “observe the principles of law and order and common sense.” Harmon himself thought racial progress would come only after the “slow, slow, slow processes of time.” Thus, he was the perfect exemplar of the attitude King so memorably lacerated in the letter—the idea that, somehow, time would heal the wounds. As King responded, “time” itself was neutral, and would by itself solve nothing.
Jesus and the Disinherited was Thurman’s most succinct, and in many ways grittiest, expression of the fundamental idea he pursued throughout his career: that the meaning of Jesus could be found in his status as a poor, disinherited Jew living under an oppressive Roman regime. This idea had appeared in bits and pieces over previous decades, but here it appeared in memorably encapsulated form. In the work, too, Thurman explored how the “hounds of hell” pursued the disinherited, and how the same fear and hate that shaped the rules of the dominant regimes also deformed the psychology of the dispossessed. In one of his most memorable passages, Thurman explained that the very religious iconography of American Christianity, symbolized by images of a white Jesus, had led blacks to disparage themselves. Thurman reasoned that if segregation was considered “normal, it was then correct; if correct, then moral; if moral, then religious.” Segregation needed the divine to be white. And so God was “imaged as an elderly, benign white man,” Satan as “red with the glow of fire,” and “the imps, the messengers of the devil, are black.”
For Thurman, the “implications” of this view were “simply fantastic in the intensity of their tragedy. Doomed on earth to a fixed and unremitting status of inferiority, of which segregation is symbolic, and at the same time cut off from the hope that the Creator intended it to be otherwise, those who are thus victimized are stripped of all social protection…. Under such circumstances, there is but a step from being despised to despising oneself.” A generation later, black theology pushed these insights further. Whereas Thurman’s generation would have preferred to de-racialize Christ, to remove his whiteness but not replace it with blackness, the theological generation of the 1960s perceived imparting blackness (whether physically or metaphorically) on the Divine as a necessary instrument of liberation. But both generations understood the devastating effects of the association of the Divine with whiteness, symbolized by the white Jesus that dominated American art from about the 1830s forward, culminating in Thurman’s own era with Warner Sallman’s image Head of Christ, which soon spawned upwards of 500 million reproductions at home and abroad. This particular whitened figure of Christ in effect became Jesus for most American Christians, white and black.
Thurman’s lifework focused on understanding what the message of Jesus meant to those whose backs were against the wall. At the end, he concluded, the disinherited would have to recognize the hounds of hell pursuing them—fear, deception, and hatred—and “having done this, they must learn how to destroy these or to render themselves immune to their domination. In so great an undertaking, it will become increasingly clear that the contradictions of life are not ultimate. The disinherited will know for themselves, that there is a Spirit at work in life and in the hearts of men which is committed to overcoming the world.” That’s the spirit his grandmother (in Thurman’s recollection and recounting) had; she remained his symbol for the triumph of the disinherited over the hounds of hell.
Thurman was delighted at how his lectures were received, but perhaps nothing gave him more pleasure than his mother’s response to the book. She asked, “I wonder where you got so much knowledge from God only Could give It to you I am very thankful to God for permitting me to be your mother.” There were the haters as well, including a Baptist pastor from North Carolina who mailed Thurman his responses to the book. “What is your purpose in trying to undermine the faith of God’s people in his precious word?” he asked Thurman, and concluded, “I am expecting you to answer my letter and my questions.” Thurman replied with a bit of acerbic humor (by his standards), reminding the gentleman of the verse, “Judge not that ye be not judged.”
Besides the lectures that became Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman pursued other lines of theological inquiry in sermons for his congregation and many other audiences nationally. In “The Quest for Peace,” from 1949, Thurman puzzled over the attractions of war, the way its sheer irrationality offered some a frisson of excitement to the “rational pattern of daily life.” And for that reason, peace advocates needed to seek “aesthetic equivalents” as well as “moral equivalents” to war, “for life has to have some poetry in it…. There must be something that tingles—something that gives you a lift.” Thurman considered deeply the troubling implications of persuading other people to one’s will, even when it was a larger moral good. There was a kind of nonphysical, “creative violence,” by which people came to accept an ideal that possessed another person. But when creative violence operated in that way, in the “fulfillment of that commitment—whether it be for peace or for violence—… often I am immunized against the simple, normal feelings of warmth and tenderness and kindness and graciousness that possessed me before I was laid hold upon by this commitment.” And so, even peace advocates using means of persuasion wielded a great power in their hands. Though the ideal of peace could be righteous or even a “supreme ideal,” it still was contingent “upon the kind of stamina and courage and body of the human beings who are manipulating it.”
Ultimately, the Fellowship Church ran its course. Through it, Thurman moved history. He did so less through his creation of interracial visions and more through his translation of universalist ideas into an American religious idiom. Thurman was a “seeker” before we had such a term, and he paved the way for contemporary ideas of religious pluralism. But in the early 1950s, his mind moved in the direction of extending his philosophical conceptions to larger fields and ministries. The Fellowship Church remained a love of his life, but he could see that it would not, by itself, be the basis for remaking American Christianity. That required a larger stage, and a chance to educate a younger generation in his ideas. That chance soon came from friends and colleagues at Boston University.
Thurman’s dreams came to be focused on his work in the chapel at Boston University, and his newfound stardom from addresses he recorded for radio broadcast. But his bigger hopes for his term there were dreams deferred. As he learned again, mystic visions of unity are hard to square within organizational boxes.