I have never considered myself any kind of leader…. I’m not a movement man. It’s not my way. I work at giving witness in the external aspect of my life to my experience of the truth. That’s my way—the way the grain in my wood moves.
One of the most personally gratifying days of Howard Thurman’s life came on May 25, 1963. It was Howard Thurman Day in Daytona Beach, Florida, his hometown. Thurman reflected on the meaning of this event given his difficult early years in a city where he was “introduced to the terror and trauma of being born a Negro.” Even to this day, he commented, “scar tissue marks the places where the early blows made their mark and the searing pain invaded body and spirit.” A dinner that evening was attended by around 150 people, a crowd about evenly divided between white and black; it was an experience of community that provided a “fleeting glimpse of the potential promise of community realized.” The city was still segregated. Yet it recognized the local boy made good. Seeing his primary school teacher there left Thurman deeply moved. The beloved community had not yet been realized in a still-segregated Daytona, one in which leaders of the local civil rights movement soon staged protests against segregation. That division was a familiar one for Thurman. Yet, as always, the unities, not the contradictions, were ultimately the important thing. Through his last years of retirement, what he called his “wider ministry,” that’s the vision he pursued. His years of stardom had passed, eclipsed by the meteoric careers of younger black men and women. And he delighted in that; he knew the quietly influential role he played in making what he called the “Negro revolution” possible.
Howard Thurman retained his affiliation with Boston University until 1965. But in effect, from the fall semester of 1962 forward, he was a sort of dean emeritus, no longer with a home in the middle of the campus community. Soon thereafter he entered into a period that he later called his “wider ministry.” In effect, for the last eighteen years of his life, Thurman was a freelance mentor: overseeing the Howard Thurman Educational Trust, traveling across the world, and continuing to tutor younger African Americans who were coming out of the civil rights struggle and into places of leadership. In some senses, Thurman had the chance to pursue exactly what he was best at. He ministered, counseled, preached, lectured, and mentored on an ad hoc basis, without the institutional and bureaucratic demands that had so long bridled him in the past. His spirit was free to roam, both physically and metaphorically; to the end of his life it moved freely. He listened for that which is God in us and communicated the lessons he learned from that to a younger generation who formed a small but loyal group of disciples. A good number of those younger followers, influenced by black theology and similar movements, disagreed with Thurman on philosophical points of power and nonviolence, but they revered him in spite of those differences, as they recognized Thurman’s profound authenticity, the way he embodied and expressed the central ideas of his life, and his long service in the freedom struggle.
During these years, as well, Thurman produced his final books. Shortly before passing, he published his autobiography, With Head and Heart, a symbol of the mental and spiritual forces he had tried to combine through his life. Reaction to the book was mixed, and included negative reviews in publications such as the Nation. Like many authors, Thurman claimed to pay no attention to reviews of his works; but like many authors, he in fact did. The irony was that the autobiography of this man who ministered personally to so many left some readers frustrated that Thurman did not reveal himself fully.
For that reason, although the book is moving and important, it is not a classic in the line of African American memoirs. The autobiography leaves one at some remove. Thurman uses his personal experiences and his intellectual reflections to impart lessons to readers, but Thurman the man remains a mystery. Perhaps in part for this reason, some years after his death, a hospice worker who had known Thurman well (and Thurman had a close relationship with those in healing ministries) commented to a friend and colleague of Thurman’s about a conference on Thurman’s life and thought: “I did feel at times though that some of the academics missed the point.” People remembered Thurman saying that those researching him from an academic perspective could not know the part of him “that was whimsical and rich and deep”: the preacher who painted penguins in his office and took up the clarinet in his later years; the dean of the chapel who delighted in playing chef for students who came and enjoyed his culinary concoctions and his extended conversations about their studies and their personal struggles; the train aficionado who immersed himself in detective novels; the pacifist who loathed violence and (at least when younger) loved prizefights and thrilled to Joe Louis; and the earnest minister who rode on a fire truck as an adult and blew the siren “with a child’s glee.” And perhaps most of all, the mystic and saint and seeker “intoxicated by God” who could reflect about himself as follows: “I have always felt that a word was being spoken through me, and three-fourths of the time I didn’t get it right. I am, simply, a man who is earnestly engaged in an effort, an exercise, a commitment, to become a religious man.”
Readers sent him letters, many of praise, some of frustration that they were left “wanting to get inside the experiences you only sketched briefly on the outside.” This reader recalled a talk with Thurman when “you told me you were stymied (my word, not yours) by the problem of writing truthfully about the dissolution of your two major jobs (Boy, was I trying hard to read between the lines of Howard University and Boston University).” Was there also, he wondered, a “strain” in the Fellowship Church? Thurman’s old friend Ed Kaplan, a professor of literature at Wellesley College, wrote to ask him, “What is the clue to your sadness and the way in which you transmute it into a deep confidence tinged with a tragic sense of your fragility? What is that melancholy with which I identified?” He continued: “You have left an indispensable historical record and I have been inspired by it. But perhaps you have left too much feeling aside. Your special genius, in your personal relationship to me, has been to understand and to articulate in the most concrete and subtle terms, the nuances of feeling and of interpersonal relationships. The autobiography is not a pious one, but it seems to me more of a document than an expression of personal need.”
But Thurman’s colleagues, friends, former teachers, and in some cases complete strangers sent in their letters of appreciation, and surely Thurman treasured those as he approached his last days. A letter from his beloved teacher from Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville, Ethel Simons Meeds, expressed the hope that Thurman was “paying no attention to any disparaging criticisms of your magnificent book.” She was impressed with the “weaving of your philosophy throughout the telling of the story showing so clearly that long entrenched custom can be uprooted, long deferred, greatly needed changes in this our life can be made without self aggrandizement or violent assault.” Reading the autobiography provoked a former student of his at BU to remember Thurman’s quality “to concentrate all your attention and love on one human being at a time and make that person feel it. Never have I met someone who possessed that gift to the extent you do.” For a younger African American woman from Indianapolis who had been brought up in the church, the autobiography helped her reconcile “the hypocrisy of Christianity as we have been taught. It was difficult for me to understand a Christ of fear, pain, and revenge. At times I felt that there was something missing.” But after reading about his time India, she realized that she could follow the true teaching of Christ “and not the teaching of Jesus Christ as it has been promulgated in the Western world. I realized that something seemingly so basic had escaped me in my learning.” A Methodist reader in Pittsburgh had learned from Thurman that “the center of everything is within.” He had to leave the organized church “because I could not work for statistics only with no seeming regard for a person’s spiritual well being.” For him, Thurman was ahead of his time in his writing and his work. “Only now are more and more people beginning to speak about meditations and the spiritual life.”
Other responses included a Jewish haberdasher in Rochester who bought and read Thurman’s autobiography because Thurman had ordered suits from his store for many years following his time in seminary; a student who wrote to testify on his behalf for conscientious objection; a son of an old ministerial friend of Thurman’s who worried about Thurman seeming, at least by insinuation, to embrace psychedelic drugs as a possible path to the divine; and a budding young scholar who sought Thurman’s counsel and advice and wondered how much he charged for autographed books. As always, Thurman drew friends, admirers, and total strangers who felt they could talk to him and be heard. His “wider ministry” existed in people with whom he interacted, in his discipling of younger ministers and scholars, and in the republic of letters. After his passing, the letters continued, as seekers sought advice from Sue on what Howard might have said about this or that subject of great concern to them. One correspondent from Dallas wrote to Sue in 1984, recounting her career trying to make her way as a black woman in the ministry but finding that “the community around me is so denominationally embedded” that she felt stifled. The correspondent knew that Howard would appreciate her struggle, after having heard him when he visited a black educational institution in Dallas.
During the early 1960s, Thurman may have entered a period of wider ministry, but he had not yet given up on Boston University, nor on his quest to make Marsh Chapel the kind of place he had long envisioned. Thurman’s replacement, Robert H. Hamill, moved into Thurman’s spot and changed the chapel’s order of service into a more recognizably Protestant one, what Thurman called a “traditional orthodox trinitarian Protestant Christian service of worship.” Thurman pointed out to President Case that “a large group of our people within our kind of heterogeneous university can get no help, or inspiration from that service and I include myself among them.” Case responded that a new dean of chapel would make the changes he deemed appropriate, just as Thurman himself had done when he arrived. Thurman continued leading some services at Marsh, particularly during the more informal summer months. But he was dismayed that his vision for Marsh Chapel never came to fruition. It was one of the more significant professional disappointments of his life.
Thurman continued to produce annual reports on his ministry, including one from 1962 to 1963 that he titled “The Wider Ministry,” expressing his notion of how he was to spend his later years. During this time, Thurman visited a meeting of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians and later traveled to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Thurman discovered among the Saskatchewan Indians the struggles under oppressive regimes, the dehumanizing misery but at the same time humanizing resistance, that he recognized from the African American experience. As he explained it, “The rest of the story is as old as human misery. It is what the Indians speak of in their recommendations to the Canadian government. It is a story of the native people of South Africa and those who would give them courage and hope; the story of Mississippi, and the tragedy of the ghetto of Warsaw.”
During the same trip, he met with a former student from his “Spiritual Disciplines and Resources” course, Rabbi Schachter, who had encouraged his Hillel students to attend Thurman’s addresses titled “Quests of the Human Spirit.” Together, the two attended the rituals at a Trappist monastery. As Thurman described it, “Somewhere in the march of the moments, the Conservative Jewish Rabbi, the gentile preacher, and the Trappist monks became children of Life, finding their way into their father’s house.” Thurman particularly appreciated the concluding service in a darkened chapel, when a statue of Mary was raised above an altar and “flooded with light. There were more prayers and chants and then the lights were extinguished. In the silence, every heart found its own rest and peace—a tranquility beyond forms, contexts, and altars.” Thurman and Rabbi Schacter later sat quietly in a car, saying nothing, contemplating the “surrounding landscape with a milk-white glow.” Thurman was in his element; the nature mystic and the spiritual seeker were at one in that moment.
Thurman had one major journey left in him—to Africa. He knew he needed to go, and Sue urged him. But first he reveled in participating in the March for Jobs and Justice in Washington, DC, where Martin Luther King gave his most famous address. Thurman was exultant that late August day in 1963; he was, he said, “part of the vast throng who heard and felt the unearthly upheaval of triumphant anguish: ‘Free at last! Free at last!’” He wrote of it later:
Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of our country. I was one of 200,000 people sharing a moment that contained all time and all experience, when everything was moving and everything was standing still, a moment that had in it the stillness of absolute motion. From where I sat I could look at the face of Abraham Lincoln deep within the shadow of the Memorial but with his countenance illumined by a floodlight…. America was present in Washington on the 28th: white and black, young and old, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, free-wheeler, male and female, conservative, middle-of-the-roader, labor leaders and workers, the schooled and the unschooled, the halt, the lame, the hale and the seeing—it was the guts of America spilling out along Constitution Avenue.
For one day, at least, Thurman’s vision of human unity seemed achievable.
In October, Thurman embarked on a six-month expedition around the world that involved, principally, a stay of two months in Nigeria, where he was a visiting professor at the University of Ibadan. Thurman felt, at the beginning, “as if I had come to the end of a period of a phase of my life never to be entered into again.” He had finished his official time as dean of Marsh Chapel, with some bitterness on what had not been accomplished but with a feeling of excitement about moving into his “wider ministry.”
Thurman’s attitudes toward Africa were complex. Earlier in his life he had felt a call to India, and he had traveled extensively since, but, as he put it, “for a long time I had no ripe desire to go to Africa. It is hard to analyze it—only that it is true. Sue kept before me the necessity of the Pilgrimage. She insisted that I needed it for my own fulfillment and rounding out. I did not see this nor feel it.” But after Thurman met K. Onwuka Dike, a Nigerian academic official, at a commencement ceremony in Boston, the two corresponded, and Thurman arranged his residency in Ibadan.
For one of the few times in his life, Thurman kept a rather lengthy personal journal of a trip. Thus, during this particular venture and during his time in Africa, we get a better sense of the inner Thurman, working through his own reactions and attitudes and problems, outside of the measured and carefully wrought prose that characterizes his public offerings. Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps because Thurman genuinely felt more adrift and more of an outsider on this journey than was usual for him, he comes across as slightly unsure of himself. At the same time, Thurman remained connected to the people of Ibadan and the university, serving as an adviser to its religious studies program in future years. During his time there, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, a shocking event that brought forth an idealistic eulogy of a political figure he clearly admired.
Thurman’s journal through this period is unusually introspective and conversational. “For the first time since I can remember,” he begins, “I was completely overwhelmed by a new kind of sadness…. It seemed as if I was not merely saying farewell to my homeland and separating from my family and close friends but that I was saying goodbye to a whole way of life—as if I had come to the end of a period or a phase of my life never to be entered into again.” Some of this came from the particular circumstances of this trip—traveling without Sue, and not yet knowing for certain about his visa to enter the country (he would acquire that once he was in London). And yet, he felt a kind of “fire burning” inside that he couldn’t comprehend, a feeling of being “alive in my mind and spirit. It is as if I am being readied for a fuller life than I have ever known—maybe it is a mere prelude to my earth leave-taking.” Thurman as a spiritual seeker always sought avenues of spiritual awareness and exploration, connections with worlds unseen that could be sending messages. He listened for them and sought them out.
The quiet time on ship—Thurman commented that he smiled and nodded to passengers but made little effort to engage in conversation—gave him time also to reflect on significant people in his life. For one of the few times in his reflections and writings, he spoke of his two daughters. And of the two, clearly he felt the most connected with Anne, his daughter with Sue: “I shall die at ease that the essence of Sue’s and my life will be preserved and blossom in ways that neither of us can imagine.” Thurman saw the reflection of Sue in Anne, with her “clear unmuddled mind that functions like a sharp tool in the hands of an expert—when she wants to. Then she becomes alive, eyes face whole countenance vibrates with a kind of hidden … energy.” Of Olive, his firstborn daughter from his brief marriage with Katie before her death, Thurman felt a keen pain. He was never free to be a “father as I was with Anne,” and her care in some of her younger years was entrusted to others while he made his voyages, including the one to India. Thurman felt a “sense of failure or guilt or remorse that for many years clung to me like a kind of sickness. I suppose that what I mean is that I was always trying to redeem something in my relation with her.” Yet most of his references to his daughters are about the joy they brought him. Both were involved in helping disseminate his work after his death.
Thurman also expressed his insecurities about being monolingual in a multilingual environment, and over the fact that people responded to him as a scholar of religion from within their own sectarian frameworks, simply because that’s how religion inevitably was identified. He saw too that Southern Baptists and Methodists had considerable sway in making converts around Ibadan. If he were asked to speak at the chapel, he would have another crisis moment, given the demand to speak evangelical language. Thurman wondered too about his own motive for his trip. Was it simply to say that, as an American Negro, he now knew Africa? Was it to “escape from the pressure of the revolution that is going on at home”?
In Ibadan, Thurman remained acutely conscious of his outsider status. “There is a manifest friendliness and then all of a sudden you are not there,” he commented of his interactions. He heard an Oxford-trained lawyer praise Billy Graham, wanting Thurman to share that enthusiasm, which Thurman could not. Thurman found himself doing “the kind of hard listening that I have never done before,” trying to understand how to communicate best with those around him: “I am listening to the strange world of experience which in its sociology is completely foreign to me.” In the university at Ibadan, he had trouble finding his own bearings: “I do not seem to be in touch with any center or core of the place.” This was so partly because of tribal tensions between various university leaders.
Thurman gave addresses as part of his visiting professorship and encountered many of the same objections—and some new ones—that he had grown accustomed to since his time in India nearly thirty years previously. In a historical talk on the Negro revolution in America—“making a speech of this kind is not one of my talents,” he admitted—he was challenged for skipping over African independence (a slight he immediately admitted) and for omitting reference to the black Muslims in America. Thurman agreed that the black Muslims had made a vital contribution by “giving heart to many of the people who felt that they did not count.” Still, he could not abide their emphasis on “separateness either within America or as a colonization scheme somewhere else.” Thurman saw himself as a “birth-right American. A part of the subtle propaganda is to make the Negro feel that he is an alien in the land of his birth and in which his sweat and blood have laid the foundation upon which the country is built.” That pretty well summarized his skeptical attitude toward “black power” in the later 1960s as well; he appreciated the anger that generated it, but he could never abide philosophies that emphasized human separation over ultimate unity. His last major book of theo-philosophical explorations, In Search of Common Ground, explored precisely this theme.
Toward the end of his African journey, word came of Kennedy’s assassination. The American ambassador, Joseph Palmer, sent word to Thurman, then in Oyo, that he wanted him to deliver a eulogy in Lagos, the capital. Thurman had just hours to prepare an address to about nine hundred people assembled at the ambassador’s residence. Thurman briefly wondered about the audience, but as he started writing, as he described it, the words simply flowed. He expressed his personal reaction to Kennedy. When he became president, Thurman felt, “the youth of the land and the young in spirit were caught up on the sweep of his confidence, his sense of purpose and his direction. There was an [aura] of destiny in his assurance.” Thurman saw his establishment of the Peace Corps, for example, as an example of Thurman’s own “apostles of sensitiveness,” those who put their “talents at the disposal of human need everywhere without benefit of anything other than the opportunity to give.”
But for Thurman, Kennedy’s activism in civil rights stood out; Thurman gave far more credit to Kennedy in this arena than did many of his contemporaries in the movement, or historians now do, for that matter. But to Thurman, despite the “impatience” some showed about “the speed with which his leadership affirmed itself, there was never any doubt that he was acting out of the center of an informed heart and conviction as to the true spirit and meaning of democracy and the American dream.” And that was a dream, Thurman said, that he had extended to “all the nations of the earth.”
Thurman’s stay in Africa led him to reflect deeply on the meaning of old slave-trading stations that he saw. He returned to some of his familiar themes of human strength and survival through situations of utter desolation:
From my cabin window I look out on the full moon and the ghosts of my forefathers rise and fall with the undulating waves. Across the same waters, how many years ago they came! What were the inchoate mutterings locked tight within the circle of their ears? In the deep, heavy darkness of the foul smelling hold of the ship, where they could not see the sky nor hear the night noises nor feel the warm compassion of the Tribe, they held their breath against the agony. How does the human spirit accommodate itself to desolation? How did they? What tools of the spirit were in their hands with which to cut a path through the wilderness of their despair? … Nothing anywhere in all the myths, in all the stories, in all of the ancient memory of the race, had given hint of this torturous convulsion. There were no gods to hear.
The impact of seeing the slave-trading coast firsthand was nearly overwhelming, producing this unusually intense personal reflection, without the theology of hope that he usually stressed even in writing of dire situations from the past.
Upon his return, he faced again new challenges in Boston. He was a freelance minister with a national audience but without any particular institutional home. He continued to write and speak in Boston and around the country, ranging widely in his topics and passions. Some highlights include addresses on religion and science, on mysticism, and on nonviolence.
Thurman loved science, particularly the life sciences that put one in touch with the natural world that provided so many lessons for the human world. And Thurman saw science and religion as complementary. Religion “must accept the challenge to give empirical validation for its claim,” while also recognizing “that the integrity, the nitty-gritty, of the experience does not ultimately rest upon any empirical validation. In the last analysis the integrity of the religious experience is the experience itself.” For Thurman, the purposiveness of life was the key, and man’s discovery of his own purpose was the role of religion. As Thurman expressed it: “A man wants to know what it is after all that he ultimately amounts to. It is here that man seeks personal assurance and confirmation; it is here that he experiences the satisfaction of being totally dealt with in a manner that is private, personal, and at the same time social and universal. It is this second level that his experience has in it the elements that make it religious.” The central quality of a truly religious experience, an encounter with God, is “that which transpires totally in a man’s personality when he feels himself to be in direct touch with the kind of reality that gathers into a single focus all of the values and meanings which the individual at other times has thought, sensed, or felt.” As a “time-binder” by nature, an observer could be aware that “events, experiences in which he may be involved do not ever quite contain all that he is at any particular moment in time.” People could stand outside their own experiences and watch themselves experiencing, but still there remained something mysteriously internal and unknowable.
Religious experiences fostered “communication between the individual and a consciousness that is an infinite expansion of his own consciousness…. The thing that makes any experience a religious experience is the door which the experience opens that makes possible an awareness of encounter between the essential self and a greater expansive living consciousness.” And that encounter would then produce purpose. Religious experience as a means to unify life could bring the individual to become “a part of all that is when the narrow walls of his own conscious life seem to become enlarged. It is as if his little life becomes the door through which he enters into a larger and fuller dimension of what he has known himself to be all along. The purpose of all spiritual exercise is to aid and abet this development. This is the meaning of worship whenever it is found.”
Thurman’s best examples came from Quaker services. He reflected deeply on one experience in particular. Asked to speak once in a Quaker meeting, Thurman prepared nothing but simply tried to “experience the depths of dynamic silence.” He felt, at first, a panic, but then gradually, as he experienced it, the barriers between him and the congregation melted. His mind fixated on a series of words that formed part of the Sermon on the Mount, and they took shape in his head as he extemporized the address in his own mind. And then, just as he was ready to speak, another congregant rose and began to speak from the same verse, as did others. And for him, it “seemed that all in that room were sharing deeply in the same kind of transcending experience which greatly confirmed and sustained us all but was at the same time much, much more than any one of us, in and of himself.”
During this time, at the height of the nonviolent civil rights movement, Thurman continued his philosophical explorations into the ideas he had been so important in fostering and spreading. In 1963, he published Disciplines of the Spirit, parts of which explored the history and purpose of nonviolence. Like others, he insisted that “non-violence is not a negative attitude—it is a positive act of resistance. It is not passive; it is positive and creative.” It once was considered weak and cowardly but was no longer considered so after the life of Gandhi and the dramatic developments within the United States during the civil rights years.
Nonviolence, Thurman insisted, was not “merely a mood or a climate, or even an attitude,” but a “particular kind of art or technique.” It was not simply the choice of the only available tool. If it were, it would participate in the very order it was struggling against; in this case, it would have “the same moral basis as violence and cannot be separated from it in essence.” But nonviolence could be one of the “great vehicles of reconciliation because it tends always to create and to maintain a climate in which the need to be understood and cared for can be honored.” Those practicing nonviolence could be full of rage, of an internal will to violence, but nonviolence was a rejection of both the physical and the psychological tools of violence. The tools of nonviolence were those aimed not merely at changing a situation but requiring “a man to face himself in his action—to see how he looks to himself in the violent act itself without regard to what he hopes the violent act will accomplish.” The tools of nonviolence placed upon men “the demand to absorb violence rather than to counteract it in kind,” something that profoundly challenged people to face naked fear: “There is rioting in the streets of the spirit, and the price of tranquility comes terribly high. Order and reconciliation must be restored within—it is here that the major conquest must be achieved.” As with Martin Luther King, Thurman saw nonviolence as a fundamental philosophical principle, not just a stratagem.
Thurman related a story from the civil rights movement about a woman who had been pinned to the ground by a policeman but at that moment felt a sense of peace within herself. For him, it was an example of how “non-violence is the tapping and the releasing of the resources of vitality and energy in the human spirit that make it possible to relax and overcome the spirit of retaliation.” That spirit had become apparent in recent years, and was evident in Supreme Court acts, in the quiet tramping of feet on the streets, and in every place where people sought justice where “injustice abounds, to make peace where chaos is rampant, and to make the voice heard on behalf of the helpless and the weak. It is the voice of God and the voice of man; it is the meaning of all the strivings of the whole human race toward a world of friendly men underneath a friendly sky.” The way had been opened through the “dramatic loss of fear on the part of the masses of Negroes,” because violence always fed on fear as its “magic source of energy,” and “as long as men react to it in and with fear, their lives can be controlled by those in whose hands the instruments of violence rest.” This had come for many reasons, but most importantly “due to the sense of direct, conscious, and collective participation in a joint destiny.” For Thurman, the goal of the beloved community remained the ideal, the ultimate aim of what he called the “Negro revolution.” He had been envisioning and forecasting it from his younger years at Howard University to his pastoral tenure in San Francisco.
Some contemporaries of Thurman, and nearly all scholars since, have pondered the paradox that Thurman was a mentor of the movement but was not a movement man. That is, he educated a generation in precepts of non-violence and a kind of internal transformation that would lead to a societal revolution, but he himself stayed in the background. As he told the Christian Century in 1973, “I didn’t have to wait for the revolution. I have never been in search for identity, and I think that [all] I’ve ever felt and worked on and believed in was founded in a kind of private, almost unconscious autonomy that did not seek vindication in my environment because it was in me.” Thurman’s vision of the church emanated from that. 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.”
His works influenced King, but King drew from many sources. His teaching inspired James Farmer and many others from Howard, and Thurman was on committees, boards of directors, and advisory groups—but rarely if ever on the front lines. At the beginning of his trip to Africa, in the momentous autumn of 1963, Thurman himself wondered if he was leaving the country in part to escape the pressures of the revolution happening at home. And later in the 1960s, activists from the left and proponents of black power actively challenged Thurman and his ideas. For them, power differentials in society overcame any imaginary spiritual “unity” between souls. By that time, Thurman was well into his sixties and attached to the same demeanor and personal habits as always. He was a formally dressed, quiet, and introspective man in a particularly tumultuous era. He listened to Beethoven rather than the blues or bebop to animate his spiritual reflections and speak to his soul. He understood, but fundamentally dissented from, the precepts of black nationalism gaining currency in the late 1960s. In one letter to an old friend, he gently mocked the argot of the era: “I got thoughts, man!” he told him. More than anything else, Thurman preferred the one-on-one conversation, or the classroom, or the formal sermon, to encounters on the street or public demonstrations. He distrusted “proclamations” of all sorts and preferred deeply felt statements that arose from one’s soul.
And perhaps he also carried with him the Gandhian emphasis on the cultivation of a small group of spiritual elites who could carry forward the message of nonviolence. As Sue later expressed it, “We had a feeling that those who were leading in the civil rights movement had to have some place to rest their hearts at night. They had to fight all day, all day long. And then at night, they had to go somewhere and find their rest, or find their peace that the next morning would bring renewed energy. So he pastored to civil rights people.” As she remembered, “They did call him in the dead of night and he did take hours on end, either writing them or speaking to them by phone or having a touch with them as they came up to Boston, just to see him for a few hours and go straight back.” Thurman was thus more interested in the personal touch than the public proclamation.
And yet, Thurman was friends with and a mentor to many who espoused ideas with which he fundamentally disagreed, even when he understood where those ideas came from. Political figures and movement activists such as Whitney Young and Jesse Jackson, black historians such as Lerone Bennett and Nathan Huggins, and early critical legal theorists such as Derrick Bell—all spoke reverentially of Thurman even as they challenged some of the central ideas that motivated his life and ministry. They understood his long history in the movement, what he had done in years past that had prepared the way for the 1960s. The Thurmans were particularly important for the historians, scholars, and activists Nathan Huggins and Vincent Harding. When Huggins was a boy, he and his sister had been effectively abandoned by their father, and Huggins was partly raised by the Thurmans in San Francisco as their adopted child. Huggins went on to a distinguished academic career, and he dedicated his landmark work Harlem Renaissance to Sue. Harding’s work of African American history, There Is a River, directly reflects Thurman’s thought on black history, even though the Harding of that era, influenced by the black power movement, had come to rather different conclusions about the place of African Americans in the United States. But as Harding later wrote, “I have a feeling that Howard Thurman’s greatest contribution is going to be to the future of black religious thinking…. [He said to us] that it is possible to take all of the struggles and the sufferings of the black experience and recreate them in such a way that they can be used to open up a whole new arena of human encounter and human relationships.” Otis Moss, a minister and organizer in the movement, said Thurman was not in the marches, but he “participated on the level that shaped the philosophy or creates the march—without that, people don’t know what to do before the march, while they march, or after they march.” Or, as Thurman described himself, “It’s the way the grain in my wood moves.” The grain in the wood defined and gave a texture to a piece of furniture, without anyone specifically taking note that it was there.
Thurman played his part in sending letters of protest, in making sizable financial contributions to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and perhaps most of all in interpreting the movement in speeches, lectures, sermons, and writings for a national audience. In The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and the Ground of Hope, published in 1965, he gave an extended set of reflections on the psychology and theology of segregation. “For generations fear has been the monitor, the angel with the flaming sword standing guard to make the pattern of segregation effective,” he explained. That fear was “spawned and kept alive by the perpetual threat of violence everywhere, on all sides,” but it was a one-sided violence, a “violence that is devoid of contest.” Whites could easily accept such a pattern and be secure (whether intentionally or indifferently) in feelings of superiority. But a white person who even passively accepted the system thus became a “party to a monstrous evil executed in his name and maintained in his behalf. The responsibility for the social decay and defiling of the spirit is inescapable, acknowledged or unacknowledged. For segregation is a sickness and no one who lives in its reach can claim or expect immunity.”
For Thurman, the civil rights movement pointed a way out of this psychology of fear and hatred, toward wholeness and community: “It makes a path to Walden Pond and ignites the flame of nonviolence in the mind of a Thoreau and burns through his liquid words from the Atlantic to the Pacific; it broods over the demonstrators for justice and brings comfort to the desolate and forgotten who have no memory of what it is to feel the rhythm of belonging to the race of men.” For Thurman, the alternative presented in the 1960s of black power had the virtue of courage but the weakness of depending on the “way of retribution and vengeance. It is one more turn of the same wheel that moves round and round but does not gain an inch…. It says the contradictions of life are not only final but ultimate.” Thurman always held the spirit of beloved community over the psychology of separation. “When the battles are over,” he said, blacks and whites would have to live together and “to forget this is the great betrayal of the future.”
One of Thurman’s other most extended and deepest discussions of segregation and civil rights, written during this time but published many years after his death, came at the request of the political scientist Samuel DuBois Cook, in what was originally to be an honorary volume for Benjamin Mays. Thurman titled it “Desegregation, Integration, and the Beloved Community.” He wrote it in 1966, as the movement entered a new phase and riots had just decimated parts of Watts in Los Angeles.
As Thurman saw it, there were two meanings to integration. One was the more limited sense of “free and open access to association with each other.” Before the deeper meaning of integration could be found, it was first necessary to struggle for this guaranteed right within the American political contract. But beyond that was a deeper meaning having to do with the “quality of human relations,” and with the “private, personal experience of individuals and groups of varied backgrounds as they discover that there is a unity among peoples that can contain and support diversity as an expression of its self.” This form of integration could not be mandated by law, because it was founded on a sense of “dynamic integration” that has to do with the “individual’s total experience in the society.” Thurman recounted that, in the Fellowship Church, the presence of people of diverse backgrounds did not mean the church was integrated in this deeper sense, because that sense required that people have forms of “natural communal association.” As Thurman put it, “Meaningful experiences of integration between peoples are more compelling than the fears, the inhibitions, the dogmas or the prejudices that divide. If such unifying experiences can be multiplied over an extended time interval, they will be able to restructure the entire fabric of the social context.” Here, Thurman expressed again his lifelong dream of a unity that overcame all apparent contradictions.
This kind of “beloved community” came precisely because of the “quality of the human relations experienced by the people who live within it.” The beloved community was not something achievable by “fiat,” but rather was an “achievement of the human spirit as men seek to fulfill their high destiny as children of God. As a dream of the race it has moved in and out on the horizon of human strivings like some fleeting ghost. And yet it always remains to haunt and to inspire men in all ages and all conditions.”
Those pursuing it would see the actions of the civil rights movement as a means rather than an end, and would “refuse to separate the means open to revolution from the ends to be achieved by revolution.” Some would say that such a community could not be achieved in our “diseased, prejudice-ridden society,” but Thurman, as always, insisted that the contradictions of life are not ultimate, and that the “presence of the beloved community is always manifesting itself in the lives of people in the very midst of the social decay by which they are surrounded. It begins in the human spirit and moves out into the open independence of the society.”
Thurman rejected any sense that people gave to a beloved community of something soft and sentimental, something that simply conjured up images of “tranquility, peace and the utter absence of struggle and of all things that irritate and disturb.” A beloved community was not a conflict-free one, but rather one in which there were no “artificial barriers separating man from man or groups from one another—where the precious ingredient in each personality, unique unto itself, may be so honored by his fellows that it will enrich the common life even as it creates its own light in which to stand.” There would be no “hard or critical lines of conformity yielding a glow of sameness over the private or collective landscape.” There would be conflicts, and human differences not expressed in destructive social patterns but ones “real and germane to the vast undertaking of man’s becoming at home in his world and under the eaves of his brother’s house.”
Thurman continued his correspondence with Martin Luther King through the 1960s. They frequently sent preaching invitations to one another or simply tried to find time to connect. As it turned out, those plans never came to fruition. In their last correspondence, in September of 1966, King thanked Thurman for his latest donation and expressed his regret for them not getting together over the years. “I do hope that the day will come soon when we can sit down together several hours and discuss many of the concerns close to our hearts. More and more I feel the need for retreating. My life is given so much to endless activity that I often fail to get the kind of spiritual refueling necessary to carry on.” Given King’s nearly manic travel during this period, and the constant internal chaos that threatened to overwhelm his movement, these words read now with a particularly stinging pain. And King was repeating, in effect, the counsel Thurman had given him in 1958. King still carried that kernel of Thurman’s advice with him. King concluded by noting that “I do manage to find a few minutes occasionally to communicate with you through your books,” finding in them “my most abiding means of meditation.” Surely he did during this particularly tumultuous time for proponents of the philosophy of nonviolence.
Tragically, shortly thereafter, while in San Francisco, Thurman led a memorial service for King at the Fellowship Church, on April 7, 1968, three days after the assassination. Not unlike his rapidly composed response to the Kennedy assassination, Thurman had about two hours to collect his thoughts before being interviewed by radio station KPFK in San Francisco; media outlets later widely distributed his statement. Thurman saw King as someone who was “able to put at the center of his own personal religious experience a searching, ethical awareness.” For him segregation and discrimination were not just un-American and undemocratic, but in fact sins against God.
Thurman reflected on his relationship with King, relatively distant as it was, at Boston University. Thurman’s primary concern was the state of King’s spiritual life. What was most profound about King was that he saw that nonviolence “could not become for him a technique merely for social change.” It was possible to embrace the techniques of nonviolence as a manipulative force, to remain personally uninvolved. King saw that, but “insisted that always coupled with nonviolence there must be the other words: direct action. There must be confrontation; there must be always the test, the checking out so that nonviolence would not degenerate either into a philosophy merely or into a metaphysic or even into a manipulating ethic.” And now, in the face of King’s assassination, it was “easy to forget that what you experienced in the light is no longer true because you are in the darkness. What you experienced in the light remains true and you must hold this until the light breaks again. And if you do that, you will discover … that it is the intent of life that we shall all be one people.”
Thurman reflected on the experience of memorializing King with John A. “Jack” Taylor, a former student of Thurman’s at BU who had served an internship at the Fellowship Church in 1955 and was set to take its pulpit in 1968. In this letter, about two weeks after King’s death, Thurman expressed his best hopes for what the church could represent. Nowhere else in the United States, he thought, “could there be found 500 or more people assembled who had such a deep sense of original community. Despite the monumental disaster of the assassination, Negro and white people were together as one family with no self-consciousness or sensitivity due to the vicissitude of the current mood. This … was the harvest from the planting of other years in the Fellowship Church.” Thurman hoped Taylor could continue in the quest for “deepening our sense of religious experience.” About a month later, though, Thurman wrote to Taylor about his state of despondency about the congregation, with practically all its leadership being white: “This is a critical moment in the human relations in our country and it will take great wisdom on your part to affirm the inclusive genius of the church while recognizing the mood of the present moment.”
Thurman’s seemingly contradictory letters expressed his conflicted sense of the past and future of the church he had helped to found. Ideally, it remained a beacon of interracialism, but in its everyday functioning it seemed unlikely to fulfill its original potential. Two years later, a memo from Thurman to the congregation explained in detail his disappointment. With a financial mess on their hands, and splits between church members, people had suggested selling the property at 2041 Larkin in San Francisco, a move Thurman opposed because it didn’t address the deeper and more fundamental issues, nor did it signal a unanimous congregational commitment. More important than anything, the church had to regain its collective spiritual commitment, for “if we are unable to find in our church community what is needful for our primary nourishment and sustenance, we will have nothing to offer to the world, the alienated, the angry, the frightened, and the suffering.” These responses of optimism and a sense of foreboding or despair fundamentally shaped Thurman’s vision during the last decade of his life.
Thurman was a master of the eulogy form; it led to some of his most moving short sermons reflecting on the spiritual meaning of individual lives. In his eulogy for Whitney Young (director of the National Urban League in the 1960s and a good friend of Thurman’s) in New York, March 1971, at the Riverside Church, he noted that only someone like Young could “bring together the very rich and the poor, the black separatist and the white segregationist.” Thurman spoke directly to how “American life is largely controlled and dominated by white society…. Ours is an affluent society in the midst of which are to be found vast numbers who may be designated as among the Wretched of the earth.” The message of Jesus and the Disinherited still rang true, despite the undeniable revolution of the civil rights years. On that point, Thurman stayed a man of the black religious Left, where he always had been.
Early in 1970 the Thurmans took a two-month cruise through the South Pacific. Thurman intended it to be a period of rest, a time to be with Sue, with few obligations. He continued the journal he had kept while in Africa, again offering unusually personal, tentative, and at times acute reflections on the influence of American goods, ideas, and products in particular islands he visited. “At last I am beginning to feel a bit rested,” he wrote to a friend. “It is the first complete rest that I have had in nearly 40 years. I had no idea what boundless fatigue I had accumulated.” He felt the healing power of the sea again, as he had as a boy: “The sea is so healing and slowly something way down deep inside of me is stirring—so much of life comes back into a wonderful luminous perspective.” Sometimes that sense of serenity was broken by what he saw on the islands. In Tahiti, he noted that the ostensible carefreeness of the people was a pretension, “more a cliché than a reality.” He wondered about his own role as a tourist, while he and Sue were the only black couple onboard. “It is strange how I could not resist the feeling of guilt to be one among the tourists…. This has come over me and many times in my travels—a sense of shame to be classified with American white society and regarded in the same way. Sometimes I have wanted to shout, I am with them by necessity but I am not one of them.” And his thoughts remained on the racial revolution at home, something he could move away from physically but not mentally.
Thinking over the meaning of his own life against the backdrop of the events of the past decade, he pondered, “A vast change has come over our total landscape. Where are we headed? We are deeply troubled. The glow is going from our faces. It seems as if we have been overtaken by a vast tidal wave of anger and our joy is dying. The mood is sullen and tight. When I see this I shudder because it says to me that we stand on the threshold of a deep inner collapse. What I feel is we are internalizing the hostility and the hate by which we have been surrounded for so many years.”
Thurman pondered also the meaning and purposes and attractions of violence, perhaps giving vent to his own anger that he had occasion to feel through his decades of experiencing the violations of race in everyday life in American society. “What I mean,” he wrote, almost as if to contemplate the possibility of what he was about to explain, “is that if I can hold over another human being the threat of violence, to that extent I can sustain the mood and the energizing effect of the power of veto & certification over other lives and make them the instruments of my will and control.”
Through the 1970s, Thurman continued his ministry of discipling younger black men and women, while maintaining his posture of remaining in the background. In a 1973 letter to Jesse Jackson, after Jackson sought Thurman’s active participation in an Operation PUSH event, Thurman supported Jackson’s efforts and remained a friend and mentor to him but declined to be a headliner at this event. “All of my life I have shunned publicity and the limelight; it is not my way of working,” he told Jackson. For him, working any other than the way he chose was to “stretch myself out of shape and thereby cut myself off from my own resources.” Jackson later eulogized Thurman as a “teacher of teachers, a leader of leaders, a preacher of preachers.” Thurman spent many of his later years leading small groups of younger people in sessions of spiritual searching, a part of preparing them for accepting positions of leadership and activism in the African American world in the decades to come.
In “What Can We Believe In,” from 1973, Thurman reflected back on surviving the psychic wounds of segregation and the struggle to create an “authentic self-image” within such a system. He used the experience of his daughters as an example. When they were children, he had taken them to his home area in Florida to show them where he grew up. They went to a playground, and the girls asked to use the swings. Thurman had to tell them they could not, and once they reached home he explained why:
It takes the state legislature of Florida, the laws of the state, all the judges, all the policemen, the majority of the churches and their ministers, the majority of the teachers in all the schools, plus the majority of all the people in the state of Florida to keep two little girls from swinging in those swings. That is how significant you are…. So I want you to remember that you are so important and so powerful as two little black girls that it takes all of that power to keep you out of two small swings in a playground in downtown Daytona Beach.
As Thurman saw it, “the estimate that a person has of you is measured by the kind of weapon he feels he must use in order to destroy you or control you. This becomes an important clue to the grounds of your own self-estimate.” And he repeated that the “contradictions of life are never quite final, certainly not ultimate.” The individual easily could come to believe in a kind of dualism, that the contradictions were final and ultimate, in order to evade his “sense of final responsibility for his own actions.” Thurman concluded with his contention that a strong belief in one’s own self, and an affirmation of that in other people, could build relationships of “mutual sharing of worth.” Thurman upheld the validity of religious experience, derived not from observations of nature or participation in ceremonies but rather “found in my awareness of total well-being held in place by a sure sense of Presence. To me this is the very essence of creative spiritual encounter. This is the very heart of prayer.” By “prayer” he meant that “highest moment of reality of which I am capable … when, in the supreme act of worshipful celebration, I feel myself to be in the presence of God, stripped to the literal substance of my being. Here the deepest thing in me seems to be responding actively to the deepest thing in existence.”
In his later years, while not connected in any way with the Fellowship Church, he preached anniversary sermons there, reflecting on the meaning of the origins and history of the church within the context of organized American religion. At the thirty-third anniversary celebration, he warned against any feeling of purity, that we live in a vacuum unaffected by prejudice in the outside world: “no institution in the society can escape reflected as a mirror the environment in which that institution lives.” The responsibility of those in a place like the Fellowship Church was “just to work at it,” to witness to the truth in spite of everything working against it. Members would have their commitments, but “everything else got a head start,” so the test remained “the degree to which it is willing to witness to the truth to which it says it is dedicated with the confidence that if we are true to our truth then the whole universe reinforces, gives energy to us in the way that the whole universe gives energy to an acorn as long as it is acorning.” If we remain true to our commitment “in despair and in discouragement, in disillusionment, in paradoxes, contradictions, the pull of the vitality and the energy of the aliveness of life works to keep the leaves green and the fruit ripening on the tree.”
In what probably was his last public sermon, given to the Fellowship Church late in 1980 (about five months before his death), Thurman reflected on the meaning of what he and the congregants had tried to accomplish in the 1940s, in the midst of a war where people had been trained to hate and at the height of the Cold War afterward. That was a most inopportune time to found a church that drew no lines of race or color, demonstrating that human beings could “come together … to worship as the experience of celebration of the communal life they had lived during the week.” The miracle was that “a remnant of the church has survived.” And Thurman concluded with some rather dark reflections on the meaning of this entire experience: “whether it is possible to develop a caring, sensitive, loving community in a world organized on violence and brutality and hate, and until religion learns how to deal with the dynamism … generating in the hearts of men and women that make for survival that is created by the idiom of hate and bitterness.” Hate gave a person a ground to stand on, even while it destroyed that same ground, but “he goes down to the grave with a shout, and religion has to learn how to deal with that at the level that makes for survival on this planet for man…. The burden of proof is on our weary shoulders.”
Thurman concluded ominously, quoting a favorite anonymous poet, that man was “God-like in image,” and “if you don’t believe it just pray to die before nightfall.” In his surprisingly dark valedictory sermon, Thurman thought hard on the lessons of his long witness for peace, nonviolence, and human community in a world organized on principles of hate, violence, and human separation. The answer, he implied, was not yet evident; and the answer is not evident today.