The cruel vicissitudes of the social situation in which I have been forced to live in American society have made it vital for me to seek resources, or a resource, to which I could have access as I have sought means for sustaining the personal enterprise of my life beyond all the ravages inflicted upon it by the brutalities of the social order.
He had a great zest for food, flowers, fragrances and scents, and his days were filled with music and laughter…. [Thurman] spoke with uncommon force and clarity to the peculiar needs of this century. He spoke at an in-depth level to racism in the church. He spoke to our fragmentation and spiritual hunger and lack of connectedness and relatedness. He spoke to our busyness, our internal noise, and our need to center down … standing in the midst of his idiom and reaching out to all other idioms—Christian and Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist, African, Asian, Indian, and European—[he] spoke to this crisis by calling us the task of spiritual reconstruction.
Howard Thurman passed away in San Francisco on April 10, 1981. He had experienced, but survived, some serious illnesses during the mid-1970s but remained active (and busy with personal correspondence as well) until late 1980, when his health rapidly declined. Sue Bailey Thurman lived until 1996, when she passed away at the Zen Buddhist Hospice Center in San Francisco. Sue’s daughter Anne lived only five years longer, dying at age sixty-seven in 2001, after spending the later years of her life working with her mother and with early Thurman scholars in publishing some of her father’s most significant work. Olive Thurman (Wong) had a varied and extensive career, including a cameo (fictitious) appearance in a novel by Jack Kerouac and a marriage for some years to the Chinese American actor Victor Wong, best known later in life for an appearance in the film The Last Emperor. Olive finished her days in New York City, passing in 2012.
In the early years after Howard’s death, Sue remained in charge of (and very vigilant about) maintaining Howard’s legacy through the Howard Thurman Educational Trust; she was the keeper of the Thurman flame. And Sue’s sensibilities as a self-trained historian were vital to her caretaking of the Thurman papers (which now include some bits of her own correspondence as well), which, after some time in other libraries and archives, were finally consolidated at the Gotlieb Research Center at Boston University. The scholar Walter Fluker, who had known Howard and been his disciple, and also knew Sue well, took charge of the Howard Thurman Papers Project, of which five splendidly edited and annotated volumes have so far been published (the first one dating from 2009, the fifth from 2019). Current plans call for a three-volume set of his sermons and writings to published in the future.
After his death, Thurman was eulogized through conferences, symposia, and fora. These occurred mostly in the 1980s, when memory of him was still fresh. Most important, his closest friend and colleague from his Boston years, George Makechnie, put together in 1988 what was effectively a biography, memoir, and collected set of reflections and eulogies titled Howard Thurman: His Enduring Dream. What is remarkable there is the compilation of memories, tributes, and reflections of people from so many parts of Thurman’s life; included are contributions from people in academia, business, journalism (notably including Lerone Bennett, by then the dean of black American journalism), religion, medicine (particularly hospice workers and nurses, with whom he had a long and fruitful relationship), music, and former students and colleagues. Many of their memories, in fact, impart a sense of Thurman the person in a way that Thurman’s own writings rarely communicated about himself: his personal joys, customs, habits, and just his manner of being with other people. Thurman’s writings and sermons are serious and even solemn, and Thurman could be given to bouts of depression, anger, and a simple desire to escape brutal human realities. But Thurman as a person also radiated life, joy, and humor; one sees it in spurts in his sometimes jocular personal correspondence, but more than that in the reflections provided by those close to him, including the one by his friend and admirer Lerone Bennett (an important figure in African American publishing) that begins this epilogue. And Thurman’s tendency to retreat into his shell was counteracted by Sue Thurman’s natural vivacity and extroversion. She knew Howard’s strengths and weaknesses best. She pushed him in important directions he might otherwise have resisted, and brought a natural love of family from her happy upbringing that did not come so easily to Howard.
But by the 1990s, as the Thurman Educational Trust gradually wrapped up its affairs, Sue passed away, and Thurman’s friends and students moved on, his star faded. Certainly he was not forgotten, and the papers project made sure he was not neglected, but it took some time to take a full measure of the meaning of the man and his life. And we are still taking it.
And so only recently has Howard Thurman’s significance and influence in twentieth-century American religious philosophy come to be understood and celebrated. Of the many varied strands of Thurman’s life and thought, perhaps the most important is the way he put his background in African American religion in a global and cosmopolitan context. Thurman took the nineteenth-century tradition (dating from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, and others) of universalist religious explorations, added to them his deep background in the African American experience and in Quaker-influenced mysticism, and brought to both his personal understanding of all the “ravages” and “brutalities of the social order” inflicted on black people in American society. The result was a synthesis of religious truths that drew from many sources but ultimately was uniquely Thurman’s own. Those who perceived the “void in the busy nothingness of the modern world,” as Lerone Bennett (the publisher of Ebony and an important figure in black public life) put it, had discovered in Thurman “inner resources for the spirit in a homegrown product nurtured and honed to a fine edge not by a mystic from the East but by a grandson of slaves,” one who “came out of the Black religious tradition with a message of hope and optimism for all men and women.”
Thurman is thus at once a very familiar figure in the history of American religious liberalism and cosmopolitanism and yet unusual in that history when his life and thought are considered as a whole. In Restless Souls, the historian Leigh Schmidt has explained how “the convergence of political progressivism, socioeconomic justice, and mystical interiority was central to the rise of a spiritual left in American culture.” Thurman’s life, career, sermons, recordings, mentoring, counseling, and writings are at the heart of that rise. He came from a storied tradition of American ethical mystics dating from the nineteenth century, but he carried on that tradition in ways that spoke to twentieth-century concerns and conditions.
We may begin with his recovery of the meaning of the spirituals—one of Thurman’s most original scholarly contributions, and something for which he is underappreciated. He was not first, or alone, in this, but he brought to the task a particular understanding of their meaning. Only W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about them with greater eloquence. Thurman’s writings on the spirituals, produced in books such as Deep River, demonstrate a profound understanding of the various meanings and levels of what he saw as songs of survival, of inner endurance of an oppressed class. Of the spirituals, he wrote, “There is no attempt to cast a false glow over the stark ruggedness of the journey. The facts of experience are seen for what they are—difficult, often even unyielding.”
Others from Thurman’s era struggled to fit the spirituals into a social protest framework and therefore could not hear their poetry. Thurman could. What other people saw as otherworldly or escapist, he saw as precisely the point. Much writing from that era cast the spirituals as a sort of protest music and overread specific directives into them. The so-called escapism, or otherworldliness, of the songs was in reality a “precious bane,” he said, because “it taught people how to ride high to life, to look squarely in the face [of] those facts that argue most dramatically against all hope and to use those facts as raw material out of which they fashioned a hope that the environment, with all of its cruelty, could not crush. With untutored hands—with a sure artistry and genius created out of a vast vitality, a concept of God was wrenched from the Sacred Book, the Bible, the chronicle of a people who had learned through great necessity the secret meaning of suffering.” This total experience enabled them to reject annihilation and “affirm a terrible right to live.” This was an extraordinary accomplishment, he suggested, because they brought out of sheer desperation an “infinite energy.” The slave authors “made a worthless life, the life of chattel property, a mere thing, a body, worth living!” They discovered God within themselves. The songs were a “monument to one of the most striking instances on record in which a people forged a weapon of offense and defense out of a psychological shackle. By some amazing but vastly creative spiritual insight the slave understood the redemption of a religion that the master had profaned in his midst.”
Thurman’s writing on the spirituals contrasts but also pairs with his reflections on mysticism. For Thurman, the root of human spirituality lay in a personal connection with God achieved through mystical experience; but for Thurman, such experiences made believers more, not less, connected to the everyday realities of the world. Thurman always attempted to balance his mysticism with activism, his reveries toward God with an emphasis on what should happen in this world because of that connection to God. As well, he emphasized the importance of the “moral essence of vital religious experience” in preparing “those most engaged in sustaining democracy.” Love of God would strengthen us to understand others.
Thurman’s vision of the church emanated from that. Thurman saw the church as a key resource for those engaged in the creation of a just and loving society. For his critics, Thurman’s church was like a lemonade stand, where people would pause to refresh themselves while otherwise living their lives normally. For Thurman, those people would not get to that “somewhere else”—nor would society at large—without those moments of spiritual nourishment, those cool drinks on a hot day. His quiet counsel to many provided that.
Yet he also remained a fierce critic of Christianity as actually practiced. “I belong to a generation that finds very little that is meaningful or intelligent in the teachings of the Church concerning Jesus Christ,” he said. For him, the “desperate opposition to Christianity rests in the fact it seems, in the last analysis, to be a betrayal of the Negro into the hands of his enemies by focusing his attention upon heaven, forgiveness, love, and the like…. For years it has been a part of my own quest so to understand the religion of Jesus that interest in his way of life could be developed and sustained by the intelligent men and women who were at the same time deeply victimized by the Christian Church’s betrayal of his faith.” Thurman often retold the story of the slave minister who preached to a congregation that included his grandmother: “‘You—you are not niggers. You—you are not slaves. You are God’s children.’ This established for them the ground of personal dignity, so that a profound sense of personal worth could absorb the fear reaction. This alone is not enough, but without it, nothing else is of value.”
Thurman’s background as a black southern Christian formed the fundamental root of his philosophy, even when he had left behind that background. “A profound piece of surgery has to take place in the very psyche of the disinherited before the great claim of the religion of Jesus can be presented,” he wrote. “Tremendous skill and power must be exercised to show to the disinherited the awful results of the role of negative deception into which their lives have been cast. How to do this is perhaps the greatest challenge that the religion of Jesus faces in modern life.” Those in power attempt to keep the disinherited in fear for their lives and livelihood, because if they are able to get a greater vision, that of true liberty, then the “aim of not being killed is swallowed up by a larger and more transcendent goal.” That is why it was so important to make the dispossessed feel like aliens, without any place in the social order.
Thurman’s work profoundly explored the psychology of relations between the powerful and the powerless, but also the very fragility of the power held by authorities. It came, he suggested, with just a thin veneer covering it:
The experience of power has no meaning aside from the other-than-self-reference which sustains it. If the position of ascendance is not acknowledged tacitly and actively by those over whom the ascendance is exercised, then it falls flat. Hypocrisy on the part of the disinherited in dealing with the dominant group is a tribute yielded by those who are weak. But if this attitude is lacking, or is supplanted by a simple sincerity and genuineness, then it follows that advantage due to the accident of birth or position is reduced to zero. Instead of relation between the weak and the strong there is merely a relationship between human beings. A man is a man, no more, no less. The awareness of this fact marks the supreme moment of human dignity.
Thurman applied his theology directly to the effects of segregation. For him, any structure that prevented the free flow of human beings with other human beings stifled the love ethic. And thus segregation or other means of separating humans were a “disease of the human spirit and the body politic,” for the very existence of that separation “precludes the possibility of the experience of love as a part of the necessity of man’s life.” And love took work, because love for humanity as such did not exist: “There is no such thing as humanity. What we call humanity has a name, was born, lives on a street, gets hungry, needs all the particular things we need. As an abstract, it has no reality whatsoever.” And that meant loving whole people, good and bad, including enemies. The key was to meet people where they were, but to then treat them as if they were already at the point they could reach. “Love demands that we expose ourselves at our most vulnerable point by keeping the heart open. Why? Because this is our own deepest need.” We want to be treated not as the product of a single deed or mistake but as an integrated person, to be understood fully: “This is to have the experience of freedom, to be one’s self, and to be rid of the awful burden of pretensions.”
This may be seen in his influence on what became the civil rights movement. He was, in many senses, the mentor of the movement. He spread the Gandhian gospel and planted the seeds of what would become the ethic of nonviolent resistance to white supremacy in America. Martin Luther King frequently turned back to Thurman’s classic Jesus and the Disinherited. In December 1955, at the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott, King said the protests should be shaped by “the teachings of Jesus” and that protesters must love their enemies, and concluded: “We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.”
Here, King channeled Thurman, who spent much of his working life answering the question of what religion might mean for the dispossessed. “The masses of men live with their backs constantly against the wall. They are the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed.” And what did religion say to them? The answer to that question “is perhaps the most important religious quest of modern life.” He answered it most fully in Jesus and the Dispossessed, his classic from 1949, and his single most important written work. The most fundamental fact of Christianity, he argued, was that it was “born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker” and immediately appeared as a “technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus…. Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.” Those hounds of hell had pursued Thurman through much of his life, most especially in his younger years, but they had no dominion over him; rather, his spirit had mastered them.
Beyond his influence on particular sociopolitical movements, Thurman also influenced the course of American theology, particularly in the area of mysticism. Drawing from Rufus Jones, himself a descendant of the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists and inventors of “spirituality” as opposed to “religion” as an ideal, Thurman made a distinction between passive and active mystics. He identified with the latter. Thurman the mystic always upheld the power of dreaming, of seeing visions of something different, beyond what was “realistic”: “It is part of the pretensions of modern life to traffic in what is generally called ‘realism,’” he once said. “There is much insistence upon being practical, down to earth. Such things as dreams are wont to be regarded as romantic or as a badge of immaturity, or as escape hatches for the human spirit.” But, he added, “men cannot continue long to live if the dream in the heart has perished. It is then that they stop hoping, stop looking, and the last embers of their anticipations fade away…. Where there is no dream, the life becomes a swamp, a dreary dead place and, deep within, a man’s heart begins to rot.” The dream would not have to be “some great and overwhelming plan,” but rather could be the “quiet persistence of the heart that enables a man to ride out the storms of his churching experiences…. It is the touch of significance which highlights the ordinary experience, the common event.” Thurman understood the presence of evil, but his emphasis was always on what was in the spirit of God in the world to overcome evil. The seeker would not be afraid of life, he said, because “he seeks at every point the emergence of the will and the mind of God from within himself and within the stuff of life itself. What is revealed in life is one with that which transcends life.”
Thurman carried on a tradition of those who found God in nature; in this way he drew from Henry David Thoreau and many others. At the same time, Thurman resisted being called a pantheist. Although it was true that God could be seen in nature, God could never be imprisoned in his own creation. Our bodies, he said, function as a whole; we do not become identified with a little finger or any other part. “The body is quite literally a dwelling place of the Most High God, Creator of the Universe.” Human relations seem chaotic, often “more diabolical than benevolent,” and yet amid the long history of human destruction, there always remained a will to create alternatives; there were always voices for peace amidst war. And there were figures such as Gandhi, coming outside the Christian faith into an empire “whose roots were nurtured by that faith,” and he became the embodiment of the intent to create other worlds, alternatives to human chaos and violence. “The moving finger of God in human history points ever in the same direction. There must be community.”
The hunger for community can take many forms and can be distorted and twisted, and yet it never disappears, and “prayer is the experience of the individual as he seeks to make the hunger dominant and controlling in his life. It has to move more and more to the central place until the hunger becomes the core of the individual’s consciousness.” As well, he emphasized the importance of the “moral essence of vital religious experience” in preparing “those most engaged in sustaining democracy.” Love of God, silence, and meditative prayer would strengthen congregants to understand others; they would become “apostles of sensitiveness.”
In a symposium after Thurman’s death, the black theologian James Cone reflected on Thurman’s life and influence: “Howard Thurman emphasized the universal dimension of the human search for freedom which he discovered in the particularity of the black religious experience. In all of his writing and speaking about the human spirit, he never forgot his own religious roots in the black community. Even when he was talking and writing explicitly about the universality of religion, as was true most of the time, the black religious experience was there, stimulating his imagination and guiding the cogency of his analysis.” As Cone saw it, “the ability to be free in the midst of slavery—that was the heart of Thurman’s theology…. Freedom was an inner reality, the individual’s knowledge that he or she will fulfill the intent of the Creator. To be is to be free, that is, to be in search of that inner reality which lets us know that we were made for God and for others.” Cone particularly was influenced by Jesus and the Disinherited, Deep River, and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death, all of which showed that “the contradictions of life are not final or ultimate.” Hope was fundamental to his theology, as he showed that “God is insistent that the divine intention for humanity ultimately will not be defeated” and that “God has a purpose for humanity that no particular human being can keep from being realized…. Suffering is real and deeply painful, but it is not the last word.”
For Thurman, God was the last word, the end of all our strivings. And humans best cultivated that relationship through meditation and prayer, through an extended inward journey employing multiple spiritual resources. “The human spirit has to be explored gently and with unhurried tenderness,” he said, and what we learn in those explorations, “in the discipline of silence, in meditation and prayer, bears rich, ripe fruit in preparing the way for love.” Howard Thurman translated his particular experiences and training into a universalist cosmopolitan idiom fully grounded in the painful and scarring experiences of African American life and history. His was an American spirituality full of wisdom drawn from sources as varied as his grandmother and early teachers, the trees and waterways where he grew up, his deep reading in religious texts, his training with Quaker mystics and social justice activists, and his experience in teaching students and preaching to congregants through decades of social justice struggles and experimental projects in interracial fellowship. The paradoxes of his own life made him only more aware that the larger contradictions of life were transitory, not ultimate. In the process, he prepared the way for a better world he hoped could come.