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Vol. 26:2 ISSN 0160-8460 June 1998
Shedding Light on Efforts to Promote Religious, Racial, and Class Harmony: The Howard Thurman Papers Project
"All of my life I have shunned publicity and the limelight," Howard Thurman wrote to Jesse Jackson in 1973, "it is not my way of working." This self portrait in a sentence helps to explain a paradox: Thurman, one of America's most influential theologians, who wrote more than twenty books, counseled various educational, cultural and civil rights leaders, and was named by Life magazine as one of a dozen "Greatest Preachers of the Twentieth Century," is relatively unknown to the American public, although, in recent years, he has been receiving more attention, including feature coverage in issues of Creative Spirituality and Sojourners.
Photo courtesy of the Howard Thurman Papers Project.
Thurman was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1900. It was a rigidly segregated environment. At night, black people could not cross the river into the white section of town without special permission. As a child, he read the Bible to his grandmother, a former slave. But, at his father's funeral, the minister asserted that the elder Thurman, who had disliked churches, would therefore be denied salvation. For a time, this experience soured young Thurman on organized religion. As he grew older, however, what Thurman called "a kind of destiny" impelled him back toward religion, especially a type of religion that rose above denominational doctrines and social barriers.
He graduated from Morehouse College in 1923, after having reputedly read every book in the college library. Three years later, he earned a divinity degree from Rochester Theological Seminary at the top of the class in which he was the only black. After several years as a Baptist minister in Oberlin, Ohio, Thurman returned to Atlanta as Professor of Religion and Director of Religious Life at Morehouse and Spelman Colleges. He subsequently spent a year studying with the noted Quaker mystic Rufus Jones at Haverford College. In 1932, he accepted a position at Howard University, where he eventually became Dean of Rankin Chapel.
While he was affiliated with Howard, Thurman visited India, and had a lengthy interview with Mahatma Gandhi at the latter's invitation. Their conversation touched on various matters, but it was Gandhi's advocacy of non-violence and his respect for all religions that had the most profound impact on Thurman, who commented that Gandhi's ideas were reminiscent of many African-American spirituals. Gandhi responded that it might be through blacks that "the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world."
His Indian journey was one of the factors that stimulated Thurman's interest in a religious fellowship that surmounted racial lines. In an effort to implement this concept, Thurman left Howard in 1943 to organize the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco - perhaps the first genuinely integrated church in the country. During these years, Thurman wrote Jesus and the Disinherited, a book that profoundly influenced civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., who is said to have carried a copy with him constantly.
After ten years in California, he moved to Boston University to become Dean of Marsh Chapel; he was the first black man to hold such a position in a major white university. Even after his retirement from Boston University, Thurman remained active, returning to San Francisco to establish the Howard Thurman Educational Trust. The trust provided the institutional means for disseminating his message through seminars, speaking engagements and distribution of his recorded sermons and lectures. Thurman headed the trust until his death in 1981. Now located at Morehouse College, the trust continues to promote various religious, educational and charitable causes.
Walter Fluker, the former Dean of Black Church Studies at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, who had once attended one of Thurman's seminars, had studied Thurman for many years and considered him a major figure in black religious history. In 1991, the Lilly Endowment awarded Fluker a grant to begin preparing a documentary edition of Thurman's unpublished writings. In the following year, Colgate Rochester Divinity School became the project's sponsor; and the project subsequently attracted financial support from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Louisville Institute for the Study of Protestantism and American Culture, and the NHPRC.
While they were arranging for access to his papers, Thurman's widow Sue Bailey Thurman gave Fluker and associate editor Catherine Tumber permission to publish Thurman's correspondence as well as his sermons and essays. This decision widened the scope of the project. In search of Thurman's letters, the editors examined the records and manuscript collections of scores of individuals and organizations, including those of Rochester Theological Seminary, Howard University, and the Fellowship Church. The great majority of the relevant documents, however, are among Thurman's own papers at Boston University. But, when the project gained access to these papers, they had yet to be processed. Tumber, aided by an assistant, had to arrange and describe approximately 150,000 items. Project staff members are currently compiling a massive database relating to Thurman's papers. This will be a useful tool for students of religion, African-American history, and protest movements.
Thurman's papers reflect American religious culture, black history, and twentieth-century social protest movements, and include letters from Mary McLeod Bethune, Sherwood Eddy, Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin Mays, A. J. Muste, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. From this massive corpus of documents, the editors will select roughly 600 letters and 200 writings for inclusion in The Sound of the Genuine: The Papers of Howard Thurman, a three-volume edition that will be published by the University of South Carolina Press. A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life, a single-volume collection of Thurman's writings, intended for students and general readers, will be released by Beacon Press this summer. Fluker and Tumber also served as consultants for a full-length documentary film, to be based on relevant archival holdings, as well as Thurman's papers and the family's audio tape and photograph collections, that will make Thurman accessible to the general public.
