Howard Thurman and the Disinherited
A Religious Biography
-
- $39.99
-
- $39.99
Publisher Description
The faith journeys of a major mentor to the civil rights movement
Teacher. Minister. Theologian. Writer. Mystic. Activist. No single label can capture the multiplicity of Howard Thurman’s life, but his influence is evident in the most significant aspects of the civil rights movement. In 1936, he visited Mahatma Gandhi in India and subsequently brought Gandhi’s concept of nonviolent resistance across the globe to the United States. Later, through his book Jesus and the Disinherited, he foresaw a theology of American liberation based on the life of Jesus as a dispossessed Jew under Roman rule.
Paul Harvey’s biography of Thurman speaks to the manifold ways this mystic theologian and social activist sought to transform the world to better reflect “that which is God in us,” despite growing up in the South during the ugliest years of Jim Crow. After founding one of the first intentionally interracial churches in the country—the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco—he shifted into a mentorship role with Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders. He advised them to incorporate more inward seeking and rest into their activism, while also recasting their struggle for racial equality in a more cosmopolitan, universalist manner.
As racial justice once again comes to the forefront of American consciousness, Howard Thurman’s faith and life have much to say to a new generation of the disinherited and all those who march alongside them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harvey (Bounds of Their Habitation), professor of history at the University of Colorado, offers an illuminating account of the life and legacy of Howard Thurman (1899 1981), the grandson of a slave who became a well-known preacher, teacher, author, mystic, and mentor to a generation of civil rights activists. Harvey recounts Thurman's drive for educational advancement despite numerous obstacles his hometown of Daytona, Fla., lacked a high school for Black students and the learning and leadership opportunities he pursued at the YMCA, Morehouse College, and Rochester Theological Seminary. Later chapters cover Thurman's six-month trip to India in 1935 as part of the American Christian Student Movement's "Negro delegation," during which he met Gandhi; his career as dean of the chapel at Howard University and, later, Boston University; and his efforts to establish an interracial church in San Francisco. Harvey astutely unpacks the development of Thurman's understanding of Christian faith, which was greatly influenced by the spirituals and Quaker thought, defied Baptist orthodoxy, incorporated mysticism and pacifism, and led to his seminal work, Jesus and the Disinherited, which influenced Martin Luther King Jr. This should go far to raise the profile of a lesser-known spiritual leader whose writings, sermons, and mentorship helped lay the foundation for the civil rights movement.
More Books Like This