Visions of a Better World
Howard Thurman's Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
In 1935, at the height of his powers, Howard Thurman, one of the most influential African American religious thinkers of the twentieth century, took a pivotal trip to India that would forever change him—and that would ultimately shape the course of the civil rights movement in the United States.
When Thurman (1899–1981) became the first African American to meet with Mahatma Gandhi, he found himself called upon to create a new version of American Christianity, one that eschewed self-imposed racial and religious boundaries, and equipped itself to confront the enormous social injustices that plagued the United States during this period. Gandhi’s philosophy and practice of satyagraha, or “soul force,” would have a momentous impact on Thurman, showing him the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance.
After the journey to India, Thurman’s distinctly American translation of satyagraha into a Black Christian context became one of the key inspirations for the civil rights movement, fulfilling Gandhi’s prescient words that “it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.” Thurman went on to found one of the first explicitly interracial congregations in the United States and to deeply influence an entire generation of black ministers—among them Martin Luther King Jr.
Visions of a Better World depicts a visionary leader at a transformative moment in his life. Drawing from previously untapped archival material and obscurely published works, Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt explore, for the first time, Thurman’s development into a towering theologian who would profoundly affect American Christianity—and American history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historians Dixie and Eisenstadt offer an admirably focused portrait of the oft-overlooked African-American intellectual, mystic, orator, minister, teacher, and philosopher Howard Thurman (1899 1981). Concentrating on a formative six-month trip Thurman undertook to India marked by an auspicious meeting with Mahatma Gandhi, the authors delineate how Thurman's brand of theology and philosophy emerged from a desire to reconcile individual spiritual experience and transcendence with broad social change and how his thinking and teaching inspired a generation of more widely recognized civil rights leaders. In thoughtful, eloquent prose, the authors juxtapose Thurman's experiences of racism in the U.S. being refused service at a hotel where he was delivering a lecture and lyrical epiphanies while traveling, such as glimpsing Mt. Everest emerge from the parted clouds in the foothills of the Himalayas. Moreover, the authors show how both sets of experiences worked to inform Thurman's life without overpowering his intellect, which remained consistently nuanced, measured, and guided toward answering the question of whether "spiritual unity among people could be more compelling than the experiences which divide them."
