Against the Hounds of Hell

A Life of Howard Thurman

Peter Eisenstadt

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780813944531
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

An inspiration to Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and other leaders of the civil rights movement, Howard Thurman was a crucial figure in the history of African Americans in the 20th century. Until now, however, he has not received the biographical treatment he deserves. In Against the Hounds of Hell, Thurman scholar Peter Eisenstadt offers a fascinating exploration of the life of this religious thinker and activist.

Thurman's life, was as notable for its remarkable variety as its accomplishments. The first significant African American pacifist, Thurman was the first African American to meet Mahatma Gandhi. An early and outspoken feminist, environmentalist, and advocate for social and economic justice, he was one of the first and most insistent mid-twentieth-century proponents of racial integration. At the same time, he was a key figure in the emergence of mysticism and spirituality as an alternative to formal religion.

Thurman dedicated his career to challenging what he called the "hounds of hell"—the ways in which fear, deception, and hatred so often dogged the steps of African Americans and the marginalized and disinherited peoples of the world. This biography will at last establish this multifaceted historical personage as a leading figure of twentieth-century American politics, religion, and culture.

1

Deep River

A Daytona Boyhood

The census enumerator came on a June day in 1900. Little Howard Thurman was about seven months old. Living in the same West Palm Beach, Florida, household were his sister, Henrietta (aged three); his mother, Alice Ambrose Thurman (aged twenty-eight), and her husband, Saul Solomon Thurman (aged fifty.)1 West Palm Beach was just a speck, with a total population in 1900 of only 564 and, like young Howard, newly fledged, incorporated only in 1894. The Thurmans were living in this still quite out-of-the-way south Florida community because Saul Solomon Thurman was a laborer on the Florida East Coast Railway. Developing the nether regions of south Florida was the extravagant dream of Henry M. Flagler, a former Standard Oil executive. The new railroad was a key element in his plans. West Palm Beach was originally platted as a residence for servants in the two new hotels Flagler built in adjacent Palm Beach.2 Alice Thurman had likely also been in West Palm Beach the previous 19 November, when Howard Thurman was born.

We aren’t sure. Thurman rarely discussed his place of birth.3 But we do know that the location of his nativity meant little to Thurman, since if he was born in West Palm Beach, he and his family moved, probably when he was still an infant, some two hundred miles to the north, to Daytona, the city he always thought of as his hometown. For most of his life he recorded his birth date as 19 November 1900, rather than 1899. Thurman, for various reasons, as we shall see, did not like to discuss the actual circumstances of his birth.

Daytona, like many central and south Florida cities, had no antebellum existence. The site of a failed attempt by white abolitionists to create a post-Emancipation settlement for Blacks, it received its name, in 1876, from one Matthias Day, an Ohio businessman, one of the many northern whites who played important roles in the early history of Daytona. The red-letter year for the history of Daytona was 1888, when the Florida East Coast Railway was extended to the area. From a population of 300 in 1880, Daytona grew to 3,572 by 1910.4

Unlike nearby Daytona Beach and Seabreeze, all three to be eventually joined to form the City of Daytona Beach, Daytona was not on the famous beach. It was separated from the Atlantic Ocean and the main tourist trade by the Halifax River, a misnamed tidal estuary. Daytona, humbler than its all-white beachfront neighbors, always had a substantial Black population. Within Daytona there were three African American neighborhoods, Waycross, Newton, and Midway. Thurman grew up in Waycross, at 516 Whitehall Street, in a three-room clapboard house that still stands. Waycross was primarily a neighborhood of private homes, with one restaurant, one rooming house, several fraternal lodges, and two churches, Baptist and AME, which were the subject of a local rivalry. (Thurman was a Baptist, and his schoolyard banter included many heated conversations and the occasional fistfight with AME counterparts on the efficacy and scriptural warrants for pedobaptism.)5

Waycross was separated from Midway, the business center of Black Daytona, by the main line of the Florida East Coast Railway, which ran down the middle of Waycross. (With numerous unprotected grade crossings, an all-too-common occurrence in Black neighborhoods, both Waycross and Midway were on the wrong side of the tracks.)6 Some sense of what Black Daytona looked like in Thurman’s day can be garnered from a series of photographs of Midway taken by the famed photographer Gordon Parks for the Office of War Information in 1943. Midway comes across as a tidy town, where proud people lived in modest homes, worked hard in small businesses, and attended well-maintained churches.7 For Thurman a visit to Midway, with its pool halls, movie theater, professional offices, and eateries, was always “like a country boy going to the city.”8

That said, there was little that was countrified about the young Thurman. He sometimes categorized people as either rural or urban. (Jesus was rural; Paul was urban.) Rural people were more straightforward, and the “distance from the center” of their being “to the circumference was very short,” whereas for city people “distance from the center to the circumference was very involved.” If Thurman sometimes fancied himself as having a rural sensibility, he was urban to his core. (Even his abiding and abounding immersion in the world of nature was from the vantage of an observer rather than a tiller of the soil.) Thurman’s Daytona childhood, with its many opportunities and stimulations, is a key to understanding the person he became. If Daytona during Thurman’s childhood was perhaps more of a town than a city, it was sophisticated in ways beyond the size of its population, and it was only the first of several urban areas and cities that shaped the complicated “city man” that he would always be.9

White Daytona, in its paternalistic fashion, was impressed by the civic energy of Daytona’s Black residents. This from a 1900 city directory: “Here we see colored men and women at every step decently clad, healthy in look and well behaved. . . . Waycross has a population of 300, two good, large well-built nurseries, a public school and a kindergarten, drug store, grocery store, Masonic and Odd Fellows lodge. . . . There is abundant proof that here is a fairly industrious population, self-supporting.”10

Black Daytonans felt the same way about themselves, without the condescension. A 1915 article in the Chicago Defender, “Southern City Making Wonderful Progress,” asserted that “there are but few towns in the United States that offer men and women of the race better business and educational opportunities than this place. . . . It already has to its credit quite a number of the most successful business men and women of the race in this section of the country.”11 Daytona was the sort of town Booker T. Washington could, and did, love.12 Black Daytona celebrated New Year’s Day, doubling as Emancipation Day, the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, with pomp and reverence. In 1913 the highlight was, as described in a local newspaper, a float with “four old mothers who were eyewitnesses to the liberating of the race.” Two years later the event was celebrated “in a grand style . . . with a grand parade, consisting of floats, music, etc.,” capped off with appropriate Emancipation Day oratory.13 Thurman no doubt watched the parades from the sidelines.

Daytona had what passed for relatively moderate race relations in the Deep South, circa 1900–1910, at the perigee of the Jim Crow era. This was connected to the prominence of northern whites in its early history. A white former abolitionist in Daytona in 1887 praised “the spirit of the white citizens of East Florida toward the colored people,” so much so that Blacks from South Carolina felt it was “like escaping from slavery to a land of freedom.”14 If this was laying it on a bit thick, it was not entirely untrue, either. By the time of Thurman’s childhood, Daytona was a winter resort for some of America’s wealthiest individuals (including, in nearby Ormond Beach, the wealthiest of them all, John D. Rockefeller Sr.). The presence of northern whites—the so-called “snowbirds”—in the town, Thurman writes, was a “tempering influence,” making “contact between the races less abrasive than it might have been otherwise.”15 (One example of their charity was a private kindergarten in Waycross that Thurman attended, paid for by snowbirds.)16

A source of the civic pride of Black Daytonans was that theirs was the largest city in Florida in which Blacks continued to vote in large numbers throughout the Jim Crow era.17 In 1898 Joseph Brook Hankerson, a Black barber and Baptist minister, was elected to the Daytona City Commission, and hopeful voices in the Black press hailed this as “the sign of the dawning of a new day in the South for capable and worthy Negroes.”18 This proved to be a false dawn, and there would not be another Black candidate for office in Daytona until after World War II. However, this did not mark the end of Black political influence in Daytona. In exchange for Black votes, Black neighborhoods were granted municipal favors such as new storm sewers, new schools, paved sidewalks, electric street lights, and even Black policemen.19 (A Black reporter, driving through Daytona in 1912, was almost giddy after being stopped for speeding and admonished by a Black officer.)20 In 1916 some of the white candidates for office went to a forum for Black voters promising to protect Black prisoners against lynch mobs.21 The incorporation of the City of Daytona Beach in 1926, merging Daytona with its all-white neighbors, Daytona Beach and Seabreeze, was something of a municipal gerrymander, done in part to dilute Black voting strength. Still, Black involvement in the political process continued, and in Daytona Beach in the 1920s and 1930s there was a dominant political machine that relied on Black votes to foil an attempt of the Ku Klux Klan to take over local politics. In 1929, 30 percent of Daytona Beach’s registered voters were African American.22

At the same time, Daytona was also a typical southern town, and one that became more so during the years Thurman grew up there, as more white southerners moved to the area. Black and white worlds, Thurman wrote, were “separated by a wall of quiet hostility and overt suspicion.”23 If the beachfront houses and resorts created numerous employment opportunities for Blacks, the beachfront communities were “sundown towns” where Blacks were not permitted at night.24 Thurman wrote that he “could work in Sea Breeze and Daytona Beach, but I was not allowed to spend the night there, nor could I be seen after dark without being threatened.” White Daytona was no better. It was “no place for loitering. Our freedom of movement was carefully circumscribed, a fact so accepted that it was taken for granted.”25 Sometime after 1900 Black store owners who catered to whites were forced from their downtown locations and moved their businesses to the African American neighborhoods, losing much of their customer base.

It was in the early years of the twentieth century that the full minatory apparatus of Jim Crow came to Daytona.26 One account placed the arrival of complete racial separation in public places in the years 1902 to 1906, though Thurman remembered that in 1910, when famed auto racer Barney Oldfield set a new world speed record (131.72 mph) on the hard, flat sand of Daytona Beach, Black and white spectators were not separated, and the beach was “not segregated as it was later to become.”27 Daytona was not free of the most heinous aspects of the South’s racial regime. In 1907 there was a lynching, and the dead man was carried through the Black neighborhoods as a reminder for Blacks “not to get out of their place.”28

Thurman often told the story that when he was a young boy, while engaged in one of his first jobs, raking leaves for a white family, a young girl came up to him with a straight pin and stuck him. When Thurman yelped, the girl was confused, telling him she thought Black people couldn’t feel pain.29 For Thurman, this was a metaphor for the way Blacks and whites did their best to pass by each other with the least amount of contact, understanding, or empathy. Thurman’s Black world was emotionally “sealed off from the white world” in which greater dangers lurked than oblivious little girls with stra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “With Our Negro Guests”
• 1. Deep River: A Daytona Boyhood
• 2. “My People Need Me”: High School Years
• 3. “The Personification of the Morehouse Ideal”
• 4. “The Sound of Rushing Water”: Rochester Theological Seminary
• 5. A New Prophet in Oberlin
• 6. “A Technique of Survival for the Underprivileged”: A Return to Atlanta
• 7. In Black Athens: Howard University
• 8. Delivering the Message of Nonviolence: Lessons from India
• 9. Footsteps of a War, Footprints of a Dream
• 10. In the Queen of Cities: Building Community in San Francisco
• 11. Against the Hounds of Hell
• 12. Disciplines and Resources: At Boston University
• 13. “The Stillness of Absolute Motion”: The Wider Ministry
• 14. Common Ground? Coming Aground? “The Cataclysms of the Civil Rights Revolution”
• 15. With Head and Heart
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Index