Howard Thurman and the Disinherited

A Religious Biography

Paul Harvey

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780802876775
• eBook ISBN: 9781467459648
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

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.

1

“My People Need Me”

The Education of Howard Thurman

The fact that twenty-five years of my life were spent in Florida and in Georgia has left deep scars in my spirit and has rendered me terribly sensitive to the churning abyss separating white from black. Living outside of the region, I am aware of the national span of racial prejudice and the virus of segregation that undermines the vitality of American life. Nevertheless, a strange necessity has been laid upon me to devote my life to the central concern that transcends the walls that divide and would achieve in literal fact what is experienced as literal truth: human life is one and all men are members one of another. And this insight is spiritual and it is the hard core of religious.

—Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness

Born in 1899 in West Palm Beach, Florida, and growing up in a particular black neighborhood of Daytona Beach, Howard Thurman had a childhood full of what he would later describe as psychic scars. But his boyhood was also full of the wonders of nature along the Atlantic seaboard. Thurman lost the man he considered his father when he was seven. Later, he endured schoolyard taunts about his paternity, because his boyhood male role model was not his biological father. Howard never mentioned that publicly, perhaps because that psychic wound was too hard to accept. He was raised principally by his mother, Alice (Ambrose) Thurman, and his grandmother Nancy Ambrose. His mother, dear to him through his life, worked constantly to support the family. As Thurman recalled, she always carried with her a “deep inner sadness.” She seemed unable ever to be spontaneously joyful.

Perhaps (it’s impossible to know) she had some of the depression that later afflicted Thurman’s younger sister, Madaline. Even if not, Alice Thurman had a rough go of it. She lost two husbands to early deaths and finally married a third who never would be close with her children. She also lost her firstborn child, Henrietta, Howard’s older sister, who passed from an illness when Howard was in high school.

The kind of hardships Alice Thurman endured may be seen too in her own manner of passing. In the late 1940s, Thurman moved her to San Francisco to care for her during her declining days. When she was near death, Thurman admitted her to Stanford Hospital, but she refused to stay, saying of the “buckra” (white people) around her, “The first chance they get, you don’t know what they will do to you. I’m scared to go to sleep at night, and you just have to take me out of this place.” Alice’s decades-long ungrammatical but loving correspondence with her son, and Howard’s fiercely protective attitude toward his beloved mother, suggests the closeness of their relationship.

From his own account, his grandmother, in particular, fundamentally shaped his religious sentiments; she was his hero. His grandmother had been a slave, and later, when Thurman began writing his books on the spirituals, he had her words in mind. Nancy also was a midwife in Daytona, known generally by the community as “Lady Nancy,” and remembered by Thurman as the “anchor person in our family.” She came from a large plantation estate in South Carolina; her owner, John C. McGehee, had moved to Madison County, Florida, before the war, where the majority of the larger planters were from South Carolina. Growing up, Thurman made frequent pilgrimages to Madison County but remembered of his grandmother, “She granted to no one the rights of passage across her own remembered footsteps.”

But there was one great exception. Nancy frequently repeated the story of the slave minister she remembered, who came once a year to preach to them. He would address the enslaved people, saying, “You are not niggers! You are not slaves! You are God’s children!” Thurman recounted that story numerous times in his orations, sermons, and books, including the autobiography he prepared later in his life. It was one of his staple parables that he returned to time and again when he reflected on his life. Another of those stories was of the girl who lived with a family for whom Thurman’s grandmother did laundry. Thurman worked raking leaves in their yard, and the girl tormented the boy by scattering the leaves. When Thurman told her to stop, she picked up a pin and jabbed him in the hand. “Oh Howard, that didn’t hurt you! You can’t feel!” she said. The grandmother’s affirmation of worth, and the girl’s negation of it, defined Thurman’s experience growing up as a black boy in Daytona.

Thurman’s mother, Alice, always a devout woman for whom Thurman cared deeply her entire life, married three times. The first, Saul, was the man Thurman assumed was his father, and Thurman revered him as a strongly built man who held opinions contrary to the general sentiments of the community. For one thing, he had some books by the famous agnostic Robert Ingersoll; for another, he conspicuously avoided going to church. Saul died in 1907; Alice then married Alex Evans, a skilled workman from Lake Helen, Florida, but he passed away in 1910. Thurman respected Evans as well. Finally in 1914, Alice married James Sams, and the two would be married for the next several decades. But Sams was someone for whom Thurman and his sister felt little affection, and in future years Thurman would write to Sams and lecture him, with uncharacteristically harsh words, about his mistreatment of his mother. Indeed, much later in his life, shortly before Alice’s death, Thurman would instruct his mother on how to cash in an insurance policy that had matured, and how to do so in a way that James would not know about (Thurman always suspected that James schemed to take money away from his mother).

Socially awkward and physically gangly as a boy, Howard spent a difficult childhood communing more with nature than with other people. Nature “provided my rather lonely spirit with a sense of belonging that did not depend on human relationships,” he later reflected. He particularly enjoyed the later hours, when he “could hear the night think and feel the night feel.” One exception was with his sister Madaline, born in August of 1908, with whom he was close in his life. Madaline shared with Thurman a passion for music but also suffered from bouts of depression that sometimes were crippling. Thurman took care of her as a child, and then sometimes as an adult during her lowest moments; in exchange, when Thurman went to India, Madaline cared for Thurman’s two young girls. But Madaline struggled with mental illness through her life, her artistic talents hampered by her bouts of crippling depression. Thurman also had an older sister, Henrietta, who passed away from an illness during Thurman’s second year in high school in Jacksonville, Florida. Little wonder that, as Thurman later wrote, death surrounded him while growing up. The annual season of illnesses routinely struck down many in the community. With doctors helpless, impoverished black families could only place their loved ones’ souls in the hands of God.

THURMAN’S EARLY RELIGIOUS LIFE AND EDUCATION

Thurman grew up in Mount Bethel Baptist Church, in Waycross, one of the black neighborhoods across the Halifax River from Daytona Beach and the tourist areas. Thurman learned to be wary of Baptist orthodoxy early on. When Saul Thurman died, a local Baptist minister initially had refused to give his father a proper burial. The pastor of their church initially refused to preach the eulogy. Thurman’s grandmother, as he recounted it, pressed the deacons to allow a service in the church, but a visiting evangelist who gave the sermon used the occasion to make an object lesson of the fate of unsaved souls. “I listened with wonderment, then anger, and finally mounting rage,” Thurman said, as his father was “preached into hell.” He whispered to his grandmother, “He didn’t know Papa, did he? Did he?”

Thurman’s bitter experience with the funeral of the man he understood to be his father, his symbol of masculinity in his otherwise female-dominated world, had a long-lasting effect. Thurman would be in search of symbolic fathers, physical and spiritual, for years to come, but the conclusions of those relationships often were unsatisfactory. Also, the shocking events of his father’s funeral set Thurman up for a love-hate relationship with religious experience and the institutional church. Thurman’s own attempt to join his boyhood church furthered this early sentiment. At twelve, feeling that he had been converted, Thurman expressed an interest in joining the church. He told the deacons of Mount Bethel of his experience, but they initially refused to accept its validity.

In fact, it had long been a tradition in many black Baptist congregations to require repeated versions of the conversion story. Thurman’s fellow Floridian Zora Neale Hurston, daughter of a Baptist minister in an all-black town in Florida, was a lifelong religious skeptic who knew intimately of the entirely ordinary lives of churchgoers in her hometown: “They plowed, chopped wood, went possum-hunting, washed clothes, raked up back yards and cooked collard greens like anybody else.” Even with her doubts and questions, she enjoyed the oral artistry of the salvation narratives. She felt moved in churches “not by the spirit, but by action, more or less dramatic.” Candidates for membership were pursued by “hellhounds” as they “ran for salvation” (perhaps the same “hellhounds” that dogged legendary bluesman Robert Johnson as he ran from the “blues falling down like hail”). They would dangle precariously over the fires of hell, call on Jesus, see a “little white man” on the other side calling them, and finally traverse to heaven. In publicly describing their spiritual journeys, they sometimes strayed from the scripted narrative expected of them, relying instead on extemporaneously created variations: “These visions are traditional. I knew them by heart as did the rest of the congregation. Some of them made up new details. Some of them would forget a part and improvise clumsily or fill up the gap with shouting. The audience knew, but everybody acted as if every word of it was new.”

The twelve year-old Thurman was no religious anthropologist, however, but an awkward boy who sought community and acceptance. The deacons’ initial rebuff brought grandmother Nancy back to the fray. “Maybe you do not understand his words, but shame on you if you do not know his heart,” she told them. He joined the church. In his younger years he felt called to the ministry but resisted that call precisely because of his long-smoldering anger over the rejection he saw at Saul Thurman’s funeral. He struggled with that sentiment for a long time, until finally feeling some release from his resentment when, years later, he encountered the man who had preached that funeral. But his quarrel with orthodox religious dogma continued through his days. The young Thurman was on his way to becoming a seeker, a path he followed the rest of his life.

Thurman’s home community of Waycross was one of the three black neighborhoods of Daytona. It had about 1,800 black residents during his younger years (about half the growing city’s population). The Daytona city directory of 1900 depicted a (relatively speaking) prosperous black community. Blacks worked in the citrus industry, for the railroad, and in other occupations a step above what was available for most rural black southerners. The presence of northern snowbirds helped, both in bringing money into the general area and in slightly lessening the degree of racial hostility and violence blacks experienced. “The tempering influence of these northern families made contact between the races less abrasive than it might have been otherwise,” Thurman remembered. And in Thurman’s case, it helped precisely because early on he developed white benefactors (including James Gamble, of the Proctor and Gamble company) who gave him modest ($5 a month) but indispensable early support in furthering his education.

Over time, however, as white southerners moved in, the town grew more visibly segregated. The influence of the northerners who had been prominent in the town’s founding diminished, and the normal patterns of Jim Crow set in more or less around the time of Thurman’s boyhood. He remembered how the movements of blacks were “carefully circumscribed,” and that the worlds of whites and blacks were “separated by a wall of quiet hostility and overt suspicion.” Most important for Thurman’s later reflections was the complete absence of whites from his ethical field of vision. As he later described it, he did not regard whites “as involved in my religious reference. They were read out of the human race—they simply did not belong to it in the first place. Behavior toward them was amoral.” Blacks and whites lived on opposite sides of a river, but they effectively dwelled on separate planets.

The Daytona area, then, was no paradise, nor an escape from the larger world of Jim Crow. And yet, there was evidence of black prosperity and black political activity. Thurman found it in the work and achievements of his lifelong friend Mary McLeod Bethune. In 1904, she founded what is now Bethune-Cookman College (originally called the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Girls), a place that, together with the “inner strength and authority of Mrs. Bethune,” gave younger blacks such as Thurman “a view of possibilities to be realized in some distant future.” Thurman also looked up to role models such as Thornton L. Smith, a cousin who played baseball in the Negro Leagues and helped to stanch the tide of Ku Kluxism around Daytona in the 1920s. The physician for Thurman’s family, John T. Stocking, also had white patrons, and Thurman remembered him as someone who resisted pressure to join the church. They were his “masculine ideals” as a young man.

Thurman later told the story of his grandmother’s belief in the magic power of education. She had wanted, as a slave, to learn how to read; the daughter of the slave owner was going to help her, but the mother, upon discovering this, intervened, and Nancy Ambrose’s hopes were dashed. But Nancy transmitted to the young Howard her belief in the power of education. Thurman managed to make it through seventh grade in Newton, one of the other black communities (aside from Waycross) where he grew up. It was the only school for young blacks in the area and extended only as far as seventh grade. The principal tutored Thurman through eighth grade individually, even as Thurman worked in a fish market to help support the family. Thurman received high marks throughout, setting his long pattern of being the valedictorian of virtually any educational institution he attended. Thurman graduated from eighth grade, the first black boy in Daytona to do so.

But there was no high school there for him. There were, in fact, only 492 black secondary school students in the state, just 3 percent of those eligible to go to high school; they attended two public and six private high schools. Thurman would have to go elsewhere to continue his education. One of the private high schools was in Jacksonville, a hundred miles north of Daytona. Thurman was desperately poor, and even the process of getting to Jacksonville on the train almost derailed his efforts. Thurman could not pay the passage for his small, ragged trunk of clothes and belongings, and, as he recounted in his autobiography, he sat in the station, crying. An unknown man asked him what was the matter. Upon learning it, he told Thurman, “If you’re trying to get out of this damn town to get an education, the least I can do is to help you.” He paid the trunk fare and disappeared, one of several instances of good fortune that Thurman understood as God’s grace, his intervention in lives, the growing edge that produced fruit out of seemingly nothing. Thurman dedicated his autobiography to this unknown man, the “stranger in the railroad station in Daytona Beach who restored my broken dream sixty-five years ago.”

Thurman attended Florida Baptist Academy from 1915 to 1919, again achieving stellar academic marks, working himself to a state of complete mental and physical exhaustion in school and in various odd jobs, and completing tough academic courses, including several years of Latin and some Greek. During his second year there his older sister, Henrietta, suddenly died. In his autobiography, Thurman claimed to have had some premonition of the tragedy, during which he received a telegram with the news of Henrietta’s grave illness; he traveled immediately to Daytona, but she had passed before he arrived. Later, in 1958, he recounted a similar experience when he woke up obsessed with thoughts of needing to go visit Martin Luther King Jr., who, that day, as he soon learned, was stabbed and nearly killed.

Thurman’s later mystical speculations on the powers of intuition, of foreknowledge and esoteric understandings of mysteries and inexplicable premonitions, had some roots in these early years. They may also have risen from African American folklore about “the veil.” While dubious of it, Thurman grew up surrounded by the pervasive African American folklore of the “veil.” This was the central image of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk. The great black intellectual famously used the physical image of the “veil” of amniotic fluid over a baby’s face (interpreted by African Americans as a sign of special wisdom or power given to that baby, but also a sign of trouble and grief), combining it with the veil worn by women to shield themselves, to speculate on the ways in which African Americans lived behind the veil. For Du Bois, it was a powerful image of being unable to see through clearly to the outside world, but also that the outside world could never see in, clearly, to the African American world. All was shrouded, veiled. And thus the world was darkened and made mysterious or even invisible.

Thurman’s ears were pierced as a child, a common practice to “break” the veil and thus rid the child of the heavy burden of carrying it. “How deeply I was influenced by this ‘superstition’ I do not know,” Thurman later wrote. “The veil” was not a central image in his writing, as it was for Du Bois. And yet, Thurman’s lifelong project of creating real human relations between people, beyond the evils of separation and segregation, really involved breaking through the veil. Being able to see what was God in us, ridding ourselves of the spiritual obstacles that made such a vision impossible, and then transmitting that knowledge into movements to transform and redeem the social world—this was his lifelong vision. And it was one in the process of formation from the earliest years of his education both in school and in his lonely encounters with the forces of nature.

By his senior year, Thurman was known locally as the academic star, and he was proud of his excellent grades. His work ethic was unexcelled, both in school and in his long hours working at hard jobs to pay his rent and (barely) keep himself fed. At the same time, his drive for work always conflicted with his sensitive nature; he was prone to bouts of minidepression and suffered from physical symptoms of overwork. Much of his later focus on the words “sensitiveness” and “relaxation” surely stemmed from these years of ceaseless mental and physical exertion. His achievements were recognized, however, as he won a partial scholarship to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta; he could not have gone there otherwise. Further, in his senior year Thurman worked as something like the dean of students at Florida Baptist Academy, which had just moved to Saint Augustine, Florida, and become Florida Normal and Industrial Institute. Further, Thurman spent the summer of 1918, during the last months of World War I, at a student army-training-corps camp at Howard University, one of several places early in his life where he began to make connections to the wider black intellectual and social world. After the experience at Howard, he returned to finish high school. While giving his high school graduation speech, he collapsed, partly because of high blood pressure. He kept his demanding regimen of work in a hot bakery during the sweltering Jacksonville summer, saving the money necessary to attend Morehouse starting in the fall of 1919.

“DUD”: THURMAN’S MOREHOUSE YEARS

Before making it to Atlanta, with the emotional but not financial support of his impoverished mother, Thurman had begun his correspondence with figures that would serve as mentors—most significantly, during his younger years, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, who later served as president of Howard during its glory years as the capital of the intellectual world of black universities. Thurman began attending events such as YMCA student conferences while in high school, where he heard addresses delivered by Johnson and other black intellectual leaders. After hearing Johnson speak in 1917, he had wanted to introduce himself, but the shy high schooler just could not bring himself to do it. Finally in June 1918, he wrote directly to Johnson to introduce himself after hearing him at a YMCA student event in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. “Listen while I tell you my soul,” he wrote in the second paragraph. He hungered to be heard, as yet far from fully mature but with a deep desire for service to the race. His participation in the YMCA and other student organizations and conferences furthered that desire.

Thurman told Johnson of the arduous path he had pursued. As the first black student in Daytona Beach to receive promotion (to move past eighth grade), he had told his...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “My People Need Me”: The Education of Howard Thurman
• 2 “The Unadulterated Message of Nonviolence”: Howard University and the Voyage to India
• 3 The Affirmation Mystic in Action: Thurman’s Philosophical Explorations, 1936–1944
• 4 “A Sense of Coming Home”: The Great Adventure in San Francisco
• 5 “The Scent of the Eternal Unity”: Dreams Deferred in Boston
• 6 “The Way the Grain in My Wood Moves”: Thurman’s Wider Ministry
• Epilogue: Mentor of the Movement: Thurman’s Influence and Afterlives
• Bibliographic Essay