Howard Thurman

Philosophy, Civil Rights, and the Search for Common Ground

Kipton E. Jensen

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781643360478
• eBook ISBN: 9781643360485
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

Although he is best known as a mentor to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Howard Thurman (1900–1981) was an exceptional philosopher and public intellectual in his own right. In Howard Thurman: Philosophy, Civil Rights, and the Search for Common Ground, Kipton E. Jensen provides new ways of understanding Thurman's foundational role in and broad influence on the civil rights movement and argues persuasively that he is one of the unsung heroes of that time. While Thurman's profound influence on King has been documented, Jensen shows how Thurman's reach extended to an entire generation of activists.

Thurman espoused a unique brand of personalism. Jensen explicates Thurman's construction of a philosophy on nonviolence and the political power of love. Showing how Thurman was a "social activist mystic" as well as a pragmatist, Jensen explains how these beliefs helped provide the foundation for King's notion of the beloved community.

Throughout his life Thurman strove to create a climate of "inner unity of fellowship that went beyond the barriers of race, class, and tradition." In this volume Jensen meticulously documents and analyzes Thurman as a philosopher, activist, and peacemaker and illuminates his vital and founding role in and contributions to the monumental achievements of the civil rights era.

1

An African American Philosophy of Nonviolent Resistance

And if I work for social righteousness so that every man can sit under his own fig tree and be unafraid—if I work to provide the kind of climate in which it is a reasonable thing that men may trust each other, then—then there will be the kind of atmosphere in which it becomes a possibility for nations to beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks.

Howard Thurman, The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, vol. 4 ([1934] 2009)

There is a very fine distinction within Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, a distinction that Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr. took for granted, but which the present generation of scholars tends to conflate or overlook entirely, namely, between ahimsa and satyagraha. The philosophy of nonviolence, ahimsa, or what Gandhi and Thurman agreed to translate as “agape” and “the love-ethic,” as expressed by St. Paul within the Christian tradition, is distinct yet ultimately and intimately related to the success of satyagraha, which is a distinctive method of nonviolence. Thurman’s creative appropriation of this distinction in Gandhi’s thought, as well as a unique application of it to the problem of segregation in America, was formative to King’s understanding of and sustained, albeit tested, commitment to nonviolence. Although it is sometimes assumed that the origins of philosophical or spiritual pacifism in African American history stretch back to King’s veneration of Gandhi, recent scholarship suggests that the inspirational sources are to be found much earlier and extended far broader than that. Not only did Thurman meet with Gandhi in 1936, he was also a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation from the early 1920s. King traces his conversion to pacifism back to a 1950 sermon by Mordecai Johnson in Philadelphia. In their Black Fire (2011), which traces the history of the “black Quaker experience,” Harold Weaver, Paul Kriese, and Stephen W. Angell suggest that the origins of African American pacifism reach back at least as far as Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), whose annual almanacs (1792–1804) advocated directly or indirectly for religious and philosophical pacifism, the disuse of oaths, and the abolition or reduction of the death penalty. Some scholars suggest that the significance of the black Garrisonians has also been overlooked. Luther Smith claims that “the development of a philosophy of nonviolent protest for the black struggle is a foremost achievement of [Thurman’s] social witness” (1992, 133).

The Thurman–King Relationship

The influence of Thurman on King remains insufficiently appreciated, if not ignored entirely, perhaps in part because the archival evidence and documentation of this influence is still emerging. But the available documents seem to confirm what many scholars have suspected all along, namely, that the influence of Thurman on King, as well as the subsequent influence of King on Thurman, was sustained and significant if not decisive to the trajectory of the civil rights movement. The extended familial relationship reaches back to the early 1920s, when Thurman was an undergraduate at Morehouse, across campus from where Martin Luther King Sr. studied theology and religion. George K. Makechnie claims that “Howard had known Martin since the latter’s boyhood” because “Martin’s father, ‘Daddy King,’ and Howard had been college mates at Morehouse” (1988, 39; also see Thurman 1979, 254). Before examining the philosophy of nonviolence in Howard Thurman and then comparing Thurman’s philosophy of nonviolence to the methods of nonviolence in King and Gandhi through the lens of their respective theories or theologies of forgiveness, something must be said about the friendship that evolved between Thurman and King; for this task, I wish to hover over several archival documents, fragments really, but telling, retained by the Martin Luther King Jr. Collection at Morehouse College.

Fluker claims “several writers have made reference to the influence of Howard Thurman on his younger fellow visionary, but no scholarly treatment has demonstrated a formal tie between the two” (1990, 36). And while we may disagree concerning what would constitute an adequate demonstration or sufficient evidence of a “formal tie between the two,” it seems that Fluker is himself among those scholars who have demonstrated a steady and strong influence of Thurman on King. Perhaps the most compelling demonstration of the connection is the epilogue to Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt’s groundbreaking study, Visions of a Better World (2011). Recent scholars are also keen to emphasize the influence of King on Thurman. When discussing Thurman’s role in the civil rights movement, Albert J. Raboteau concedes that “influence is difficult to measure” (2001, 157). But the formal tie or influence will not surface by analyzing King’s and Thurman’s personal and professional correspondence. In 1966, for example, in response to a brief letter and donation to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from Mr. and Mrs. Thurman, King wrote, “In the meantime, I solicit your continued prayers and support in these difficult days. These are trying times for the philosophy and method of non-violence, but I will continue to go on with the faith that this approach is right” (Martin Luther King Jr. Collection at Morehouse College: 1.1.0.46790_005). The typed letter strikes the reader as merely perfunctory. But the intellectual if not spiritual friendship between Thurman and King was deeper than one might suppose based solely on their formal correspondence, which, as we now know, was monitored by the FBI.

Thurman and King understood themselves to be allies in a nonviolent struggle against what both expressed as the triple threats of racism, materialism, and militarism. In an earlier letter to King, in 1958, Thurman wrote of their plan to “spend several hours of uninterrupted talk about these matters that are of such paramount significance for the fulfillment of the tasks to which our hands are set” (2017, 233). When it comes to demonstrating philosophical influence, the closest thing to a formal tie—perhaps better than a “formal tie” if what is meant by that is an official declaration—will consist in a scholarly comparison of their respective treatments of related philosophical material. Comparing Thurman’s teachings on community with King’s, as Fluker has in They Looked for a City, or when showing parallels or family resemblances between Thurman on King on nonviolence, as Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt begin to do in Visions of a Better World, has thus far provided the best evidence of influence, philosophical or otherwise. To demonstrate the reciprocal influence, scholars must “seek to unearth significant differences obscured by surface similarities,” as James T. Kloppenberg puts it, but that also “yield equally valuable insights if phenomena assumed to be dissimilar can be shown to exhibit similar features when viewed from a new perspective” (1988, 8). That said, even their official correspondence—which is often thick with allusion and connotation, indicative of a shared journey shot through with meaningful encounters—provides evidence of reciprocal influence. (Surely King and Thurman knew that their correspondence was by no means confidential at that point.) Thurman’s philosophical influence and spiritual genius significantly shaped what was to become a distinctively African American philosophy and method of nonviolence; beyond his influence on King, Thurman’s influence extended also to James Farmer as well as James Lawson.

King’s commitment to the philosophy and method of nonviolence, not altogether unlike Thurman’s, was contested in 1966 by “logistical imperialists” and “black-national ideologies” such as Floyd McKissick, Huey Newton, and Stokely Carmichael, who argued for their strategies and demeaned nonviolent direct action, and other participants in the Freedom Sunday march to Chicago City Hall on July 10, 1966, and in the Chicago Freedom Movement. In May of 1966, Thurman wrote to King as if clairvoyant, as someone gifted with second sight and symbolized at his birth by the sign of the caul (Thurman 1979, 263), as someone who understood the fate of King as a “Black Christ” (Weaver et al. 2011, 22–23; also see Thurman 1971, 98), closing cryptically if not indecipherably, anticipating King’s “fate and destiny,” which were not the same thing for Thurman: “Those [who hunt] treasure must go alone, [at] night, and when they find it, they have to leave a little of their blood behind” (Martin Luther King Jr. Collection at Morehouse College: 1.1.0.46790_002).

Alluding to Thurman’s earlier advice following the assassination attempt on King in Harlem on September 20, 1958—namely, that King withdraw for a while “from the immediate pressures of the movement to reassess himself in relation to the cause, to rest his body and mind with healing detachment, and to take a long look that only solitary brooding can provide”—King wrote that their meeting was “a great spiritual lift” that was “of inestimable value in giving me the strength and courage to face the future of that very trying period” and that he “was following your advice on the question, ‘where do I go from here?’” (MLK to HT, November 8, 1958, as qtd. in Dixie and Eisenstadt 2011, 193; see also Fluker 2009, 29). After many years of collectively brooding over this question, first posed by King in the final chapter of his 1958 Stride Toward Freedom, which Thurman personalized in his visit to King’s hospital bed in Harlem, King published a masterful set of sustained responses to Thurman’s question in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Although Thurman is nowhere explicitly mentioned in these books, the Thurmanian inheritance is on rich display for those with eyes to see, that is, those familiar with Thurman’s early corpus. In a similar way, Thurman’s WHDH-TV reflections on loving one’s enemy, delivered in a series titled “We Believe”—especially two episodes recorded in early December 1959, aired on the eleventh and the nineteenth, the transcripts of which King received and studied, as indicated by the marginalia (see Martin Luther King Jr. Collection at Morehouse College: 2.2.0.1060)—might be said to have been analogously influential on King’s 1963 Strength to Love. At least in terms of his treatment of the “anatomy of hatred,” and as a case in point, King seems to acknowledge Thurman’s influence when he refers—in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?—to “those psychiatrists who say, ‘Love or perish’” ([1968] 2010, 67), which is the title of one of Thurman’s most powerful sermons from circa 1953.

On the importance of the Gandhian philosophy, if not method, of nonviolence in Thurman and also King, and for the purposes of the human rights movement in America, there is a famous quote—one that is often rehearsed to the exclusion of the context necessary for appreciating its meaning or significance—from the initial meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957: “Do you remember, Rustin asked King, what Gandhi told Howard Thurman in India, many years ago? And [then Rustin] quoted Gandhi’s words [namely, ‘Well if it comes true it may be through the Negroes that that unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world’]” (Dixie and Eisenstadt 2011, 112). The trajectory of the movement, it should be acknowledged, was informed and shaped by the Gandhian tradition. What Dixie and Eisenstadt say of Thurman, as he and his wife departed from their meeting with Gandhi in 1936, “that the force was certainly with them,” could be applied equally to the spiritual force or vitality that animated King as well as Rustin in Atlanta back in 1957. King’s commitment to the “unadulterated message of non-violence” and “dangerous unselfishness,” by which one gains the “capacity to project the ‘I’ into the ‘thou,’” alluding to Buber, was reaffirmed or otherwise demonstrated on countless occasions throughout his life. The “unadulterated message of non-violence” was delivered by those who, “with their backs against the wall,” were strangely liberated from the triple ills of fear, hatred, and deception by way of the love-ethic displayed on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho by the Good Samaritan in the religion of Jesus. And yet the truth of nonviolence, thought Thurman, was inherent in all the great religions of the world. The unadulterated and distinctively African American message or philosophy of nonviolence, which should have universal appeal, was expressed—in content as well as form—within the idiom of the black church. For this point, however, it is necessary to explore the grassroots pacifism in Thurman’s thought prior to his encounter with Gandhi in 1936.

Howard Thurman: African American Pacifist

Thurman joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international pacifist organization still in existence, as a sophomore at Morehouse College (in 1921). But prior to his formal adoption of pacifism, as expressed by his membership in the Fellowship of Reconciliation or as espoused in his philosophy of nonviolence as part of the Pilgrimage of Friendship in 1935–36, Thurman claims that he learned about the central ills or the admonitory lesson of violence from his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, a freed slave, in Daytona Beach, Florida, where Thurman grew up. Thurman was also a pacifist because he believed that the religion of Jesus requires it and, more generally, again like Gandhi, because violence distorts the soul, which is construed as the portal of access to God. Although Thurman’s “approach to social justice issues has been called ‘mystical’ and unresponsive to the concrete realities of oppressed peoples,” argues Fluker, “this reading of Thurman is misinformed and unjustified” (2009, 31). In his encounter with Gandhi in 1936, Thurman was keen to understand the theory or philosophy of ahimsa.¹ Gandhi told Thurman that the effectiveness of the struggle depends on “the degree to which the masses of people are able to embrace such a notion [ahimsa] and have it become a working part of their total experience.” Thurman claims that “it struck me with a tremendous wallop that I had never associated ethics and morality with vitality—it was a new notion trying to penetrate my mind” (qtd. in Dixie and Eisenstadt 2011, 107). According to Judith Brown, Gandhi “was convinced that the soul’s strength grew in proportion to which a [person] disciplined his [or her] flesh” (1989, 187–88).

Gandhi’s use of the Sanskrit “ahimsa” alludes to the ancient karmic religions, especially Jainism, for which “ahimsa stood for a commitment to refrain from harming [all] living things” (Dixie and Eisenstadt 2011, 104). While it may be relatively easy to grasp the ethical doctrine inherent in ahimsa, understood as a practical prescription for behavior, Thurman was interested in the metaphysical if not cosmological doctrine at the heart of the philosophy of nonviolence qua ahimsa. “At the center of non-violence is a force which is self-acting,” Gandhi claimed, “a force more positive than electricity” and, as Dixie and Eisenstadt amend beautifully, “subtler and more pervasive than the ether” (2011, 104). With an eye turned toward the spiritual resources available within Christianity, thought Gandhi, and Thurman agreed, ahimsa was best thought of along the lines of “‘love’ [or ‘agape’] in the Pauline sense, yet something more.” Gandhi translated “ahimsa” negatively, as “nonviolence,” although he stressed that nonviolence “does not express a negative force, but a force superior to all the forces put together; one person who can express Ahimsa in life exercises a force superior to all the forces of brutality” ([1936] 2009, 335). Dixie and Eisenstadt elaborate on the metaphysical strain in Gandhi’s theory of ahimsa:

For Gandhi nonviolence was not really an idea at all. It was, as he told the delegation repeatedly, a force, a physical reality, a metaphysical substrate that underlined and defined all reality, a deeper truth behind the dross and flux of the world, the truth beneath and beyond the seeming brutality that apparently confined both human life and the world of nature to endless cycles of gratuitous violence. Ahimsa was a force, as Gandhi indicated, ‘the force,’ in the constitution of the universe. (2011, 105)

Thurman’s interdisciplinary preoccupation with deciphering this metaphysical code surfaces most prominently in his Search for Common Ground.

What initially appear to be distinct themes in Thurman—for example, his mysticism and his philosophical teachings on the workings of nonviolence—turn out to be united at their core in a manner analogous to Gandhian teachings on ahimsa and satyagraha. The philosophy and methods of nonviolence can be understood distinctly, even adopted separately, in some cases even mutually exclusively (for example, in certain strands of Jainism, the genuine votary of ahimsa would not deign to participate in political activism), but it was one of the distinguishing characteristics of Gandhi’s teaching that one leads ineluctably to the other. The effectiveness of satyagraha as a method depends on one’s vital commitment to the philosophy or metaphysics of ahimsa. Inversely, for Gandhi as well as for Thurman, ahimsa demands satyagraha: “It is not possible to be actively non-violent and not rise against social injustice no matter where it occurs” (1958, 89). Ultimately, Gandhi believed that satyagraha would succeed because “ahimsa was a force, the force, in the constitution of the universe” (Dixie and Eisenstadt 2011, 105). As Thurman expressed in a 1944 lecture, “The Cosmic Guarantee,” injustice or evil is bound to fail eventually because “the source of life is alive” and because “there is a heart at the heart of the universe”; the strategy of nonviolence was animate, for Gandhi and Thurman as well as for King, by the conviction that “the cosmos is the kind of order that sustains and supports the demands that the relationships between men and between man and God be one of harmony [and] integration” ([1944] 2015, lxii). In his Search for Common Ground, in the context of his analysis of the “structure-functional integrity” of living organisms, Thurman suggests that “the intent [of life] is for integration, for wholeness, for community within the limits of the organism itself” (1971, 39). “It is not unreasonable, then,” Thurman continues, “to assume that as he seeks community within himself, with his fellows, and with his world, he may find that what he is seeking to do deliberately is but the logic of the meaning of all that has gone into his own creation” (1971, 41).

The “art of Ahimsa,” insisted Gandhi, requires courage as well as discipline and self-sacrifice. Though open to all, mastery of ahimsa is granted to very few, if any. Thurman asked Gandhi whether it is possible for an individual who had mastered or otherwise embodied ahimsa to hold violence at bay in its entirety. And while the answer admits of multiple interpretations, some specific to Gandhi and others more universal in their application, Gandhi replied, “If he cannot, you must take it that he is not a true representative of Ahimsa” ([1936] 2009, 336). (But if he were, presumably, following the implicit logic of Gandhi’s reply, then he could.) Gandhi’s response alludes, it seems, to what Dixie and Eisenstadt isolate as “one of the peculiarities of Gandhian nonviolence” (2011, 106). The success or failure of the struggle in India ultimately depended not only on the degree of vitality inherent in ahimsa, as embodied in a single individual—although that is also part of the teaching—but also “on the degree to which the masses of people are able to embrace such a notion and have it become a working part of their total experience” (Dixie and Eisenstadt 2011, 107). Gandhi believed ahimsa as well as satyagraha consists in an exercise in restraint not unlike fasting and chastity, which Gandhi considered to be various means by which one clings to the truth and accumulates a vitality of “soul force.” Self-denial, suggests Gandhi, is always advisable and a reward unto itself, and he bemoaned the fact that the masses did not seem to have enough vitality to embrace ahimsa. In practice, the vitality of the disinherited or oppressed is diminished not only by a lack of bread but also by a profound lack of self-respect, which, claimed Gandhi, was lost to the Indian masses because of “the presence of the conqueror in their midst” (1979, 133) and the injustices within their own communities (for example, the institution of untouchability). Thurman understood all-too-well how racial oppression and the constant fear of violence undermined the self-respect of the disinherited and distorted the integrity or vitality of the personality of the oppressed as well as of the oppressor. “Both Thurman and Gandhi saw the impetus for movements of social change arising less from mass politics than from a handful of persons who had realized the proper techniques for self-mastery and could, by their example, show others the way” (Dixie and Eisenstadt 2011, 108).

Thurman’s significance and role within the civil rights movement consists in what Gandhi called “constructive preparation,” that is, the task of “cultivating non-violence among the brave in thought, word and deed” (2007, 36). If King represents the “Moses of the Movement,” as it were, and Mays the “Schoolmaster of the Movemen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• A Chronology of Thurman’s Life and Career
• Introduction
• 1 An African American Philosophy of Nonviolent Resistance
• 2 On the Anatomy of Hatred and the Power of Love
• 3 Pedagogical Personalism at Morehouse College
• 4 Reading Thurman as a Philosophical Personalist
• 5 Reading Thurman as a Social Activist Mystic
• 6 Reading Thurman as a Prophetic Pragmatist
• 7 The Growing Edges of Beloved Community
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author