Howard Thurman

Howard Washington Thurman was born on the eighteenth of November 1899 at Daytona, Florida, the son of Saul Solomon Thurman — a railway worker — and Alice Ambrose Thurman, a domestic worker. His father died of pneumonia when Howard was seven. He was raised by his grandmother Nancy Ambrose, a formerly enslaved woman whose oral teaching of the lay Black Baptist tradition of her plantation girlhood Thurman would across his life acknowledge as the formative source of his theology. He was the seventh African American to receive a high-school diploma in Florida — completing the Florida Baptist Academy at Jacksonville in 1919 — and the third valedictorian of his class. He took his undergraduate degree at Morehouse in 1923, where he was the protégé of John Hope, and the divinity degree at Colgate Rochester in 1926.

He served at Mount Zion Baptist in Oberlin from 1926 to 1928, at Spelman from 1928 to 1932, and at Howard University as professor of theology and dean of Rankin Chapel from 1932 to 1944. In April 1935 he led a Howard delegation of four to India, Burma and Ceylon — the journey on which he met Mohandas Gandhi at the latter's Bardoli ashram in February 1936. Gandhi's parting question to Thurman — what message do you take back to the Negro people of America from us — formed the spiritual seed of the satyagraha line of the post-war African American freedom movement.

In 1944 he co-founded with the white minister Alfred Fisk the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco — the first formally interracial and ecumenical Christian congregation in the United States. From 1953 to 1965 he served as dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University — the first Black dean of a chapel at any majority-white American university. He produced across his career twenty-one books — the best-known of which is Jesus and the Disinherited of 1949, which Martin Luther King Jr. is said to have carried with him through the Montgomery and Birmingham campaigns.

He died at San Francisco on the tenth of April 1981, at eighty-one.

He is honored here as the contemplative theologian of the freedom movement.