The Man Behind the King
Derrick Weston
Day 1 of 3
“To the Kings, the test of life is often found in the amount of pain that we can absorb without spoiling our joy.”
Howard Thurman, Papers 6:229 – The King Institute
Just the other day, I asked a friend if they knew who Howard Thurman was. I probably shouldn’t have been as shocked as I was when her answer was “no.” While Dr. Thurman’s influence has reached all of us, his name seems only to be known in theological circles and to those who have done a deep dive in researching the civil rights movement.
My first exposure to Rev. Dr. Thurman was in a theology course in seminary. Before I learned anything about Thurman himself, I learned about his grandmother—a former slave who, because of that lived experience, decided that she had no room in her life for the letters of Paul (with the occasional exception of I Corinthians 13). It was an important lesson on how our context shapes our theology. Thurman’s own context—being raised by his grandmother in the early 1900’s in segregated Daytona, Florida—shaped much of who he was to become.
Thurman became a Baptist minister in 1925 and soon after became professor of religion at both Morehouse and Spelman Colleges. Several years later, he studied with a Quaker pacifist named Rufus Jones who lead an interracial Fellowship of Reconciliation. In 1936, he was part of a delegation that traveled to South Asia where he met Mohandas Gandhi. It was Gandhi's expressed vision and desire that the philosophy and practice of non-violence would be adopted by African Americans. These experiences were the foundation of the theological and philosophical ideas that would be the heart of Thurman’s work.
In 1944, Thurman, who had been serving as dean of Howard University, moved to San Francisco and co-founded the first fully integrated, multicultural church in the U.S., The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples.
In 1949, Thurman wrote Jesus and the Disinherited, his seminal work. Its theme is that Jesus was on the side of the oppressed and that his ministry was, at its heart, giving people the tools to withstand crushing systems. This book would come to some popularity as it became known that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King carried it with him at all times.
King and Thurman crossed paths on several occasions. They met informally in 1953 to watch the World Series together. At the time Thurman was hoping to bring King into his ministry in San Francisco, but King was already committed to beginning his own ministry in Montgomery, Alabama. They met again in 1958. Thurman visited King in the hospital after he had been stabbed by a woman at a book signing. Thurman convinced the hospital to let King have two additional weeks of recovery and warned King that the civil rights movement had become “an organism with a life of its own to which he must relate in fresh and extraordinary ways or be swallowed by it” (Thurman to King, 14 November 1955, Papers 2:588 from the King Institute).
Thurman became the dean of Marsh Chapel at Brown University in 1955 and served in that position for ten years. Then from 1965 until his death in 1981, he directed the Howard Thurman educational trust—a fund dedicated to give aid to disadvantaged students primarily in the deep South and to bolster spiritual programs in higher education.
Through his books, sermons, and speeches, Thurman encouraged people to find their true nature in God and, in that process, challenged them to find that God-nature in everyone they encountered. He worked for peaceful reconciliation, encouraged genuine relationships, and gave vision to the beloved community about which King would later preach.
“God could have made a better looking man, but he didn’t,” Thurman often joked in his sermons and speeches—a self-deprecating way of challenging his hearers to appreciate what God gave them and to use it for the betterment of the world around them.
Who are the people who have influenced your spiritual life?
What are ways that you can pass the inspiration you have received onto others?
Information from the King Institute and “This Far by Faith”
Derrick Weston