Howard Thurman and the Disinherited

Starred review from August 24, 2020
Harvey (Bounds of Their Habitation), professor of history at the University of Colorado, offers an illuminating account of the life and legacy of Howard Thurman (1899–1981), the grandson of a slave who became a well-known preacher, teacher, author, mystic, and mentor to a generation of civil rights activists. Harvey recounts Thurman’s drive for educational advancement despite numerous obstacles—his hometown of Daytona, Fla., lacked a high school for Black students—and the learning and leadership opportunities he pursued at the YMCA, Morehouse College, and Rochester Theological Seminary. Later chapters cover Thurman’s six-month trip to India in 1935 as part of the American Christian Student Movement’s “Negro delegation,” during which he met Gandhi; his career as dean of the chapel at Howard University and, later, Boston University; and his efforts to establish an interracial church in San Francisco. Harvey astutely unpacks the development of Thurman’s understanding of Christian faith, which was greatly influenced by the spirituals and Quaker thought, defied Baptist orthodoxy, incorporated mysticism and pacifism, and led to his seminal work, Jesus and the Disinherited, which influenced Martin Luther King Jr. This should go far to raise the profile of a lesser-known spiritual leader whose writings, sermons, and mentorship helped lay the foundation for the civil rights movement.

September 1, 2020
How to describe the Black theologian Howard Thurman (1899-1981)? Harvey (Bounds of Their Habitation, 2017) attempts to answer this question by calling Thurman, variously, a mystic, an intellectual, a poet, minister, theologian, cosmopolitan, seeker, teacher, mentor, and writer. Clearly the man was a polymath who spent his life channeling his religious experience toward combating the basic violence of hatred that stalked the lives of black Americans. However, he was not an activist but more a mentor to the civil rights movement. As the author of more than 20 books, he spoke to timeless issues of the human spirit, sometimes in the context of spirituals, his study of which remains some of his most enduring work; however, his most influential work is the 1949 book Jesus and the Dispossessed with its understanding of Jesus as a member of a despised, circumscribed minority group, not unlike African Americans under slavery and segregation. Although celebrated during his lifetime, Thurman's star went into eclipse following his death. Surely this judicious, insightful biography will help restore its lost luster.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)