This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1953, Boston University president Harold C. Case recruited Howard Thurman, then leading his interracial San Francisco congregation, to serve as Dean of Marsh Chapel and Professor of Spiritual Disciplines and Resources, a documented academic appointment distinct from the 1935 Gandhi meeting and the 1944 Fellowship Church founding his first article covers. Thurman held the deanship until 1965, and in doing so became the first Black person to hold such a post at a major predominantly white American university, a documented institutional milestone distinct from the pastoral and publishing career his first article traces through 1949.
During those same years Martin Luther King Jr. was a doctoral student in theology at Boston University, and Thurman's presence on campus as dean put him in direct contact with King during his formal studies there, a documented overlap distinct from the influence Thurman's book Jesus and the Disinherited had already exerted on King's thinking by that point. Thurman's chapel services and his mystical, experience-centered theology reached a university-wide audience well beyond Boston's Black churches during his twelve years in the post.
That the same theologian whose meeting with Gandhi and later book shaped the civil rights movement's core ideas also spent twelve years as the first Black dean of a major white university's chapel, years that overlapped with King's own doctoral training there, marks Thurman's Boston University deanship as a documented case where his influence on the movement operated through direct institutional proximity as well as through the written word.