Howard Thurman, the Book That Traveled With a Movement

In 1935 Howard Thurman led a small delegation of Black American Christians on what was called the Pilgrimage of Friendship, meeting with religious and political leaders across South Asia, including a lengthy conversation with Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi pressed Thurman on why Black Americans, who had lived under sustained nonviolent suffering for centuries, had not yet become the ones to carry a fully realized nonviolent movement to the world, and reportedly told him it might be through the American Negro that this message would finally reach humanity unadulterated. The conversation deepened a contemplative, mystical strand already present in Thurman's theology, one less interested in doctrinal boundary lines than in direct religious experience available to any person regardless of creed. That conviction found institutional form in 1944 when Thurman and Alfred Fisk co-founded the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, deliberately built as an interracial, interfaith congregation at a time when Sunday worship in most of the country was rigidly segregated. Five years later Thurman published Jesus and the Disinherited, a short book arguing that Jesus should be understood first as a poor, colonized Jew living under Roman occupation, someone whose teaching addressed people with their backs against the wall rather than people comfortably secure in social power. Martin Luther King Jr. carried a copy of the book with him during the years of the civil rights movement and named it directly as a formative influence on his own theology of nonviolent resistance, a rare case of a scholarly religious text shaping the daily practice of a mass political movement rather than remaining confined to seminary reading lists.