Howard Thurman: Philosophy, Civil Rights, and the Search for Common Ground

By Kipton E. Jensen

Although he is best known as a mentor to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Howard Thurman (1900–1981) was an exceptional philosopher and public intellectual in his own right. In Howard Thurman: Philosophy, Civil Rights, and the Search for Common Ground, Kipton E. Jensen provides new ways of understanding Thurman's foundational role in and broad influence on the civil rights movement and argues persuasively that he is one of the unsung heroes of that time. While Thurman's profound influence on King has been documented, Jensen shows how Thurman's reach extended to an entire generation of activists.

Thurman espoused a unique brand of personalism. Jensen explicates Thurman's construction of a philosophy on nonviolence and the political power of love. Showing how Thurman was a "social activist mystic" as well as a pragmatist, Jensen explains how these beliefs helped provide the foundation for King's notion of the beloved community.

Throughout his life Thurman strove to create a climate of "inner unity of fellowship that went beyond the barriers of race, class, and tradition." In this volume Jensen meticulously documents and analyzes Thurman as a philosopher, activist, and peacemaker and illuminates his vital and founding role in and contributions to the monumental achievements of the civil rights era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643360478

Kipton E. Jensen

Kipton E. Jensen is an associate professor of philosophy at Morehouse College, the director of the Andrew Young Center for Global Leadership, and the codirector of the International Comparative Labor Studies program. He earned a doctorate in philosophy from Marquette University and was a Fulbright Scholar at Martin-Luther-Universität. Jensen is the author of Hegel: Hovering and Parallel Discourses and coeditor of Howard Thurman's Sermons on the Parables.

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Introduction

Howard Thurman (1899–1981) is one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights movement in America. As one of the first in a long line of African American intellectuals to meet with Mahatma Gandhi at his ashram in India, in 1936, Thurman quickly appropriated and adeptly applied the philosophy of nonviolence to the problem of racism as well as to materialism and imperialism in America. The result was a distinctively African American philosophy of nonviolent but active resistance to social injustice. Thurman, whose ideas were repeatedly put to the test during the civil rights movement, is best known as a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. At the first meeting of the Southern Negro Leaders Conference (later called the Southern Christian L;eadership Conference) in 1957, Bayard Rustin asked King, Do you remember what Gandhi told Howard Thurman in India, many years ago? He then recited Gandhi’s seemingly prophetic words, that it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world ([1936] 2009, 337; see also 1975, 132). By the time he met Gandhi, and in ways similar to Gandhi, Thurman sharply distinguished the religion of Jesus from the injustices that are historically inseparable from the institution of Christianity. Thurman suggested in his 1949 Jesus and the Disinherited that the teachings of Jesus had a special significance for those with their backs against the wall ([1949] 1996, 11). Otis Moss, himself an unsung hero of the civil rights movement, suggests that while Thurman did not march from Selma to Montgomery, or many of the other marches, [he] participated at the level that shapes the philosophy that creates the march—and without that, people don’t know what to do before the march, while they march, or after they march (quoted in Bennett 1978, 71).

Although Thurman said that he never considered himself as any kind of leader nor a movement man, Albert Raboteau argues that Thurman believed—as did another twentieth-century activist contemplative, Thomas Merton—that true social change must be grounded in spiritual experience and personal transformation (2001, 158). Andrew Young claims that King carried Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited in his briefcase almost everywhere he went (quoted in Heltzel 2015, 74). Lewis Baldwin says that "Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) was as important for King as any other intellectual source he studied at Boston (2010, 65). Makechnie relays the story that when Lerone Bennett went to Montgomery, in the early days of the bus boycott, [he] was not at all surprised to find King not reading Gandhi but Howard Thurman" (see Makechnie 1988, 39). King was not alone in his reliance on Thurman’s writings and sermons. U.S. Representative John Lewis of Georgia has said in a personal conversation with the author that he and the other freedom riders from across the country circulated Thurman’s writings, especially Deep River (1945) and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death (1947), as a source of spiritual courage at a time when they were asked to do the impossible.

Although much of Thurman’s Search for Common Ground (1971) was written prior to 1968, many read it as Thurman’s scholarly response to King’s assassination and to the looming question posed by King’s final publication, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? ([1968] 2010). Thurman’s personal response to King’s death is found elsewhere (Thurman 1998, 185–87; also 1979, 223). At a tumultuous point in the struggle for racial equality in America, some may well have been disappointed that Thurman’s Search for Common Ground was not an impassioned political manifesto or a religious jeremiad against the hypocrisy inherent in the institutions of Christianity and democracy in America. But reconsidered from a different vantage point, Thurman’s Search for Common Ground should be celebrated as his most impressive philosophical achievement. Mozella Mitchell claims that in his final book, Common Ground, Thurman puts into the perspective of process theology the many strands of [his] keen concerns in the intense lifelong struggle for wholeness, not simply for himself but on behalf of community (1983, 32). Thurman’s Disciplines of the Spirit (1963) was written for philosophers of religion and theologians as well as Christian laity. For those with eyes to see, so to speak, and ears to hear, Thurman’s philosophical methodology is reminiscent of William James and John Dewey, whom Thurman first read during his Morehouse years. Thurman’s Meditations of the Heart (1953) explores the more philosophical passages to be found in Augustine’s Confessions and Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. Throughout Thurman’s writings, there are echoes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and transcendentalists of other sorts. His Meditations of the Heart and Disciplines of the Spirit should be read as a series of parabolic reflections on the paradoxes inherent in self-examination, self-surrender, self-overcoming, self-sacrifice, self-discovery, and self-determination.

Although he taught philosophy and religion at an array of academic institutions (for example, Morehouse College, Howard University, Boston University), Thurman was neither a systematic theologian nor a professional philosopher. And yet Thurman was a systematic thinker who preached his theology and put his philosophical ideas to the test. In Lay Bare the Heart, James Farmer Jr., describes Thurman as a critical scholar, but very devout (1985, 135). Thurman was a polymath and a synesthete. One of Thurman’s professors at Rochester Theological Seminary advised him saying that it would be a terrible waste for [Thurman] to limit [his] creative energy to the solution of the race problem, however insistent its nature and that he should give himself over instead to the timeless issues of the human spirit (1979, 60). In his autobiography, With Head and Heart, Thurman admits that he struggled to find an adequate response to this man who did not know that a man and his black skin must face the ‘timeless issues of the human spirit’ together (1979, 60). As a professor or a pastor, as a priest or a shaman, Thurman strove in earnest to create a climate of inner unity of fellowship that went beyond the barriers of race, class, and tradition (1979, 95). Thurman brooded over a broad spectrum of philosophical paradoxes, those allegedly timeless issues of the human spirit, and in those matters his thought was consistent and coherent but also creative and compelling.

Although scholars often note in passing that Thurman was considered to have been philosophically profound (for example, when Philip Lenud reports that while King loved and respected Thurman, the ontological meaning of what he said went right over many folks, including Martin (Baldwin 1991, 300–301), few if any have taken the time to carefully examine those alleged metaphysical subtleties or prevail to plumb the depths of his profundity. Luther E. Smith claimed that there remains a pitiful dearth of scholarship on his thought and that there has been little attempt to do an in-depth critical analysis of his ideas ([1981] 2007, 3). And while the scholarship on Thurman’s thought over the past decade has been substantial, most significantly in the form of the Thurman Papers Project at the Boston University School of Theology, most recently with the publication of volume 4 of Thurman’s works, The Soundless Passion of a Single Mind, June 1949–December 1962, I agree with Smith that Thurman’s thought is woefully underappreciated, but I would stress that this is doubly true of his philosophical ideas.¹ Beyond his philosophy of nonviolence, which was not only a method but also a creed for many of those who participated in the longer civil rights movement in America, Thurman should be appreciated for his seminal and original insights into the philosophy of mind, especially personal identity; theistic personalism; philosophy of education; philosophy of religion, including his exploration of mysticism; moral psychology; sociopolitical philosophy; and the philosopher of freedom.

The following pages demonstrate the serious and sustained philosophical engagement of an extraordinary man who played an essential role in laying the intellectual and spiritual foundation for the modern civil rights movement in America. Lerone Bennett, editor of Ebony, himself a Morehouse man and author of What Manner of Man (1964), went so far as to describe Thurman as one of the greatest minds of our generation and perhaps the greatest storyteller in the world (Bennett 1978, 68). But today Thurman is relatively unknown. Thurman was an exceptional individual, to be sure, but he is also representative of an entire era within the longer civil rights movement. The descriptive dimension of this book contributes to the collaborative task of documenting or otherwise acknowledging the confluence of influences that gave rise to the monumental achievements of the civil rights era. The normative aspect of this analysis consists in providing vital resources for what Vincent Harding, Thurman’s friend and colleague, himself a veteran of the freedom movement, called our continuing task of turning this wilderness nation into a land of promise for all its people (2010a, 184). Luther Smith suggested early on that Thurman’s interpretation of the spiritual basis for social transformation may serve as the philosophy for the next generation of participants in the black struggle ([1981] 2007, 211).

Thurman claimed that his 1936 meeting with Gandhi was but one of several monumental experiences in India. Prior to his encounter with Gandhi, up in the mountains overlooking the Khyber Pass, Thurman had an epiphany that, at its core, confirmed the possibility of true human community ([1959] 2009, 25). In his Footprints of a Dream, Thurman recalled: All that we had seen and felt in India came miraculously into focus: we knew that we must test whether a religious fellowship could be developed in America that was capable of cutting across all racial barriers, with a carry-over into the common life, a fellowship that would alter the behavior patterns of those involved. It became imperative, now, to find out if experiences of spiritual unity among people could be more compelling than the experiences that divide them ([1959] 2009, 24). Thurman described his ministry in 1937 as an exploration of the problems that arise in the experience of people who attempt to be Christian in a society that is essentially un-Christian (2012, xix). Followers of the religion of Jesus, insisted Thurman in Deep Is the Hunger, were those who were willing to exercise the limit of power and moral suasion upon men in the interest of the redemption of themselves and society and who could against the darkness of the age see the illumined finger of God guiding in the way they should go (1951a, 5). Whether in religious or academic institutions, Thurman decried what he perceived to be a preening otherworldliness and a callow materialism. The apocalyptic heritage of the black church, as he put it, left it ill-equipped to deal with either the spiritual or practical realms of existence. When some well-meaning sociologist advised Thurman that what African Americans really needed was to enrich themselves and learn to speak the language of economic power and control, Thurman objected that the religion of materialism was soul-killing and, no less than racism and materialism, was rooted in fear, deception, and hatred. Whatever distorted or warped the personality, whatever injured or killed the soul, whether segregation and poverty or imperialism and militarism, was for Thurman not only unethical, though it was clearly unethical or immoral for those very reasons, but also a mortal sin against God (2009, 121). According to Walter Fluker, Thurman’s ministry of teaching and healing extended beyond the walls of the church to personal encounters with individuals who found in his presence ‘a place, a moment’ to declare, ‘I choose!’.… He taught those in despair how to dream again, how to begin again, how to resurrect the crucified and forsaken symbols of life and make of them redemptive messengers in a world that conspires against faith, hope, and love (2009, 17).

Following Luther Smith, Thurman deserves our head as well as our heart (2007, 5). Philosophers have tended to dismiss Thurman as a religious mystic or a theologian, as though that somehow places him outside the scope of philosophical analysis; conversely, many Christian theologians—perhaps thinking of his Search for Common Ground—tend to dismiss Thurman as a philosopher, maybe even a pantheist, someone inappropriately preoccupied with science and worldly utopian literature. For some, it would seem, Thurman’s writings are summarily ignored as somehow too Christian in their orientation to deserve serious philosophical examination; by others, he is insufficiently Christian to merit sustained attention. To certain academics, Thurman’s writings are insufficiently scholarly or inappropriately fixated on the social issues of his day rather than on the timeless issues of the human spirit; to pastors, Thurman’s most substantial writings were too scholarly to recommend to their parishioners or congregants. Some scholars classify Thurman as a black liberation theologian, as a predecessor to James Cone, author of Black Theology of Liberation (1970) and God of the Oppressed (1975), while others view him as a participant in the twentieth-century American Christian liberal social gospel movement or an early advocate of a cosmopolitan ecumenicalism, perhaps even one of the grandfathers of the new age movement. Cornel West describes Thurman as Martin Luther King Jr.’s most worthy theological precursor in the sense that both Thurman and King pulled from the rich insights of Western thinkers, yet he elevated the lived experiences of wounded, scarred, and bruised bodies of enslaved and Jim-Crowed black peoples to enact radical love (2016, xvi). Thurman was a spiritual genius, certainly, in William James’s sense of the term, but he also exemplifies all the traits of a prominent and empowering strand within the black philosophical tradition (Hord and Lee, 2016; see also Harris 2000).

Thurman has been variously characterized as a mystic-activist and a spiritual guru, as a 20th century prophet and a sophisticated modern-day shaman, as a Lamed Vay Tzadikim (i.e., one of the thirty-six righteous ones), and as a holy man of the next millennium; theologians tend to classify Thurman as a modernistic liberal, an early African American exponent of the social gospel movement, or, most obviously, a precursor to Black liberation theology. Each of these labels sheds some light on Thurman’s thought, but they also tend to obscure or ignore entirely other ways of reading Thurman. Without suggesting that the existing set of descriptive categories is either mistaken or misleading, I contend that Thurman can be creatively and instructively construed as a first-rate philosopher. In his autobiography, Thurman claims that his conclusions were not definitive, but they point the direction in which others must go in search of the idiom of community in a strange and bewildering society in which the integrity of the individual life seems to be put under siege by the vast impersonal processes of life (1979, 225). Thurman was interdisciplinary to the extreme: and while this poses a prima facie problem for those who wish to classify or label Thurman’s thought, it is precisely Thurman’s strength as a philosophical thinker.

Thurman provides vital resources for our present times. Thurman’s voice, whether written or spoken, always resonant, expressed the sound of the genuine (1965, 38; also 1980, 14). The present generation of teachers and scholars of the civil rights movement are still discovering the broad spectrum of philosophical and spiritual or ethical and religious resources that animated or otherwise sustained what John Lewis called, in 1963, at the March on Washington, the serious social revolution. Thurman’s well-wrought words and writings, quoting what Thurman attributed to an old plantation preacher, are seasoned with a mellowness of sustained religious insight and experience ([1934] 2009, 205). This book also attempts to bridge the undeniable divide between, say, classical American pragmatists (for example, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, and John Dewey) and African American philosophers (for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Howard Thurman, and Martin Luther King Jr.). Alton Pollard suggested from the outset that Thurman may well have been, and perhaps he still remains, "too radical for us. We have not yet caught up with him" (1992, 193).

1

An African American Philosophy of Nonviolent Resistance

And if I work for social righteousness so that every man can sit under his own fig tree and be unafraid—if I work to provide the kind of climate in which it is a reasonable thing that men may trust each other, then—then there will be the kind of atmosphere in which it becomes a possibility for nations to beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks.

Howard Thurman, The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, vol. 4 ([1934] 2009)

There is a very fine distinction within Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, a distinction that Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr. took for granted, but which the present generation of scholars tends to conflate or overlook entirely, namely, between ahimsa and satyagraha. The philosophy of nonviolence, ahimsa, or what Gandhi and Thurman agreed to translate as agape and the love-ethic, as expressed by St. Paul within the Christian tradition, is distinct yet ultimately and intimately related to the success of satyagraha, which is a distinctive method of nonviolence. Thurman’s creative appropriation of this distinction in Gandhi’s thought, as well as a unique application of it to the problem of segregation in America, was formative to King’s understanding of and sustained, albeit tested, commitment to nonviolence. Although it is sometimes assumed that the origins of philosophical or spiritual pacifism in African American history stretch back to King’s veneration of Gandhi, recent scholarship suggests that the inspirational sources are to be found much earlier and extended far broader than that. Not only did Thurman meet with Gandhi in 1936, he was also a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation from the early 1920s. King traces his conversion to pacifism back to a 1950 sermon by Mordecai Johnson in Philadelphia. In their Black Fire (2011), which traces the history of the black Quaker experience, Harold Weaver, Paul Kriese, and Stephen W. Angell suggest that the origins of African American pacifism reach back at least as far as Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), whose annual almanacs (1792–1804) advocated directly or indirectly for religious and philosophical pacifism, the disuse of oaths, and the abolition or reduction of the death penalty. Some scholars suggest that the significance of the black Garrisonians has also been overlooked. Luther Smith claims that the development of a philosophy of nonviolent protest for the black struggle is a foremost achievement of [Thurman’s] social witness (1992, 133).

The Thurman–King Relationship

The influence of Thurman on King remains insufficiently appreciated, if not ignored entirely, perhaps in part because the archival evidence and documentation of this influence is still emerging. But the available documents seem to confirm what many scholars have suspected all along, namely, that the influence of Thurman on King, as well as the subsequent influence of King on Thurman, was sustained and significant if not decisive to the trajectory of the civil rights movement. The extended familial relationship reaches back to the early 1920s, when Thurman was an undergraduate at Morehouse, across campus from where Martin Luther King Sr. studied theology and religion. George K. Makechnie claims that Howard had known Martin since the latter’s boyhood because Martin’s father, ‘Daddy King,’ and Howard had been college mates at Morehouse (1988, 39; also see Thurman 1979, 254). Before examining the philosophy of nonviolence in Howard Thurman and then comparing Thurman’s philosophy of nonviolence to the methods of nonviolence in King and Gandhi through the lens of their respective theories or theologies of forgiveness, something must be said about the friendship that evolved between Thurman and King; for this task, I wish to hover over several archival documents, fragments really, but telling, retained by the Martin Luther King Jr. Collection at Morehouse College.

Fluker claims several writers have made reference to the influence of Howard Thurman on his younger fellow visionary, but no scholarly treatment has demonstrated a formal tie between the two (1990, 36). And while we may disagree concerning what would constitute an adequate demonstration or sufficient evidence of a formal tie between the two, it seems that Fluker is himself among those scholars who have demonstrated a steady and strong influence of Thurman on King. Perhaps the most compelling demonstration of the connection is the epilogue to Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt’s groundbreaking study, Visions of a Better World (2011). Recent scholars are also keen to emphasize the influence of King on Thurman. When discussing Thurman’s role in the civil rights movement, Albert J. Raboteau concedes that influence is difficult to measure (2001, 157). But the formal tie or influence will not surface by analyzing King’s and Thurman’s personal and professional correspondence. In 1966, for example, in response to a brief letter and donation to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from Mr. and Mrs. Thurman, King wrote, In the meantime, I solicit your continued prayers and support in these difficult days. These are trying times for the philosophy and method of non-violence, but I will continue to go on with the faith that this approach is right (Martin Luther King Jr. Collection at Morehouse College: 1.1.0.46790_005). The typed letter strikes the reader as merely perfunctory. But the intellectual if not spiritual friendship between Thurman and King was deeper than one might suppose based solely on their formal correspondence, which, as we now know, was monitored by the FBI.

Thurman and King understood themselves to be allies in a nonviolent struggle against what both expressed as the triple threats of racism, materialism, and militarism. In an earlier letter to King, in 1958, Thurman wrote of their plan to spend several hours of uninterrupted talk about these matters that are of such paramount significance for the fulfillment of the tasks to which our hands are set (2017, 233). When it comes to demonstrating philosophical influence, the closest thing to a formal tie—perhaps better than a formal tie if what is meant by that is an official declaration—will consist in a scholarly comparison of their respective treatments of related philosophical material. Comparing Thurman’s teachings on community with King’s, as Fluker has in They Looked for a City, or when showing parallels or family resemblances between Thurman on King on nonviolence, as Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt begin to do in Visions of a Better World, has thus far provided the best evidence of influence, philosophical or otherwise. To demonstrate the reciprocal influence, scholars must seek to unearth significant differences obscured by surface similarities, as James T. Kloppenberg puts it, but that also yield equally valuable insights if phenomena assumed to be dissimilar can be shown to exhibit similar features when viewed from a new perspective (1988, 8). That said, even their official correspondence—which is often thick with allusion and connotation, indicative of a shared journey shot through with meaningful encounters—provides evidence of reciprocal influence. (Surely King and Thurman knew that their correspondence was by no means confidential at that point.) Thurman’s philosophical influence and spiritual genius significantly shaped what was to become a distinctively African American philosophy and method of nonviolence; beyond his influence on King, Thurman’s influence extended also to James Farmer as well as James Lawson.

King’s commitment to the philosophy and method of nonviolence, not altogether unlike Thurman’s, was contested in 1966 by logistical imperialists and black-national ideologies such as Floyd McKissick, Huey Newton, and Stokely Carmichael, who argued for their strategies and demeaned nonviolent direct action, and other participants in the Freedom Sunday march to Chicago City Hall on July 10, 1966, and in the Chicago Freedom Movement. In May of 1966, Thurman wrote to King as if clairvoyant, as someone gifted with second sight and symbolized at his birth by the sign of the caul (Thurman 1979, 263), as someone who understood the fate of King as a Black Christ (Weaver et al. 2011, 22–23; also see Thurman 1971, 98), closing cryptically if not indecipherably, anticipating King’s fate and destiny, which were not the same thing for Thurman: Those [who hunt] treasure must go alone, [at] night, and when they find it, they have to leave a little of their blood behind (Martin Luther King Jr. Collection at Morehouse College: 1.1.0.46790_002).

Alluding to Thurman’s earlier advice following the assassination attempt on King in Harlem on September 20, 1958—namely, that King withdraw for a while from the immediate pressures of the movement to reassess himself in relation to the cause, to rest his body and mind with healing detachment, and to take a long look that only solitary brooding can provide—King wrote that their meeting was a great spiritual lift that was "of inestimable value in giving me the strength and courage