Countless people who took part in the civil rights movement have not received public recognition, let alone scholarly attention. With a few exceptions, Howard Thurman shared this fate until recently. Thanks to the work of Paul Harvey in Howard Thurman and the Disinherited: A Religious Biography, readers can familiarize themselves with an intellectual and theological bedrock of the movement who is steadily receiving more attention. Adding to the work of Walter Fluker, Peter Eisenstadt, Luther Smith, and Quinton Dixie, Harvey provides an accessible introduction to the life of Thurman and a helpful intellectual history of a critical influence on the Black freedom struggle of the 20th century.
While a biography, this book also serves as an intellectual history and offers a solid introduction to Thurman’s writings and lectures. As Harvey writes, “Thurman was foremost a man of ideas” (3). The book traces the contours of Thurman’s Christian background, mysticism, and religious training. Through the lens of Thurman, Harvey’s work provides a helpful examination of the intellectual and theological threads of the civil rights movement, complementing the work of scholars like Charles Marsh, Ansley Quiros, and David Chappell.
The book takes the reader chronologically through critical periods of Thurman’s life. Harvey begins with an examination of Thurman’s childhood in Florida and the interplay of his Baptist upbringing and general wonder of the natural world. Great care is given to Thurman’s education and early formation. Harvey traces Thurman’s trajectory from grade school to Florida Baptist Academy, and then on to Morehouse College and Rochester Theological Seminary. All the while, Harvey identifies contemporaries who shaped Thurman, including Benjamin Mays, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, John Hope, George Cross, Rufus Jones, and Mary McLeod Bethune. In addition to Thurman’s educational formation, the book also recounts Thurman’s development as a religious minister with a social conscience; Harvey identifies his early ties with the YMCA, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the Christian Student Movement. We are also introduced to the multiple pastorates and teaching posts that Thurman held, including at Morehouse College, Spelman College, and Howard University.
In the chapter on his tenure as a professor at Howard, Harvey features Thurman’s formative trip to India, where he met with Mahatma Gandhi and had a mystical experience at the Khyber Pass that defined his later social and religious pursuits. On this trip Thurman grappled with the consequences of Christian foreign missions, imperialism, and American foreign involvement, and it inspired him to transport Gandhian nonviolence back to the United States. Following his time at Howard, Thurman relocated to San Francisco, where he pastored the multiracial Church for the Fellowship of All People from 1944 to 1953.
While at Fellowship Church, Thurman published his pivotal book Jesus and the Disinherited (Abingdon 1949), which articulated his views on religion and the affinity between Jesus and the socially marginalized. After his stint in San Francisco, Thurman then moved to Boston, where he served as the dean of the chapel at Boston University and taught courses until 1965. Harvey then traces Thurman’s later years, when he published his memoir With Head and Heart (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1979) and traveled the world, including teaching for two months in Nigeria. Harvey also considers Thurman’s continued relationship with the civil rights movement, including his hesitancy to support Black power positions. Harvey then concludes the book with a reflection on Thurman’s legacy following his death in 1981.
Over the course of the book, Harvey traces the ways that Thurman left behind his traditional Protestant upbringing for something more ecumenical in spirit. Harvey suggests that “Christianity remained Thurman’s starting point but not his destination” (72). This was clearly evidenced during Thurman’s time in India, when he shunned the role of an evangelical foreign missionary and instead took on that of a spiritual seeker. This often played out in a reoccurring tension in Thurman’s life between institutional constraints and his capacious spiritual pursuits. Likewise, Harvey does an adept job identifying Thurman’s aim to wed individual spiritual growth with a social conscience. In keeping with his more intellectual focus, Harvey delves deep into the currents of mysticism, theological modernism, Personalism, pacifism, and anti-imperialism represented in Thurman’s work. Harvey sheds light on “the way he put his background in African American religion in a global and cosmopolitan context” (223). Readers will also encounter much-needed emphasis on the role of Sue Elvie Bailey Thurman; Harvey asserts that she made many contributions to Black scholarship and was an intellectual force in her own right.
In the end, Harvey argues that Thurman worked to develop a robust spirituality that did not recede from the world, but instead engaged injustice. “His most important work,” Harvey reflects, “married the lived experience of people with grand truths of religious encounters” (37). Thurman went to great lengths to articulate a spiritual basis for nonviolent civil disobedience. Yet, Harvey argues that Thurman never set out to lead a movement, but rather to serve as a spiritual inspiration. In Harvey’s words, Thurman “served as a mentor for the movement” (6), a role he provided for civil rights leaders such as James Farmer, Pauli Murray, Barbara Jordan, Martin Luther King Jr., and Jesse Jackson. Whether you are seeking to understand the intellectual and theological foundations of the civil rights movement or recommend a text that will introduce Thurman to a wider audience, Harvey’s book offers a penetrating and accessible study.
Nicholas T. Pruitt is an associate professor of history at Eastern Nazarene College.
Nicholas T. Pruitt
Date Of Review:
March 17, 2023
