Paul Harvey - Howard Thurman and the Disinherited

LIBRARY OF RELIGIOUS BIOGRAPHY

Mark A. Noll, Kathryn Gin Lum, and Heath W. Carter, series editors

Long overlooked by historians, religion has emerged in recent years as a key factor in understanding the past. From politics to popular culture, from social struggles to the rhythms of family life, religion shapes every story. Religious biographies open a window to the sometimes surprising influence of religion on the lives of influential people and the worlds they inhabited.

The Library of Religious Biography is a series that brings to life important figures in United States history and beyond. Grounded in careful research, these volumes link the lives of their subjects to the broader cultural contexts and religious issues that surrounded them. The authors are respected historians and recognized authorities in the historical period in which their subject lived and worked.

Marked by careful scholarship yet free of academic jargon, the books in this series are well-written narratives meant to be read and enjoyed as well as studied.

Titles include:

Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President

by Allen C. Guelzo

A Christian and a Democrat: A Religious Biography ofFranklin D. Roosevelt

by James D. Bratt and John F. Woolverton

Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life

by Nancy Koester

For a complete list of published volumes, see the back of this volume.

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

2020 Paul Harvey

All rights reserved

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN 978-0-8028-7677-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Harvey, Paul, 1961author.

Title: Howard Thurman and the disinherited: a religious biography / Paul Harvey.

Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020. | Series: Library of religious biography | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: A religiously focused biography of Howard Thurman, one of the most significant progenitors of the Civil Rights movementProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020017615 | ISBN 9780802876775 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Thurman, Howard, 1900-1981. | African American BaptistsBiography.

Classification: LCC BX6495.T53 H37 2020 | DDC 230/.044092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017615

For Philip Goff,
Fellow Old Man and Partner-in-Crime

First and most important, thanks must go to the generation of scholars and archivists who have worked for many years with the Thurman papers, now at Boston University, and in the process produced five volumes of his papers along with two edited volumes of his sermons and other writings. These keepers of the Thurman flame have made possible this book and many others previously published and yet to come.

My thanks to Robert Sackett, my departmental colleague, for reading the manuscript and giving it a thorough edit; to friends and professional colleagues Randal Jelks and Stephen Prothero for offering early encouragement; to Stetson University, for providing me the opportunity to give a series of endowed lectures that served as a kind of first draft for my writing about Thurman; to Jason Sexton and the online magazine Boom California, for encouraging me to write on Thurmans years in San Francisco; and to numerous friends and colleagues in the field of African American religious history, who have taught me so much over the years.

And finally, thanks to David Bratt, Heath Carter, Mark Noll, and my former coauthor Kathryn Gin Lum for encouraging me in this project and seeing it through the process to be included in the Library of Religious Biography series at Eerdmans.

The goal of life is God! The source of life is God! That out of which life comes is that into which life goes. He out of whom life comes is He into whom life goes. God is the goal of mans life, the end of all his seeking, the meaning of all his strivings.

Howard Thurman, Deep River

As a boy growing up in a small black community situated by Daytona Beach, Florida, Howard Thurman loved nature. He learned from it lessons that shaped his life. And then he devoted that life to meditating on spiritual matters even while envisioning a world, as he put it, of friendly men underneath a friendly sky. Thurman loved to sit near the ocean at night; it gave him a sense of timelessness, of existing beyond the reach of the ebb and flow of circumstances. The periodic storms that lashed the coastline thrilled him: Unafraid, I was held by the storms embrace. His experience with the storms gave him, as he described it in his autobiography, an overring immunity against most of the pain with which I would have to deal in the years ahead when the ocean was only a memory. The sense held: I felt rooted in life, in nature, in existence. But even in the midst of these storms that came in from the sea and stripped trees bare, the oak tree in his backyard held. I needed the strength of that tree, and like it, I wanted to hold my ground. The young Thurman talked to the oak tree, and felt understood.

Thurman was growing up, too, in his local black Baptist church. He was educated in high school, college, and seminary in the Baptist tradition. Yet, even as a boy, he already had left that tradition. And as a boy, too, he experienced the sharp psychic wounds (as he called them) of American racism, and he spent his life channeling his religious experience toward combating the basic violence of hatred that stalked the lives of black Americans. The mystic and the movement philosopher, the poet and the preacher and prophet, the searing critic and the soothing soulThurman joined together in one soul qualities from diverse personalities, spirits, and intellects.

Howard Thurman (18991981) has interested me for a long time. In 2017, I began to consider writing his biography. There were parts of his life I didnt know very much about. I began by searching for other biographies. At that time, although two biographies of Thurman had been prepared during his life, no scholarly biography using the full range of his now publicly available papers existed. Since then, a lengthy and definitive biography of his life has been completed by a longtime editor with the Howard Washington Thurman Papers Project, Peter Eisenstadt: Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman. Readers interested in a magisterial, academically rigorous, and expertly produced academic biography of Thurman are well advised to begin with Eisenstadts volume (expected out in 2021). Also, a biography of sorts can be compiled by reading the impeccably scholarly introductions to the five volumes of The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, a project directed for several decades by the scholar Walter Fluker. In Visions of a Better World, Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt laid out the portions of his life most directly relevant to his trip to India and meeting with Gandhi in 19351936. More recently, one section of Gary Dorriens Breaking White Supremacy provides a beautifully crafted introduction to his life and thought, set within the context of the long history of the black social gospel movement. (The reader may find full references for all these works in the bibliographic essay at the end of this book.) But with the exceptions of the forthcoming work by Eisenstadt and two documentary films (