Dangerous memories and redemptive possibilities: reflections on the life and work of Howard Thurman

Abstract

Howard Thurman (1899–1981) touched the lives of many leaders in and beyond the US civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Thurman earned his degree in politics/economics at Morehouse College and in theology at Rochester Theological Seminary. He served as dean of the chapel at Boston University from 1953 to 1965. At once mystic, pacifist and integrationist, his thought was vitally impacted by experience of oppression in America’s Deep South. Thurman was an isolated child in an aggrieved community, forced back upon a deep inner spirituality to cope with material deprivation and indifference. He explored the importance of ‘sites of memory’ as a means of recovering emotion, not least grief. For Thurman, the individual is the point of departure, but is only fully constituted in ‘the crucible of relationship’; the purpose of knowledge is action; and the object of action is to secure loving relationships.