The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman vol. 3 : The Bold Adventure, September 1943–May 1949

Abstract

This is the third volume from the Howard Thurman Papers Project, now at Boston University, and this installment focuses on the years Rev. Howard Washington Thurman co-pastored the pioneering interracial and ecumenical Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. A pacifist minister and contemporary of Bayard Rustin in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Thurman had led a delegation of African Americans to meet with Mahatma Ghandi in the 1930s and was a leading advocate of nonviolent resistance long before the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. He was serving as dean of the chapel at Howard University when he answered the call to join a white Presbyterian minister in San Francisco, Alfred Fisk, in co-pastoring an interracial church. The volume begins with a thorough, well-documented essay on Thurman and the roots of the Fellowship Church, while the bulk of the book is composed of letters to and from Thurman, speeches and sermons he delivered, and reflections on his church. Usefully included as well are a number of contemporary articles, including from Time magazine and the Christian Century, about Thurman's work in San Francisco. The letters to and from Eleanor Roosevelt, the future National Council of Churches head Eugene Carson Blake, Mary McLeod Bethune, Pauli Murray, and others well illustrate Thurman's role as a leader in both the nascent civil rights movement and the ecumenical movement. Thurman mentored many young black crusaders, and Murray's letter includes the charming detail that Thurman had advanced her $150 for her legal studies, listing it in her accounts payable on her New York bar application but also calling it “a debt of honor” (p. 321).