Howard Thurman, another rebel with a cause

Up until recently, this blog has been about my father and a lot of his writings that have come down to me. My father was an amazing writer, a minister, and a great father.  He was also a rebel with a cause.

Now I am adding some other people who have affected my life, who have taught me much of what I have learned over the past 45 years, people that I think were rebels with a cause. One person in  particular was Howard Thurman, whose classes and sermons I listened to back in the 1960s when I was a student at Boston University (BU)  and Thurman was the Dean of Marsh Chapel at BU.  But it was only in the past four or five years that I have gone back to Thurman through the Internet remembering so much that I learned from him.

Like my Dad, like me, like almost everyone, we have all had teachers and many of us have had mentors, in fact, I think most of us have had mentors. My first mentor was my Dad, but he was just the beginning. There were many teachers, many whose names are no longer with me, but I can see them in the classrooms, explaining so many different things to us, the students. And like my Dad, and like all those teachers, when I went to college, I found a new teacher, Howard Thurman. So these pages are about Howard Thurman, a great teacher  and a great person who  had a huge impact on my college years.

 Like all of us, Thurman had mentors  starting during his childhood.

The first mentor he had was his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose. Ambrose was determined that Howard would have a good education and that he would go to college. Ambrose had been born a slave: she could not read and when the daughter of her master tried to teach her to read, the father closed that down, refusing to allow his daughter to teach a slave to read.

The next mentor that Thurman had was his seventh grade teacher. You see there was no school above seventh grade for black children in Daytona Florida where Thurman grew up. But the principal of his school saw how much young Thurman wanted to learn and he taught Thurman eighth grade and got his work certified so he could go on to a high school. Unfortunately, there was no high school in Daytona for black children, so Howard Thurman's family decided to send him to a private high school in Jacksonville, Florida.

This meant going by train from Daytona to Jacksonville. Unfortunately, when young Howard got to the train station and paid for his ticket, he had no money to take his small  trunk with him. So, like many of us have done as children when things weren't going right with something we really wanted to do, young Thurman sat down outside the station and cried. A stranger came along and stopped to ask him why he was crying. When Thurman told him the problem, the stranger paid for his trunk to go with him. Thurman never forgot this. He didn't know who the man was but years later when he wrote his autobiography, he dedicated the book "to the stranger in the railroad station in Daytona Beach who restored my broken dream sixty-five years ago."

So Thurman got to the High School in Jacksonville and he graduated valedictorian of his class. After high school, he went to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia and again he graduated valedictorian. After Morehouse, he went to Colgate Rochester (now Colgate Crozer Divinity School ) in upstate New York to study and become an ordained minister. His first church was the Mount Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin Ohio (1925 - 1928).

While he was at Oberlin, he read a book by Rufus Jones, a Quaker mystic and philosopher, and a professor. Thurman found that book while at a conference and he immediately studied that book, sitting on the outdoor steps of the building the conference was in. It was a small book, and Thurman read the book over and over. He wrote Rufus Jones and asked if he could come and study with him. In his last sentence, he wrote: "By the way, I am black." Jones paid no attention to the last sentence, and he not only said yes, but he also made arrangements for Thurman to have a room in one of the dormitories at Haverford College where Jones was a professor.

Rufus Jones' theology held that God is not accessible to a handful of the elect but was rather part and  parcel of the vitality of all life itself. Jones believed that God is present in every one of us and that God's vitality intermingles with the world and the experiences of every individual.

Thurman was particularly moved by Rufus Jones notion of the affirmation mystic, a mystic whose personal religious experiences of the unity of God and humanity become their motivation for social action and improvement. Thurman wrote of Rufus Jones and his time studying under him: "Rufus Jones was a  prolific writer, an inspiring teacher, an engaging preacher. He had the gift of intimacy, which allowed him to go to the heart of his  personal experience without causing embarrassment to his listener or himself. He was not self-conscious, nor did he presume to give advice. One day he told me that it had been his lifelong habit to take a nap after lunch. I smiled, the reaction of youth to what seemed to me to be a waste of time. He responded by saying, ever so gently, "The time will come when you may wish you had been wise enough to have developed this habit while you were young." Toward the end of my stay at Haverford, he stopped me on campus to say that he had actually forgotten to meet his class. With a tone of muted sadness he said, "Now I know that it is time for me to retire." (With Head and Heart, The Autobiography of Howard Thurman )