February 13, 2025

By Rev. Rick King

“I am a Hindu. I do not understand. Here you are in my country, standing deep within the Christian faith and tradition. I do not wish to seem rude to you. But, sir, I think you are a traitor to all the darker peoples of the earth. I am wondering what you, an intelligent man, can say in defense of your position.” (“Jesus and the Disinherited”)

Howard Thurman was having coffee with the principal of the Law College at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka, following a talk Thurman gave there on civil disabilities under states’ rights in the U.S. In the course of their five-hour conversation, Thurman came face-to-face with the need “to examine the religion of Jesus against the background of his own age and people, and to inquire into the content of his teaching with reference to the disinherited and the underprivileged.”

In short, as the child of former slaves in Florida in the Jim Crow South, the Jesus of the Christianity he had grown up with was a caricature compared with the Jesus of first-century Palestine, whom he had encountered in his calling to uplift disinherited Blacks, first as a Baptist minister and then as one who trained students, and in his studies of the Bible and theology.

From 1932 to 1944, Howard Thurman was on the faculty at Howard University School of Divinity, and served as the first dean of Rankin Memorial Chapel there. He led a delegation of African Americans to India to meet with Mahatma Gandhi, and they spent six months there and in Ceylon/Sri Lanka and Burma/Myanmar. During this visit, Thurman had this life-changing conversation with the law college principal.

They discussed the status of African Americans, nonviolence, and the history of African Americans. His experiences there influenced his work, and out of it he delivered a series of lectures at Sam Houston College in Austin, Texas, in 1948. These lectures were the foundation for the book he wrote called “Jesus and the Disinherited,” first published in 1949 and then reissued in paperback in 1969, in the middle of civil rights and Vietnam War protests raging in America.

Howard Thurman was notable during the social justice movements in the early 20th century, and a student named Martin Luther King, Jr., encountered him during King’s days as a Ph.D. student at Boston University’s School of Theology, where Thurman served as dean of Marsh Chapel, 1953-65. The two became friends, and Thurman became essentially King’s spiritual director, the one who taught King to tend his own soul-life, and to the spiritual underpinnings of leadership in the Civil Rights Movement.

I’m not going to summarize the book here, but it’s still in print, and I highly recommend getting hold of a copy (PDF editions are also available). Why? Because of what it tells us about the role of hatred, and how hatred is connected to a lack of community—something that’s a universal human experience, regardless of skin color.

This and the next two Seeking and Serving columns are in celebration of Black History Month. In this time when our Presidential administration is systematically dismantling all our protections against a resurgent white supremacy, maybe it’s time for us to pay more attention to Black history.

Because if we still have a democracy after 2028, it will desperately need our attention to those our nation has disinherited since its founding.