HOWARD WASHINGTON THURMAN LECTURE SERIES
Howard Washington Thurman was born in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1899, and spent his puerile years in the black community of Waycross; where he was a member of the Mount Bethel Baptist Church, and was baptized in the Halifax River.
Thurman had several African-American role models both male and female, but none had a more profound impact than Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Girls. Thurman developed a lifelong friendship with Mrs. Bethune and was the requested eulogist at her funeral preaching the message “Shafts of Light.”
Thurman left Daytona in the eighth grade to go to Jacksonville where he further pursued his education at the Florida Baptist Academy, only one of three high schools for African Americans in the state of Florida at that time.
Thurman subsequently matriculated at Morehouse College and graduated in 1923 as valedictorian. He entered The Rochester Theological Seminary (presently known as the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School - Crozer Theological Seminary) in the fall of 1923 and came under the influence of Walter Rauschenbusch — the founder of the Social Gospel Movement who had a major influence in shaping his Thurman’s theology. The Social Gospel Movement concentrated on the widening gap between the rich and poor, and those individuals who would speak out against those structures that legitimized those institutions.
After graduation in 1925, Thurman was ordained a Baptist minister and from 1926 to 1928 he served as Pastor of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church of Oberlin, Ohio and Dean of the Chapel at Morehouse College 1928 to 1931. Thurman pursued study at Haverford College with noted Quaker mystic Rufus Jones, who had a further hand in shaping his theology.
Thurman came to Howard University in 1931 as professor of Christian Theology.
In 1935, Thurman led an international delegation of African Americans representing the YMCA on a pilgrimage to Burma, Ceylon and India. In India, Thurman met Mahatma Ghandi where he became greatly engrossed in the practice of the non-violence civil obedience and techniques employed by Ghandi.
Over his life, Thurman would write more than twenty books with his most famous being — Jesus and the Disinherited — in 1944.
From 1931 to 1944, Thurman served at Howard University. He would leave Howard and found the first interracial church in America in San Francisco — The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in 1944.
In 1953, Thurman became Dean of the Marsh Chapel at Boston University, the first African American to head a predominately white chapel at a predominantly white university. At Boston University, Thurman would renew acquaintances with another Morehouse graduate — Martin Luther King, Jr. — a Crozer Seminary graduate, baptist preacher, and graduate student pursuing his Ph.D in theology. Thurman had known the young King through his father Martin Luther King, Sr., who was Thurman’s classmate at Morehouse. It is noted that Martin Luther King, Jr., carried a copy of Jesus and the Disinherited while leading the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Thurman went on to become one of the well-known theologians of the 20th century and for the remainder of his life, he embraced a theology of liberation which coupled the thought of Jesus as a liberating figure bringing the New Testament gospel together with non-violent resistance. Thurman died April 10, 1981.
The Howard Thurman Lecture series began at Stetson University, Deland, Florida in the 1990s and was subsequently discontinued in 2012 but was adopted by The Bethune-Cookman University faculty from and Dean Randolph Bracy, Jr., founding Dean of the Cornelius and Dorothy School of Religion. It is now a mainstay of the School and will be an ongoing lecture series each academic year.