The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman. Volume 3: The Bold Adventure, September 1943–May 1949 ed. by Walter Earl Fluker et al (review)

Subtitled "The Bold Adventure," this third volume in the Howard Washington Thurman Papers project appropriately captures the pivotal moment in Thurman's life and career when he moved beyond his southern roots to achieve national acclaim and even international notoriety. In 1944 Thurman decided to leave his vaunted position as dean of Howard University's chapel in order to join Rev. Alfred G. Fisk, a liberal white Presbyterian minister, as co-pastors of an intentionally interracial, interdenominational, and interfaith congregation, the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, in San Francisco. As Walter Earl Fluker illustrates in an introductory essay, the nine months Thurman spent in India with Mahatma Gandhi in 1935–1936 set in motion the transformative work he undertook for roughly nine years in the Fellowship Church, in addition to his expanding roles as preacher, lecturer, and author.

The years encapsulated in this volume led to what might be called a journey of clarity marked by a remarkably fertile period of Thurman's scholarly and ministerial activity. Shaped chiefly by his tenure at the Fellowship Church, the wide array of letters, sermons, speeches, and articles that compose this book reflects Thurman's trailblazing efforts in both the interfaith movement and the civil rights movement. The volume is an excellent resource, consisting of Thurman's correspondence with figures such as Benjamin E. Mays, George E. Haynes, Mary McLeod Bethune, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eugene Carson Blake, Mordecai W. Johnson, and Pauli Murray, as well as documentary evidence replete with references to Thurman's relationships with the likes of W. E. B. Du Bois, Gandhi, Bayard Rustin, and A. J. Muste, among others. This volume reveals how Thurman was uniquely gifted to negotiate the twin worlds of religious pluralism and racial justice based on his timing, temperament, and theological outlook. Interestingly, the introductory essay makes mention of a noteworthy missed opportunity when, at Fisk's behest, Thurman replaced a young minister named Rev. Albert Cleage Jr. (later known as Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, the founder and first holy patriarch of the Shrine of the Black Madonna of the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church) as co-pastor of the Fellowship Church in 1944. Although the two ministers never met one another during this transition process, it is fascinating that Thurman and Cleage—embodying the integrationist and separatist impulses within black religion, respectively—briefly found common ground in this humble interracial church that stood as a symbolic precursor to the social and spiritual transformations of the turbulent 1960s.

It is quite fitting that this volume concludes with mention of Thurman's 1949 landmark text, Jesus and the Disinherited, a concise but profound tract that sparked the imaginations of an entire generation of civil rights activists, most especially Martin Luther King Jr. One thing that reviewing this text makes abundantly clear is that a figure such as Thurman is desperately needed today. Ultimately, the considerable challenge to the current reader of this masterfully compiled and brilliantly curated collection of Thurman's papers is not about the profundity of the historical content per se but rather about the perplexing nature of the contemporary context in which we inhabit. Much like the historical epoch reflected in the pages of this volume, we also find ourselves confronted by economic insecurity, cultural intolerance, regional schism, and virulent white ethnocentrism, on both sides of the Atlantic, masquerading as populism in ways that Thurman, sadly, would find all too familiar. On the whole, this fine text arrives at a moment when the political pervasiveness of psychological dynamics that Thurman once famously described as "the hounds of hell"—hate, deception, and fear—potentially lend themselves to stark authoritarianism in the United States, an outcome that does not feel as far-fetched as it once did (p. 291). In light of this, revisiting...