Howard Thurman and the Disinherited: A Religious Biography by Paul Harvey (review)

Despite his importance in American religious and political history, Howard Thurman has not inspired as much scholarly attention as one would expect. Paul Harvey, one of the leading historians of African American religion, has written a very important book that accomplishes a difficult task: richly distilling the interwoven mysticism, political critique, and activism of Thurman, rather than treating them as separate aspects of a life. Harvey shows not only that Thurman was an integral participant in multiple episodes of African American religious activism, simultaneously chronicling and participating, but also that Thurman understood that the quality of social relationships could improve only if so, too, did the quality of self-interrogation.

Elegantly written and painstakingly researched, Harvey’s critical cultural biography is filled with such insightful complexities. Tapping into Thurman’s poetic and mystical leanings, Harvey certainly narrates the life in ways historians will appreciate. However, what is especially rewarding is the total portrait of Thurman as a combinative thinker and activist, networking persons and bodies of thought in equally generative ways. Beginning with a series of profound experiences with nature and mysticism in his youth—Thurman’s experience of his “psychic scars” while at the same time being “held by the storm’s embrace”—his life experiences led him to fuse Black Baptist theology, the Social Gospel, cosmopolitanism, pacifism, Gandhian praxis, and more (p. 1). The thread knitting these ideas together was Thurman’s conviction that the “cultivation of the self feeds and enriches the struggle for social justice” (p. 7).

With great clarity and authorial empathy, Harvey generates a series of questions, based in the archives, that preoccupied Thurman until his death. Thinking through and alongside a range of thinkers and activists—W. E. B. Du Bois, A. J. Muste, A. Philip Randolph, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation—Thurman pursued the possibility of a religious message that could cut across racial barriers. Harvey has a feel for the multiple textures that made up Thurman’s thinking, which in other hands might be reduced simply to a series of bullet points. Harvey shows elegantly and clearly how Thurman stood at the nexus of many historical trends, each one integral to the overall assemblage of his rich thought.

Through a careful narration of Thurman’s education and early academic career, Harvey argues that through powerful questioning Thurman came to believe that Jesus’s ministry constituted a “technique of survival for a disinherited minority” (p. 58). Harvey shows that for Thurman, self-interrogation and nonviolent direct action alike were spiritual disciplines that often, as no less a figure than Mahatma Gandhi himself told Thurman, pitted American Christianity against Jesus’s own message.

The later phases of Thurman’s career were focused on institution building, following from an enduring vision he experienced at the Khyber Pass. He established the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, a daring attempt at interracial worship. In his pursuit of egalitarian spaces and ongoing pedagogy, Thurman sought to create “Apostles of Sensitiveness” in order to Christianize the world, not by domineering but by spreading mercy and compassion (p. 133).

Harvey’s gift is in his ability to lift out moments of distinctiveness, comparison, and intellectual and social significance, expanding the reader’s historical range while also doing justice to complex and overlapping personal and institutional narratives. Harvey’s intellectual range, too, makes for that rare religious biography that excels in archival and narrative work while also displaying a gift for the music of a specific theology.