ISSN: 1094-902X
Volume 2, Number 1 (Fall 1998)

A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life.  Edited by Walter Fluker and Catherine Tumber.  Beacon Press, 1998. 340 pp. $25.00.

Howard Thurman is an enigma. Fifty years ago he was heralded as one of the few great preachers of the century; today his name is hardly known. He has long been identified as a mystic, yet this is a tradition alien to the black church. Thurman once wrote an article entitled "Mysticism and Social Change;" how could he not only combine these seemingly contradictory positions, but meld them to such a degree as to preserve his own radical spiritual inwardness on the one hand, and serve as an inspiration to Martin Luther King, Jr., on the other? Also, for many, Thurman personified a humble saintliness, yet he permitted a cult-like following of adoring admirers (generally white, upper middle class, and female) to gather in special "listening rooms" across the country to hear his recorded voice.

These questions make Thurman a figure of continuing intellectual interest. And the large project to collect, edit, film, and selectively publish his large collection of papers should mean a popular revival of his name and influence. A Strange Freedom is the first fruit of the Thurman Papers Project. The Project's editors,Walter Fluker (now teaching at Morehouse College) and Catherine Tumber (now a Fellow at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard), are the book's editors, and they have created a one-volume Thurman treasury of published and unpublished sermons, essays, book excerpts, and meditations, and provided a first-rate interpretive introduction and biographical sketch. Thurman began writing late, but this is the first compendium which covers his whole career. The point, of course, is to allow Thurman to speak fully and freely for himself, and he does so here with a clear voice, despite his notorious indirection, clear enough, one hopes, to rescue him from the New Age Spiritualists who have tried to appropriate him and his work.

The book is dedicated to Sue Bailey Thurman, a neglected person who deserves much more attention than she has received. There is a foreword by Martin Marty. The flavor of the collection, which is organized thematically, can be grasped from a sampling of some familiar and unfamiliar titles taken from the 45 pieces: "What Shall I Do with My Life?" (1939), "The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death" (1947), "Jesus - An Interpretation " (1949), "Martin Luther King, Jr." (1968), "America in Search of a Soul" (1976), "Meaning is Inherent in Life," "How Good to Center Down!" "Give Me the Listening Ear," and "The Task of the Negro Ministry "(1928).

There is no doubt about the reality of Thurmanıs mysticism. When I reviewed his autobiography With Head and Heart (1979), I tried to understand and explain it: "This is a product of his radical self-understanding and his realization that the truth he found in himself is universal. Having had revealed to him, as other mystics, a glimpse of the unity of the universe, he goes on to say, 'The Head and the Heart at last inseparable, they are lost in the wonder of the One.'  Howard Thurman is a humble seeker who has never been without wonder; that may be his secret." To my surprise, Thurman wrote to me, saying that the review was the "most insightful and sensitive one" of his autobiography he had seen.

Yet, there are some serious questions that need to be thought about. First of all, where does this mysticism come from? Perhaps from Thurmanıs association with Gandhi. Perhaps from his decision to study at the feet of Rufus Jones, the Quaker apologist. Perhaps from his own personal religious self-examination, an introspection which from childhood, he claimed, protected him from the viciousness and pain of Southern racism. Specifically, is mysticism as alien to the black church as I have suggested? Who else is there? Certainly Rebecca Cox Jackson, maybe Jarena Lee. Cornel West says that there are occasional black mystics, like John Coltrane, but there is no African-American tradition as such because mysticism involves a descent into a level of pain and suffering that already exists for black people. Who can take on more?

Am I right that we must be careful not to understand black ecstatic visionaries as mystics? There are people, particularly women, who have what Jean Humez calls "functional visions," that is, religious experiences that provide credentials for ordination for those who do not meet "regular" standards. But while the black church has a tradition of visionaries, I donıt see them as equatable with mystics or mystical experiences. Nat Turner is apocalyptic and messianic, for example. This is all, as they say, a fruitful subject for further research, but we obviously need first to acquire a dictionary.

It is clearer, I believe, where mysticism was taking Howard Thurman. It was a path away from the black church. I think Thurman, either despite or because of his deep spirituality, may have become one of those whom Schliermacher called "the cultured despisers of religion." White churches as well as black know them well: intellectuals, the sophisticated, people of aesthetic good taste, those who are upwardly mobile. They cannot escape fast enough from the poor, uneducated, limited, emotional folks from whom they came, with whom they do not feel compatible, and above whom they now perceive themselves. For African Americans who move away from their cultural roots for these reasons, there is the added benefit of being able to float into something "larger" which means they will no longer have to be black. Alain Locke found Baha'i, Jean Toomer became a disciple of the Russian guru Georgi Gurdijieff, and there are even black Buddhists.

This is a serious matter. But I think it can even be charted geographically. Thurman moved from Florida north to Atlanta (Morehouse), and north again to Washington (Howard). He was courted for the presidency of Morehouse, the most influential school for black men, with its strong commitment to producing the cream of Baptist preachers. But this move would have necessitated a journey back, back to the Deep South, back to his Baptist roots, back to the segregated black world of Atlanta. Thurman removed himself from consideration for this highly desirable job in order to move west, the place for new American beginnings, to start in San Francisco an interracial church, that is, a church only half black. When he moved again, it was to Boston, about as far north as one can respectably get, and to an all-white institution (Boston University). This is a clear pilgrimage from South to North and from black to white, as well as from the historical and biblical specificities of the black church to the vagueness of mystical union with the One.

There is another element here, however sensitive, that needs to be considered. Thurman was a very dark-skinned man and he experienced prejudice not only from the white world, but also from elements within the African -American community itself. One can see, then, some additional possibilities: that racism was doubly painful for him, that he wanted to separate himself from race in any form, that he learned that not all people of color could be depended on, that one must wonder how he wrestled with the pernicious threat of self-hatred and the devil of internalized racism.

If these suggestions for analysis have any validity, even partly, they may help explain Thurmanıs paradoxical "Mysticism and Social Change." If it was racism that drove him inward, it was an inescapable outer badge as well. "Being a black man in America is like being a spectator at your own lynching," Ishmael Reed once wrote. Whatever else he was or wanted to be, Howard Thurman was a black man in America, and this means to be constantly aware of oppression, however one might try to evade it or avoid it or rationalize it away. It is to be "condemned to awareness," as Michael Eric Dyson says. Resistance was bred into Howard Thurmanıs bones, a sense of the realities of inequality no mysticism could mask, no moving North could disguise. His southern, black, Baptist roots cried out for justice in the world, a cry that co-existed, then, in the body of an authentic holy man, along with the discoveries he had found in exploring the deep inner life of the spirit.

Richard Newman, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University

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