Howard Thurman: The Theologian Who Taught King
Near Daytona, Florida
Six-fourteen Whitehall Street is a modest wood-frame house built in eighteen eighty-eight in what was then a Black neighborhood called Waycross, one of three all-Black communities in early Daytona Beach. Howard Washington Thurman was born in that house in eighteen ninety-nine, and the world did not expect much from a child born in Jim Crow Florida at the turn of the last century.
The records of exactly how Thurman navigated a childhood in a city where Black residents were excluded from most public life are incomplete, and the daily weight of that exclusion is something he wrote about throughout his career with precision and controlled anger. What the documents do show is that he was brilliant, that he found his way to Morehouse College, then to Rochester Theological Seminary, and eventually to Boston University, where he became the first Black dean of Marsh Chapel.
Thurman's contribution to American thought is hard to summarize briefly. He was a philosopher, a theologian, a mystic, and a strategist of the spirit. His most influential work, published in nineteen forty-nine and called Jesus and the Disinherited, argued that Christianity had been systematically misread as a religion of the powerful when it was in fact a survival manual for the oppressed. He argued that nonviolent resistance was not merely a political tactic but a spiritual necessity.
That book sat in the breast pocket of Martin Luther King Junior during the Montgomery bus boycott. King had met Thurman at Boston University, and by multiple accounts the older man was one of the deepest intellectual influences on the younger. Thurman himself did not march or lead campaigns. He said he was more useful as a contemplative, helping people find the interior resources that direct action required.
In nineteen forty-four, Thurman co-founded the first fully interracial, interdenominational church in American history, the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, in San Francisco. He died in nineteen eighty-one.
His childhood home here on Whitehall Street is a National Register property and open for tours.
