Chapter 4 Howard Thurman and the African American Nonviolence Tradition
Kipton E. Jensen
And if I work for social righteousness so that every man can sit under his own fig tree and be unafraid—if I work to provide the kind of climate in which it is a reasonable thing that men may trust each other, then—then there will be the kind of atmosphere in which it becomes a possibility for nations to beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks. howard thurman1
Although some assume that the origins of philosophical pacifism within the African American tradition stretch back only as far as Martin Luther King’s storied pilgrimage to nonviolence and trip to the land of Gandhi, recent schol- arship suggests that the philosophical and theological sources of nonviolent resistance tradition within the African American community are much older than that. Twenty years prior to King’s adoption of Gandhian methods of civil disobedience in Montgomery, Howard Thurman met with Gandhi in 1936 to discuss the plausibility of satyagraha, construed as nonviolent resistance, to the longer civil rights movement in America. King traces his own conversion to Gandhian pacifism back to a sermon in 1949 by Mordecai Johnson in Phila- delphia. King visited the “land of Gandhi” in 1959. In Black Fire: African Ameri- can Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights,2 Weaver, Kriese and Angell sug- gest that the origins of African American pacifism reach back at least as far as William Whipper (1804–1876) and Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), whose an- nual almanacs advocated for religious and philosophical pacifism, the disuse of oaths, and the abolition or reduction of the death penalty. The African American nonviolent resistance tradition constitutes, writes Preston King, an “interesting and pertinent case of the particular interplay between democracy
1 Thurman. Papers, 1949/2018: 7. 2 Weaver, et al, 2011.
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1 Howard Thurman: African American Pacifist
As a sophomore at Morehouse College, in 1921, Howard Thurman joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (for), an international pacifist organization that is still in existence. But prior to his formal adoption of pacifism, as expressed by his membership in for or as espoused in his philosophy of nonviolence as part of the Pilgrimage of Friendship in 1935–36, Thurman claims that he learned about the central ills or the admonitory lesson of violence from his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, a freed slave in Daytona Beach, Florida, where Thurman grew up. Thurman was also a pacifist because he believed that the re- ligion of Jesus requires it and, more generally, again like Gandhi, because he was acutely aware of how violence distorted the soul or, put differently, the personal- ity. “The fact that the first twenty-three years of my life were spent in Florida and Georgia,” wrote Thurman, in Luminous Darkness, “has left its scars deep in my spirit.”4 Pacifists not only refrain from physical and psychological violence, they are also compelled to work diligently to change the socio-economic conditions that contribute to physical and psychological violence. Similar to Thurman, Johan Galtung defines violence quite simply, almost axiomatically, as “the ab- sence of peace” and argues that “violence is present when human beings are influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations.”5 Thurman’s political conscience was piqued by how vi- olence of sundry sorts, proximate or remote, whether direct and personal or indirect and impersonal, arrests the development of the personality and cir- cumvents the democratic process. Luther Smith claims that “the development of a philosophy of nonviolent protest for the black struggle is a foremost achievement of [Thurman’s] social witness.”6 In his encounter with Gandhi in 1936, Thurman was keen to under- stand the theory or philosophy of ahimsa.7 Gandhi’s use of the Sanskrit “ahimsa”
3 Preston King, 2013: 17. 4 Luminous Darkness, 1965: x. 5 Galtung, 1969: 167–91. 6 Smith, Mystic as Prophet, 1992: 133. 7 Thurman discusses the doctrine of ahimsa as an ethical doctrine with a spiritual foundation as means of dealing with their poverty, of which the spinning-wheel was the symbol, his 1953