Howard Thurman

Boston University made Thurman dean of Marsh Chapel in 1953, the first Black person to hold such a post at a mainly white American university, and he stayed twelve years. Before that he had built something rarer. The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, founded in San Francisco with Alfred Fisk in 1944, was deliberately mixed by race at a moment when almost no congregation was. He had travelled to India in 1935 with a delegation and met Gandhi, and returned convinced that nonviolence could be turned to the situation of Black Americans. Jesus and the Disinherited, published in 1949, reads the gospels from the standpoint of people with their backs against the wall, and it circulated widely among the leaders of the movement that followed. Meditations of the Heart, from 1953, is a book of short prayers and reflections rather than argument. He lived from 1899 to 1981.