Howard Thurman was a remarkable man and 75
years ago he founded a remarkable church. This article is about him, the church
he founded, and a remarkable co-pastor of that church today.
The Remarkable Howard
Thurman
Howard Washington
Thurman was born in Florida 120 years ago this month, on November 18, 1899
(although some sources say he was born in 1900) and died in 1981. Ordained as a Baptist minister
in 1925, he has been characterized as “a spiritual genius who mentored MLK, Jr., and carried Gandhi’s
teaching to America.”
Thurman was a part
of a Student Christian Movement-sponsored four-person “Pilgrimage of
Friendship” to South Asia in 1935-36. That experience,
including personal conversations with Gandhi, influenced Thurman greatly—and
later reverberated throughout the civil rights movement in the U.S.
In 1953, Thurman became
the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University (BU), the first African American
to hold such a position at a majority-white university. At that time, MLK, Jr.,
was a graduate student at BU.
According to BU’s alumni magazine (see here), “King not only attended sermons [at Marsh Chapel] but also turned to Thurman as his mentor and spiritual advisor. Among the lessons that inspired him most were Thurman’s accounts of a visit to Mohandas Gandhi in India years earlier.”
So much more needs to be said about Thurman, but for additional information I highly recommend the superlative February 2019 PBS documentary “Backs to the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story.”
So much more needs to be said about Thurman, but for additional information I highly recommend the superlative February 2019 PBS documentary “Backs to the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story.”
The Remarkable “Fellowship
Church”
In the fall of 1943, Alfred G. Fisk, a Presbyterian clergyman, had the
vision of starting a church that would welcome people of all races and creeds.
Thurman, who had served as Dean of the Howard University Chapel since 1932, was
asked to recommend a young black minister who might be interested in helping
start such a church.
Thurman decided to volunteer himself and requested a year’s leave of
absence from Howard beginning July 1, 1944. Thus, Thurman was the main one
responsible for starting a new church in San Francisco with a remarkable name:
The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. For short, it is often just
called Fellowship Church.
On October 8 of that year, Fellowship Church held its first public
meeting—and last month it celebrated its 75th Jubilee Anniversary.
Fellowship
Church was unmistakably based on the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.
Along with that basic affirmation, though, the second of the three-paragraph
“commitment” agreed to by Fellowship Church members says,
I desire to share in the spiritual growth and ethical awareness of men and women of varied national, cultural, racial, and credal heritage united in a religious fellowship.
In 1959, Thurman wrote a book titled Footprints of a Dream: The
Story of The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples (reissued 2009). I
finished reading it last week, and it was a fascinating read.
The Remarkable Current
Co-pastor of Fellowship Church
Since 1994, Dr. Dorsey O. Blake has been co-pastor of Fellowship
Church. (Currently, the other co-pastor is a white woman.) This past June, I
had the opportunity of hearing/meeting Dr. Blake, for he was the speaker at the
local Juneteenth banquet.
Dr. Blake was born in 1946, and before he was a year old his father
became pastor of First Baptist Church here in Liberty, a predominantly African
American church from its beginning until the present. His first six years in
school were at the segregated Garrison School in Liberty, established for Black
students in 1877.
Fellowship
Church in San Francisco, literally seeking to be a place of fellowship for all
peoples, continues to thrive under the leadership of a remarkable man whose
early life was spent as a Baptist PK (preacher’s kid) in the small town of Liberty,
Missouri.
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A fascinating bit of American religious history!
ReplyDeleteIn a recent email from Dr. Blake, he told me that in 1949 his father sought admittance to William Jewell College, my alma mater here in Liberty, but he was not accepted because of his race. (There were still no African American students at WJC when June and I were students there from 1957~59, but Dr. Blake wrote that in 1961 his brother was one of the first two African Americans to enroll as students at Jewell.)
ReplyDeleteAlso, the old Garrison School building where Dr. Blake went to school is now the permanent home of Clay County African American Legacy Inc., the sponsors of this year’s Juneteenth banquet in Liberty, the county seat of Clay County, Mo.
A few minutes ago local Thinking Friend Bruce Morgan sent me this brief comment:
ReplyDelete"Thanks for this refresher course on Thurman, a giant of the faith."
And just now these comments from local Thinking Friend Temp Sparkman:
ReplyDelete"Thanks Leroy, for bringing Howard Thurman to my morning. I especially noted Martin Luther King’s connection to him. I wonder what King thought when he first heard Thurman mention Gandhi. So goes the long row of lights that shine in our pilgrimages."
I really enjoyed learning about these two men, the church, and the tie to Liberty. It's nice that people in Liberty remembered this connection to Blake. Otherwise, I'm guessing you may not have known this?
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments, David. I'm not surprised you liked this tie to Liberty.
DeleteI have known about Thurman himself for a long time, and my Dec. 26, 2011, blog article was about him (see here: https://theviewfromthisseat.blogspot.com/2011/12/work-of-christmas.html).
Perhaps it was just a year or two ago that I became aware of The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, and I didn't know about Dr. Blake until that Juneteenth banquet last June. I was so happy to learn more about the church and especially happy to get to know Dr. Blake and his roots in Liberty.
Yesterday I also received the following comments from local Thinking Friend Bob Leeper:
ReplyDelete"At the time I left-the-church (about 1958) I had spent a mis-invested year at segregationist Bob Jones University, and coming to know that THE MOST SEGREGATED place on earth was Sunday morning church-time. I do not attend (my wife does) the Church of the Resurrection, and they advocate and actively support the collaboration between COR and the Cleaver church on Paseo, about 55th street. I attend some of those, plus some of the classes at COR focused on racial justice."
Thanks for your comments, Bob.
ReplyDeleteThe segregation of the churches was one of the main things that motivated Thurman in 1944. Unfortunately, most churches are still largely segregated, but at least now minorities (Blacks) would be welcomed into most white churches if they should want to attend. Still, there is a lot more that needs to be done. I have heard only a bit about the interchange between the Church of the Resurrection and St. James United Methodist Church, but that seems to be a good and important thing they are doing. (I have been to meetings at both churches, but not to Sunday services, and I am highly impressed with both Adam Hamilton and Emanuel Cleaver III.)
I was very happy to receive the following comments from local Thinking Friend Will Adams. Dr. Adams was a political science professor at William Jewell College for decades, and earlier this year he celebrated his 90th birthday:
ReplyDelete"Thank you for a fascinating article! Your comments introducing the article touched a special place in my heart. I joined the William Jewell faculty in fall 1955 and quickly became aware of the racial selectivity of the College. I visited the first Baptist church (mostly African American) my first year in Liberty, and learned that its pastor got his college degree from Rockhurst, a Catholic college, because the local Baptist college would not admit him.
"Ironically, William Jewell did have black students at that time, but no African Americans. Our black students were classified as foreign students, from Nigeria, Uganda and other African countries.
"I was present at the meeting in spring 1959 when the William Jewell faculty voted with one dissent to admit African American students. I won't say who the one dissent was--he was a highly regarded older faculty member. But I was proud when William Jewell finally opened its doors to American blacks, and I did what I could to make them welcome.
"How far we have come--and how far we still have to go to live according to Christ's teachings!!!"
Thank you, Leroy, as always for a fascinating article and much back-story that I did not know. It seems to me now in retirement that I am focusing my cross-cultural and racial awakenings from long years in Japan to racial issues in the US and also Costa Rica. I am reading or have read in the last year James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, White Fragility, and now at the suggestion of new African American friends, Uncle Tom's Cabin. The lack of racial bias around me makes the blatant resurgence in the the US all the more distasteful, and on the other hand, brings into sharp focus the raw sins of the past, which are not as much in the past as we might have thought they were with the backlash since the election of Obama.
ReplyDeleteThanks for responding to my blog posting with your thoughtful comments, Lydia. Like you, after living in Japan for so long and then coming back to the States, it seemed as if there was far more racial equality here when we got back than there had been 40 years earlier--and surely that is the case. I doubt that there is any PoC now who would like to go back to how things were in the 1960s. And yet--and yet!-- there is still much more that needs to be done for racial harmony and social justice. That is why we still need to see the example and to listen to the appeal of a church like The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples.
DeleteThinking Friend Michael Willett Newheart, now in Wisconsin, shared the following comments on my Facebook "timeline" after I linked to my blog article there today.
ReplyDelete"Reading Thurman and reading about Thurman is always inspiring. So thank you, Leroy. I taught over a quarter-century at Howard University School of Divinity, where Thurman taught theology while serving as the first dean of the university's Rankin Chapel. I was married in Howard Thurman chapel, I often meditated (or napped) in the Howard Thurman listening room, and I used a variety of Thurman's works in my classes. You might say that Thurman is the patron saint of the school. Relevant Facebook pages include The Psalm of Howard Thurman, Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground, Howard Thurman's Great Hope, Howard Thurman Audio Collection, and Howard Thurman."
I am Dorsey Blake's brother: Doctor of Musical Arts (Cornell University, 1988). Dorsey forwarded your concise yet enlightening article about Drs. Thurman and Blake. Although Dorsey was born in Kansas City, I was born in Liberty. I am the seventh of nine children of Rev. Dr. and Mrs. William Blake. Beginning the second grade, I was enrolled in an integrated elementary school. Liberty will always hold a special place in my heart and mind.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, my middle name is LeRoy. Keep up your excellent work.