MLK’s Mentor Revealed

He criticized Christianity for its racial segregation, the New Deal for being half-hearted, and America for mimicking, in its Jim Crow laws, the fascistic tendencies of Europe’s real fascists. Having already labeled Jesus’ virgin birth a myth, albeit a religiously instructive one, he was no stranger to hot-button commentary.

Howard Thurman (Hon.’67) (pictured below) expressed these thoughts privately, and sometimes publicly, in the years before he became BU’s pioneering African American chapel dean and mentored a young Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59). The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, Volume 2: Christian, Who Calls Me Christian?(University of South Carolina Press), out this month, features a fraction of his surviving 58,000 papers. The book spans the years from 1936, just after Thurman’s life-altering meeting with Gandhi, to 1943, just before his cofounding the country’s first integrated, interfaith church in San Francisco.

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