carried Howard Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited with him at all times. King’s leadership of the civil rights movement, he continued to correspond with Thurman, who counseled him to remain grounded in nonviolence, which was the way not only of Gandhi but also of Jesus. These prophetic words bore fruit in the spiritual friendship that blossomed between Thurman and MLK at Boston University in the early 1950s- shortly before the younger minister would change history when he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama in 1955–6. Ordained a Baptist minister, he befriended the Quaker mystic Rufus Jones in 1935 he traveled to India and met Mahatma Gandhi, who shared with Thurman his commitment to promote nonviolence Gandhi thought that the African American community could be the champions for nonviolence in America. Howard Washington Thurman was born on Novemin Daytona Beach, Florida, the grandson of slaves he graduated from Morehouse College in 1923. His writing and his sermons reveal a deep contemplative sensibility, grounded in the encounter with the God who is Love that informed his commitment to social justice and nonviolence.

Over a long ministry, which included serving as dean of the chapel at Howard University and Boston University, he became renowned not only as a gifted preacher but also a prolific author of more than twenty-eight books. He is also the most widely recognized, and universally celebrated, of African-American mystics. Howard Thurman is remembered first and foremost as a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., but he is also widely regarded as one of the greatest African American spiritual leaders of the twentieth century.

Deep Is the Hunger by Howard Thurman