Daytona Beach To Celebrate Civil Rights Leader Howard Thurman

Thurman mentored Martin Luther King Jr.

Howard Thurman, a Daytona Beach, Florida-born theologian, civil rights leader, and author will be celebrated by his hometown on Nov. 18 with an event featuring tours of Thurman’s 128-year-old childhood home.

According to The Daytona Beach News-Journal, there will also be a luncheon and a program featuring Kenyatta R. Gilbert, dean of the School of Divinity at Howard University as the keynote speaker.

Thurman, who died in 1981 at age 81, was a personal friend of Indian activist Mahatma Gandhi, and a mentor to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Thurman was also noted for being the pastor of the first interracial church, The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, which he founded in 1944.

Thurman was a key, if unheralded, figure during the Civil Rights Movement as he provided spiritual guidance to many of its leaders, including King and Vernon Jordan.

Thurman was selected as one of America’s 12 outstanding preachers in a nationwide poll Life Magazine conducted and was also named a 20th Century Saint by Ebony.

According to PBS, Thurman was raised in Daytona Beach by his grandmother, a formerly enslaved woman.

In 1925, Thurman became an ordained Baptist minister, and later became the pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio; he was appointed as both the professor of religion and the director of religious life at Atlanta’s Morehouse and Spelman Colleges.

In 1932, after studying under Rufus Jones, a Quaker mystic who taught at Haverford College, Thurman began to publish religious work critical of white America’s “will to dominate and control the Negro minority” which he believed led Black people to harbor a crippling hatred of whites who would be their colonizers.

In 1949, after meeting Gandhi, Thurman published his seminal work, Jesus and the Disinherited, which laid out the basic principles of a nonviolent civil rights movement as interpreted through the New Testament gospels.

In the book, Thurman argued that Jesus was at the core, a liberating figure whose message could be used to create a praxis of revolutionary nonviolent resistance to injustice.

Eventually, Thurman would pass on this belief to King and James Farmer, the founder of the Congress of Racial Equality. (CORE)

Vassar College also credited Thurman with shaping its record on human rights during an event in February 2024 that honored him via the research of four students on Thurman’s legacy at the school.