African American theologian, mystic, and pastor whose spiritual writing provided much of the interior theological ground on which the nonviolent civil-rights movement stood. Grandson of a formerly enslaved woman, educated at Morehouse and Rochester Theological Seminary, Thurman led an extraordinary 1935 delegation of African Americans to meet Gandhi in India — the conversation that opened the channel by which Gandhian nonviolence entered the Black church tradition. In 1944 he co-founded the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, the first major intentionally interracial, interdenominational congregation in American history. He later served as Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, where Martin Luther King Jr. was among the students who read him closely.
Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) is Thurman's essential book and, by a common reckoning, the single most influential theological text on King — who reportedly carried it in his briefcase on the road. The book asks what the religion of Jesus has to say to people with their backs against the wall, and answers by insisting that Jesus himself was such a person: a poor Palestinian Jew under Roman occupation whose teaching addresses the spiritual diseases bred by being unarmed and dispossessed — fear, deception, and hatred — and offers in their place a discipline of love that is not sentimental but survival-tested. It is the closest thing in American religious writing to a theology of what it means to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously from below rather than from above.
Thurman's other writing — The Search for Common Ground (1971), The Inward Journey (1961), the meditations and poetic prose of Deep Is the Hunger (1951) — is contemplative, unhurried, and unafraid of silence. His achievement was to hold mysticism and social witness together without letting either dissolve the other.