Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman's Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence

Historians Dixie and Eisenstadt offer an admirably focused portrait of the oft-overlooked African-American intellectual, mystic, orator, minister, teacher, and philosopher Howard Thurman (1899%E2%80%931981). Concentrating on a formative six-month trip Thurman undertook to India marked by an auspicious meeting with Mahatma Gandhi, the authors delineate how Thurman's brand of theology and philosophy emerged from a desire to reconcile individual spiritual experience and transcendence with broad social change%E2%80%94and how his thinking and teaching inspired a generation of more widely recognized civil rights leaders. In thoughtful, eloquent prose, the authors juxtapose Thurman's experiences of racism in the U.S.%E2%80%94being refused service at a hotel where he was delivering a lecture%E2%80%94and lyrical epiphanies while traveling, such as glimpsing Mt. Everest emerge from the parted clouds in the foothills of the Himalayas. Moreover, the authors show how both sets of experiences worked to inform Thurman's life without overpowering his intellect, which remained consistently nuanced, measured, and guided toward answering the question of whether "spiritual unity among people could be more compelling than the experiences which divide them." (Aug.)