Jesus and the Disinherited

Howard Thurman (1899-1981) grew up in an all-Black community in Daytona, Florida. He attended Morehouse College and Rochester Theological Seminary and served as a Baptist minister at churches in Virginia and Ohio as a young man. Thurman was the dean of Howard University’s Rankin Chapel from 1932 to 1944. He led Christian missionaries in India and Africa and met Mahatma Gandhi, who greatly influenced his thought and practice. He established the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco and later taught theology at Boston University.

Thurman wrote prolifically on theology, philosophy, and religion. Thurman was a friend and classmate of Martin Luther King, Sr., at Morehouse College, and he later became a mentor for Martin Luther King, Jr., among other Black leaders of the civil rights movement. Jesus and the Disinherited is Howard Thurman’s most well-known work, most likely because King frequently cited it as a major influence. Indeed, King’s speeches are deeply informed by Thurman’s work, and the ideas illustrated in Jesus and the Disinherited owe their cultural ubiquity and traction to King’s presentation.

Jesus and the Disinherited contains numerous stories derived from Thurman’s personal experience. As a minister and as a Black man in America descended from slaves, his interest in the topics of theology and social justice are intensely personal. While Jesus and the Disinherited is a theological treatise aimed at social liberation, it also provides a window into Thurman’s life as a child and as a public theologian and intellectual.