11/21/2025
Happy 126th Birthday, Howard Thurman!!!!!!
Today we honor a man whose inner life shaped entire movements. A man who believed that the work of the spirit is not retreat, but transformation; not escape, but liberation; not passivity, but power.
Thurman taught us that:
“The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength is the kind of weapons he feels that you must use to hold him in check.”
This was his diagnosis of oppression, fear, and domination—and why the world tried so hard to contain free Black interiority. But Thurman never bowed to containment. He built alternative communities instead.
At Fellowship Church in San Francisco,
Thurman and his wife, Sue Bailey Thurman, created something revolutionary:
the first in*******al, interfaith congregation in the United States.
Not merely a church, but a living demonstration of what beloved community could be.
A sanctuary where race, class, and creed did not determine the value of a soul.
A place where contemplative depth met social courage.
A gathering that held Buddhists, Christians, agnostics, laborers, scholars, Black migrants, white intellectuals, immigrants, artists, and activists—
all under one roof, all in one Spirit.
Fellowship Church was Thurman’s proof that spiritual imagination could outpace the broken politics of his time.
And its legacy remains a blueprint for every faith community that dares to confront the fractures of American life with moral imagination instead of fear.
At Howard University,
he shaped the intellectual and spiritual direction of the Howard School of Religion, forming a generation of Black ministers, teachers, artists, and diplomats.
He insisted that Black spirituality was not marginal—but central to understanding God, democracy, and the human spirit.
At Boston University,
as the first Black Dean of Chapel in a major white institution, he created a moral home where students from every corner of the world found grounding.
It was there he mentored a young Martin Luther King Jr., offering him spiritual ballast and a copy of Jesus and the Disinherited, which became the soul of the civil rights movement.
Thurman believed that to change the world, you must first reclaim your soul.
That inner authority is stronger than outer intimidation.
That a free spirit cannot be colonized.
And he reminded us always:
“There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.”
On his 126th birthday, we return to that truth.
Happy Birthday, Dr. Thurman.
Your courage still instructs us.
Your mysticism still steadies us.
And your witness still calls us:
Build the world the soul knows is possible
