Visions of a Better World

May 23, 2011
Historians Dixie and Eisenstadt offer an admirably focused portrait of the oft-overlooked African-American intellectual, mystic, orator, minister, teacher, and philosopher Howard Thurman (1899â1981). 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 changeâand 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.âbeing refused service at a hotel where he was delivering a lectureâand 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."

Starred review from July 1, 2011
Although hardly a household name, Howard Thurman was one of the most important African American religious thinkers of the twentieth century, an early advocate of radical Christian nonviolence, and the founder of one of the first interracial congregations in the U.S. In 1936, Thurman met Mahatma Gandhi in a crucial encounter between East and West. Thurman did more than anyone to promulgate Gandhi's message. Already a well-respected preacher at the time of the visit, Thurman was chair of the Negro Delegation, which undertook a Pilgrimage of Friendship to South Asia under the auspices of the Student Christian Movement. Dixie and Eisenstadt bring to life the overlooked story of Thurman and his lifelong search for a solution to racial equality. As they point out, Thurman helped give the civil rights movement its shape and its impetus and deeply influenced a generation of black ministers, especially Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. An important portrait of a neglected figure who deserves wider recognition.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)