Howard Thurman

African American theologian, mystic, and pastor, 1899–1981. Grandson of a formerly enslaved woman. He grew up in segregated Daytona, Florida and became, in succession, the first Black dean of a chapel at a majority-white university (Boston University), the co-founder of one of the first intentionally interracial congregations in the United States (the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco), and the most important spiritual mentor to the Black freedom movement of the twentieth century. In 1935 he led a delegation to India and spent three hours with Gandhi, who told him: it will be through the African American that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world. Thurman taught a generation of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., who carried a copy of *Jesus and the Disinherited* with him on the Montgomery bus boycott. Core teaching: do not ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive — and go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. Religion that does not free the oppressed is not Christian. Key works: *Jesus and the Disinherited* (1949), *The Inward Journey*, *Meditations of the Heart*, *With Head and Heart* (autobiography), *Disciplines of the Spirit*.