HOWARD THURMAN. CIVIL RIGHTS. & HOWARD U.
"Although the philosophy of nonviolence was far less familiar than the idea of armed self-defense, it was not a completely unfamiliar method of political struggle. And as the Freedom Movement evolved and the practice of nonviolent activism began playing an increasingly important role, it turned out that these two approaches-- so dissimilar on the surface--were in fact quite compatible...
"Even before the war, Mohandas Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to British colonialism had been attracting attention in black America . Especially important to nonviolent activism's spread to the U.S. civil rights struggle was theologian Howard Thurman, who in 1936 went on a "Pilgrimage of Friendship" to India with his wife, Sue Baily Thurman, Methodist minister, Edward Carroll, and his wife, Phenola Valentine Carroll. At the end of Thurman's visit, Gandhi told him 'It may be through Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.' In 1953, Thurman became dean of Boston University's Marsh Chapel (making him the first tenured black dean at any predominantly white university) holding the position until 1965. When Thurman became dean , Martin Luther King, Jr. was in the last year of residence at the university for the doctorate he was to receive June 5, 1955, and Thurman was an important influence on him although the two men seem not to have been very close personally . Thurman had also been a classmate of King's father at Morehouse College in Atlanta and was a family friend. From 1931-1944 Thurman had been dean of Howard University's Rankin Chapel. James Farmer, the founder of CORE, had been one of his students there, and it was Thurman who introduced Farmer to the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an international, interfaith, interracial organization dedicated since World War I to working for peace and to training activists for nonviolent struggle . FOR would have a formative influence on some of the nonviolent activist eaders who preceded the activists of the 1960s--figures such as Bayard Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington; Reverend James Lawson, who mentored the Nashville student movement; and Farmer, who found in FOR "a cadre of black and white pacifists primed to act on the race question and examining with close interest the progress of nonviolent direct action in India.'
"From time to time well before the Montgomery bus boycott and the sit-ins of the 1960s, acts of nonviolent protest had taken place in the United States, often imitated by prominent or rising black intellectuals . In 1935, Charles Hamilton Houston, then dean of Howard University's law school, took a ferry from Norfolk , Virginia, to Washington , D. C. He refused to eat supper behind a screen in the ferry's dining room, so he ordered food to be brought to his cabin. Then he refused to pay the additional service charge that almost doubled what the same meal would have cost him in the dining room. in the same year [1935], Howard University student, Kenneth Clark--a budding psychologist and editor of the school newspaper , who later would convince the Supreme Court of the damaging psychological effects of school segregation on black children--was arrested for picketing the U. S. Capitol to protest the segregation of its restaurants. In 1940, Pauli Murray , an FOR member who would become the first African American to earn a doctorate from Yale Law School and the first black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest, was arrested with a friend for violating Virginia 's segregation laws by sitting in the whites-only section of a bus. In 1943, Murray, then a law student at Howard University led female students in a sit-in at a nearby cafeteria that refused service to blacks."
P.149-151, THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF'LL GET YOU KILLED by Charles E. Cobb, Jr. (2016)
