Chapter One

CHRIST, THURMAN, DU BOIS, AND THE SPIRITUALS

In April of 1947, Howard Thurman became the first African American to deliver the Ingersoll Lectures at Harvard Divinity School. His lecture put him in the company of William James, Josiah Royce, Edgar Sheffield Brightman, William Ernest Hocking, and Alfred North Whitehead. Thurman had much in common with his predecessors, particularly his affinity for the philosophy of pragmatism. It was Thurman's belief that there had bloomed on American soil a view of life, of the human condition, and of truth that was centered in just the type of raw approach to human experience that those other fellows had advocated. He said, "The human spirit is so involved in the endless cycle of birth, of living and dying, that in some sense each man is an authority, a key interpreter of the meaning of the totality of the experience." This could have been said by any of the American pragmatists. Where Thurman parted company with them, however, was in his decision to reach back to the Negro spiritual as a resource for understanding these matters. He announces that he has chosen the Negro spirituals as his subject because in many ways they are "the voice, sometimes strident, sometimes muted and weary, of a people for whom the cup of suffering overflowed in haunting tones of majesty, beauty and power!" The intellectual challenge of the songs was not their unusual meter, "the real significance of the songs ... is revealed at a deeper level of experience, in the ebb and flow of the tides that feed the rivers of man's