Visions of a Better World Howard Thurman's Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence

The first biographical exploration of one of the most important African American religious thinkers of the twentieth century--Howard Thurman--and of the pivotal trip he took to India that ultimately shaped the course of the civil rights movement. In 1935, Howard Thurman took a trip to India that would forever change him. He became the first African American to meet with Mahatma Gandhi and found himself called to create a version of American Christianity that was intolerant of self-imposed racial and religious boundaries. Deeply influenced by Gandhi's philosophy and practice of satyagraha, his translation of the idea into a Black Christian context became one of the key tenets of the civil rights movement, influencing an entire generation of black ministers--most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. Visions of a Better Worldexplores this pivotal trip and its effect on the very shape of the civil rights tradition. Drawing from previously untapped archival material and obscurely published works, Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt outline, for the first time, Thurman's development into the towering theologian who would so profoundly influence the epochal shift in U.S. race relations in the mid-twentieth century.

Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt are two of the country's leading experts on Howard Thurman. They are both senior volume editors of the Howard Thurman Papers Project and have extensive backgrounds in African American history and religious history. Dixie is assistant professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. He holds MA and PhD degrees in religious studies and American church history, respectively, from Union Theological Seminary. He is coauthor, with Juan Williams, of This Far by Faith, and is coeditor, with Cornel West, of The Courage to Hope. Eisenstadt is an independent historian with a PhD in history from New York University. He is the author or editor of six books, including Rochdale Village, Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History, and Black Conservatism. He is also the associate editor of The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, Vols. I-III.

Foreword by Walter Earl Fluker
Introduction
1 Southern Boy, Morehouse Man, Rochester Scholar
2 Starting a Career
3 Planning the Pilgrimage of Friendship
4 The Negro Delegation in India
5 What Thurman Learned from India
6 Thurman’s War and the Creation of the Fellowship Church
Epilogue: Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus and the Disinherited
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index