Toward Understanding a Black Spiritual Left: the Spirituality of Howard Thurman and the Black Lives Matter Movement

Careful readers of the theologian, mystic, and minister, Howard Thurman, have noted that his work grappled with the major social issues of his day—namely racism, sexism, economic inequality, and other forms of oppression. Indeed, in works such as Jesus and the Disinherited (1949), Luminous Darkness (1965), and Deep River and The Negro Speaks of Life and Death (1975), Thurman pushed readers to engage oppression—particularly racial oppression—as an issue that people of faith needed to engage. Though Thurman’s more popular book-length works have gained attention from religious scholars, his essays “Mysticism and Social Change” (1939)—found in Volume two of the Howard Thurman Papers—and “Mysticism and the Experience of Love” (1961) expose how Thurman’s mysticism could be used as a tool in the fight against oppression.