Minister, theologian and mystic Howard Thurman was born in 1899 and was thirty years older than Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but he played a large role in MLK’s life. Thurman, who gave sermons and taught at Howard University and Boston University, influenced an entire generation, both spiritually and intellectually, an entire generation that became the leadership of the civil rights movement. His most significant contribution is bringing the idea of nonviolence to the movement. He met Mahatma Gandhi during a trip to India in 1935, which was greatly influential in incorporating the principles of nonviolence in the African-American freedom struggle. According to Smithsonian Magazine, Gandhi told Thurman, “it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.” This message resonated with King and others in the movement, and they repeated it through the 1950s. Thurman met King after King was stabbed during a book signing in 1958. Thurman visited King while King was recovering in the hospital. Thurman gave the same advice he gave to others: King should take “the unexpected, if tragic, opportunity, to step out of life briefly, meditate on his life and its purposes, and only then move forward.” Though Thurman and King were never personally close, Thurman had a large spiritual and intellectual impact on the leader. King reportedly carried a copy of Thurman’s book, Jesus and the Disinherited in his pocket during the Montgomery bus boycott, reports Smithsonian.
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