Gandhi, who was then critical of Christianity because, he maintained, it ''fostered segregation.''ĭr. On that trip he met with the famed Indian religious leader Mohandas K. Thurman to begin dreaming of a church that would transcend racial and economic barriers between people. It was a sabbatical leave and a trip through India, Burma and Ceylon in 1935 that inspired Dr.

Later he was named professor of religion at Howard University in Washington. He returned to the South in 1926 to teach religion at Morehouse College and Spelman College for Women. Later he was awarded honorary degrees from several other schools, including Washington University and Ohio Wesleyan University. At a time when most black children did not attend public schools, he was graduated from the eighth grade and later attended Florida Baptist Academy high school, working as a janitor to pay for his education.Īfter graduating from Morehouse College in Atlanta and Colgate-Rochester Divinity School in Rochester in 1925, he was ordained a Baptist minister. He was director of of the Howard Thurman Educational Trust, a foundation that he began in 1951 to give aid to disadvantaged students and to help organizations with religious, cultural and educational programs.īorn in Daytona Beach, Fla., he was reared by his grandmother, who had been born a slave. Howard Thurman, one of the nation's leading black clergymen and educators and an early champion of a Christianity that emphasized the needs of the poor and disadvantaged, died Friday in San Francisco after a lingering illness.

Howard thurman deep is the hunger