The forgotten civil-rights leader who knew that laws and lawsuits couldnt heal Americas racial divide

America has forgotten one of its great guides.This country has seen numerous periods of great contention.

It has survived all of them.If America wants to survive the current division, it must look to this neglected thinker: Howard Thurman (1899-1981).The grandson of slaves, Thurman was a giant in his own day.

He wrote influential books on Jim Crow-era America, pastored a number of churches, became the dean of chapel at Howard University and later Boston University, and became a trusted ally of the 20th century’s most dedicated seekers of peace.During a months-long trip through India, Burma and Sri Lanka in 1935 and 1936, he spoke on black history and segregation and met Gandhi.This encounter instilled in him the importance of non-violent resistance, an ethos he brought back to what was then a terrifyingly violent America.When he returned to America, his work took on an increasingly contemplative tone.

He began to look at our social and political divisions in a different way.He began to see faith, not politics, as the most important part the struggle for peace.

Thurman’s most famous work, “Jesus and the Disinherited,” draws a straight line between the violence faced by black Americans and the political oppression in first-century Palestine faced by Jesus of Nazareth.But rather than use that comparison to call for further legislation, Thurman saw a harder truth: Great evil cannot be overcome by laws, but only by great love.As he writes in “Jesus and the Disinherited”: “To revile because one has been reviled — this is the real evil because it is the evil of the soul itself.

Jesus saw this with almighty clarity.Again and again he came back to the inner life of the individual.

With increasing insight and startling accuracy, he placed his finger on the inward center as the crucial area where the issues would determine the destiny of his people.”What animated the violence of the first century was no different than what animated the violence and divi...