The Luminous Darkness

Howard Thurman's Luminous Darkness

Howard Thurman's famous book "Jesus and the Disinherited" (1949) helped to inspire the Civil Rights movement that soon followed in its wake. In 1965, near the end of the movement, Thurman wrote this book, "The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and the Ground of Hope." In it, Thurman offered his own understanding of the nature of segregation and its impact. Thurman ultimately grounds his understanding of the evils of segregation in mysticism and religious philosophy. In the book's "Foreword", Thurman noted the deeply personal character of this essay. He wrote about what he saw as the crucial insight he learned from his experience of segregation in his own life:

"[A} strange necessity has been laid upon me to devote my life to the central concern that transcends the walls that divide and would achieve in literal fact what is experienced as literal truth: human life is one and all men are members of one another. And this insight is spiritual and it is the hard core of religious experience."

Thurman took great inspiration from the vitality of his upbringing and from what he termed the "Negro idiom". He wrote: "A man must be at home somewhere before he can feel at home everywhere." He also believed that the sense of separateness resulting from segregation and divisions among people needed to be overcome, "even as it sustains and supports." Thurman wrote: "This is the crucial paradox in the achievement of an integrated personality as of an integrated society. To work as if the walls did not exist, to be nourished by the strength of one's ethnic idiom, and at the same time to be victimized by the walls is as exhilarating as it is hazardous. There is no waking moment or sleeping interval when one may expect respite from the desolation and despair of segregation."

The book is not a historical account of the Civil Rights Movement but is instead personal, reflective, and philosophical. Thurman describes many incidents in his life beginning with his childhood in heavily segregated Jacksonville, Florida which show how he came to understand the pernicious effects of segregation upon his own life and on his family and community. He discusses how segregation harmed both blacks and whites by creating a "wall" between them and an atmosphere of fear and hatred. Much of the book explores the effect of segregation on both blacks and whites in terms of loss of dignity, self-esteem, and moral understanding of one's fellows.

Thurman's discussion gradually expands and broadens in scope to describe how the two world wars changed life in the United States to the ultimate demise of segregation. He also explains how the American Civil Rights Movement was part of a broader movement of downtrodden people, influenced deeply by Gandhi, for autonomy and respect. Thurman suggests but does not elaborate upon the need for long-term remedial action to counter the impact of segregation following the Civil Rights Legislation of 1963 and 1964. He discusses the role of organized Christianity and explains why institutional religion had seemed to lag behind in speaking out against the evil of segregation.

The book takes flight in its final sections. Thurman discusses how segregation had the effect of making people see one another in terms of whiteness or blackness rather than in terms of a shared or common humanity. He describes the breadth of ethics and spirituality as transcending any particular religion and as showing the continuity of all existence. The book moves from the individual and particular through the community through the universality of human experience to the transcendent and all-encompassing. With his deep commitment to civil rights and understanding of the African American experience, Thurman remains a mystical thinker. He writes:

"Just as scattered through the earliest accounts of man's journey on this planet are flashes and shafts of light illuminating the meaning of man and his fellows, so in our times we find the widest variety of experiments pointing in the same direction and making manifest the same goals. Men are made for one another. In this grand discovery, there is a disclosure of another dimension: this experience of one another is not enough. There is a meaning in life greater than, but informing, all the immediate meanings -- and the name given to this meaning is religion, because it embodies, however faintly, a sense of the ultimate and the divine."

Thurman offers a message of hope. He shows how darkness can indeed be "luminous" in pointing the way to a better future. Thurman's book is valuable for its discussions of the particulars of segregation and its evil. But it is profound in the way it ties this discussion into a suggestion of the broadest reaches of reality, mind, and spirit.

Robin Friedman