I encountered the life and legacy of Rev. Howard Thurman in seminary. It was there that I learned that Thurman was the direct link between  Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. 

Born in 1899, Thurman was raised by his formerly enslaved grandmother. He grew up to be an ordained Baptist minister and a leading religious figure of 20th-century America. As a student in 1936, Thurman led a four-member delegation to India, Burma, and Ceylon.  It was during that visit that Thurman met Gandhi and was taken by his use of non-violence as a way to help India break free of British occupation. 

 Thurman preached a philosophy of Common Ground, which taught that humans need to seek an inner spiritual happiness that would lead them to share their experience in community with others. In 1944, Thurman cofounded San Francisco’s  Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, the first integrated interfaith religious congregation in the United States.

In 1953, he became the dean of Marsh Chapel, the first black dean at a mostly white American university, mentoring, among many others, Martin Luther King, Jr. as he developed his philosophy of nonviolence.

Click here for more about the connection between Thurman, Gandhi and King.