Important Students
Howard Thurman
Howard Washington Thurman (1899–1981) played a leading role in many social justice movements and organizations of the twentieth century. He was one of the principal architects of the modern, nonviolent civil rights movement and a key mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr (The Howard Thurman Papers Project, Boston University, 2016).
Thurman grew up in Daytona, Florida and was raised by his grandmother, a former slave. As a child, Thurman complied with his grandmother’s request that he read the bible aloud to her, and he developed an interest in the text at a very early age. As a young child, Thurman also learned not only of the trials of slavery, but also of the slaves’ deep religious faith, which profoundly shaped his later vision of the transformative potential of African American Christianity (The Howard Thurman Papers Project, Boston University, 2016). Thurman attended the Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville from 1915 to 1919, the year he matriculated at Morehouse College. In 1923 he graduated from Morehouse (under John Hope); he had purportedly read every book in the college’s library (The Howard Thurman Papers Project, Boston University, 2016).
Nearing the end of his undergraduate education in economics at Morehouse, he spent the summer of 1922 in residence at Columbia University, where he attended classes with white students for the first time. After receiving a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Rochester Theological Seminary in 1926, he served as pastor of the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Oberlin, Ohio. In the spring of 1929, Thurman studied mysticism at Haverford College under Rufus Jones, who was a Quaker. Mysticism came to figure prominently in Thurman’s theology. Thurman evolved into a mystic who grounded all of his work in the idea that “life is alive” with creative intelligence (The Howard Thurman Papers Project, Boston University, 2016).
James Nabrit, Jr.
James Madison Nabrit, Jr., (1900 – 1997) educator, legal scholar, civil rights activist, and diplomat, who served as the 14th president of Howard University, died December 27, 1997, at the age of 97.
The eldest of eight siblings, Jim was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 4, 1900. Following graduation from Morehouse College in 1923 (under John Hope), he went to Northwestern University, where he received a law degree in 1927 with highest honors (Anderson, C., 1998). Despite his standing in his class, he received no offers of employment as a lawyer as did many of his lower-ranking white classmates (Anderson, C., 1998). Narbit was a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Inc., (Eta Chapter), Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity Inc., and The Order of the Coif (Northwestern University Chapter) (Anderson, C., 1998).
He worked as an attorney in Houston, Texas, beginning in 1930, and for the next six years developed a successful law career. In 1936 Nabrit moved to Washington, D.C., where he became a member of Howard University’s law school faculty and established the first civil rights course for a U.S. law school (Anderson, C., 1998). From his post at Howard, Nabrit continued to teach while working on a number of significant civil rights cases. Among those cases were Lane v. Wilson, (1939), concerning the registration of black voters in Oklahoma, and Terry v. Adams (1953), which focused on the right of African Americans to participate in primary elections in Texas. He argued successfully for both cases (Anderson, C., 1998). Nabrit worked closely with prominent civil rights lawyers Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and other members of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund throughout his career (Anderson, C., 1998).
He also teamed with George E. C. Hayes to work on the landmark Bolling v. Sharpe case (1952), a predecessor of Brown v. Board of Education (Anderson, C., 1998). Nabrit and Hayes lost the case in the District of Colombia Federal District court before taking it to the Supreme Court in 1952 and 1953, where they lost both appeals. Unlike Brown v. Board of Education and other desegregation cases that followed, Bolling v. Sharpe was decided under the due process clause in the Fifth Amendment, not under the Fourteenth Amendment (Anderson, C., 1998). In the ruling in favor of Brown in Brown v. Board of Education, segregated schools were deemed unconstitutional in 1954 (Anderson, C., 1998).
Nabrit became the second African American president of Howard University in 1960 and the second Morehouse Man to become president of Howard University (Anderson, C., 1998).
Dr. Benjamin Brawley
Benjamin Brawley (1882 – 1939) was born in Columbia, South Carolina. His grandparents had been free blacks, and his father, Edward McKnight Brawley, was a respected minister in Columbia’s African-American community and a leader in the black Baptist church of the era (Brennan, C. 1996). The elder Brawley was also an instructor at Benedict College, a Baptist-affiliated school for blacks in Columbia. He went on to take jobs at colleges or churches in Nashville, Tennessee, and Petersburg, Virginia (Brennan, C. 1996). The Brawleys sent their 13-year-old son to the preparatory school of Atlanta Baptist College, which later became Morehouse College. He earned a bachelor’s degree there in 1901 and took a job teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Georgetown, Florida, for a year before returning to his alma mater as an instructor in English and Latin (Brennan, C. 1996).
Benjamin Brawley was one of the leading black academics of the 1930s, and the author of a number of scholarly tomes that became standard college textbooks for a generation of students after his death in 1939 (Brennan, C. 1996). A professor of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Brawley wrote extensively on the achievements of African-American writers like Paul Lawrence Dunbar (Brennan, C. 1996). His 1921 book, A Social History of the American Negro, was a groundbreaking work that remained in print for some five decades (Brennan, C. 1996).
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