From the militant steps of Harriet Tubman to the mystical pace of Howard Thurman, these ancestors balance the raceless gospel out. Strident and deeply spiritual, they bear witness to self- emancipation lived out, finding common ground within and then walking it out. Howard Thurman offers a vision and a model of “radical inclusion” lived out. I can’t go far without them. Their journeys are uniquely intertwined with mine and I wouldn’t know the way apart from having them as spiritual guides. Both know what it takes to get to freedom

The author, mystic and philosopher raised in Daytona Beach, Florida would go on to play a prominent role in the Civil Rights Movement. While not on the front lines, Thurman served as a spiritual mentor to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who carried a copy of his book, Jesus and the Disinherited, with him wherever he went. Thurman would go on to hold several positions to include dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University in Washington, D.C. and Marsh Chapel at Boston University as well as co- founder and co- pastor, along with Alfred Fisk, of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, California, an interdenominational and multicultural church and the first of its kind.

Thurman writes about the church’s early years in Footprints of a Dream: The Story of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. “Did the church part company with the Master (Jesus) in its particular emphasis on racial exclusiveness or not?” he wrote. “In seeking an answer to the question of having to do with the life of the Master, I developed the thesis that appears in my book Jesus and the Disinherited, which embodied my convictions that the segregated church as such was a reaction response to the environment and not inherent in the genius of the Christian faith itself. But nowhere in my experience had I ever seen a Christian church that was a living confirmation of my conviction. Deep within me I wondered whether or not my conviction was groundless.” Since Thurman didn’t see it, he and Fisk laid the groundwork for it and then built the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, which will celebrate its 80^th church anniversary on October 8^th.

But this commitment to work against segregation is far from easy. While a call to walk away from what German theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza describes as “relationships of ruling,” it is also an inward orientation supported by the decolonization of identity. By this, I mean racialized identities, the color- coding and categorizing of human beings as white- good and black- bad, which promotes self- alienation, prejudice and othering. Racialized language is also rootless and spurs anonymity as human beings do not come from colors but countries. It was in the renaming that the Africans who were enslaved lost a sense of their mother country as explained by Karenga: “A Negro is from nowhere. You call a man from Germany a German- American; a man from Japan a Japanese- American, and a man from Mexico a Mexican- American. The so- called ‘Negro’ if he is from anywhere is from Africa. If he lives in the United States, he is an Afro- American.”

Not an uncommon struggle or feeling, W.E.B DuBois names it when he asks, “What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both?” Because it seems one cancels out the other. The late Rev. Dr. James H. Evans Jr., my former seminary professor and author of We Have Been Believers: An African American Systematic Theology agreed. “People of African descent in Europe and North America have not been able to address questions of what it means to be human without, first, wrestling with what it means to be black,” he wrote. “One could argue that the question of being black was separated from the question of being human by the elevation of the factor of race to a normative status in relation to the human being.” This is the problem with race, re- creating some humans as divine (white- light people) and others as evil (black- dark/ness people), invisible people are pushed to the edge of nothingness. Mark Doox in his book The N- Word of God walks heavy and offers a strident path forward and far away from this color- coded language to a new world shared with other “hue-man beings.” I am encouraged by the number of people I cross paths with, packing pen, paper, paintbrushes and an inner authority in search for common ground. They all understand that we must keep moving.

This is an excerpt from my feature article for Nurturing Faith Journal. To subscribe and continue this conversation, click here.