Valedictorian.Įnrolled at Rochester Theological Seminary in 1923 (Rochester allotted two spots in the freshman class to black students). (Summer semester at Columbia in 1922 studied philosophy). Graduated from Morehouse College in 1923 with degrees in economics and government. Howard’s high school graduation photograph Grades 9-graduation: Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville (one of three high schools for black students in Florida). Grades 1-7 (8) in black school in Daytona Beach, Florida (From Howard Thurman’s book With Head and Heart) Howard’s oak tree It, too, was part of my reality, like the woods, the night, and the pounding surf, my earliest companions, giving me space. I could talk aloud to the oak tree and know that I was understood. I could reach down in the quiet places of my spirit, take out my bruises and my joys, unfold them, and talk about them. I could sit my back against its trunk, and feel the same peace that would come to me in my bed at night. (From Howard Thurman’s book With Head and Heart)Įventually I discovered that the oak tree and I had a unique relationship. In some fantastic way, the night belongs to me. This comforted me…I felt embraced, enveloped, held secure. The night had its own language….At such times I could hear the night think, and feel the night feel. When there was no moon, the stars hung like lanterns, so close I felt that one could reach up and pluck them from the heavens. The nights in Florida, as I grew up, seemed to have certain dominant characteristics.
(From Howard Thurman’s book Disciplines of the Spirit) My response to the sense of Presence always had the quality of personal communion. There would come a moment when beyond the single pulse beat there was a sense of Presence which seemed always to speak to me. It was a time of watching and waiting for what I did not know-yet I always knew. There were times when it seemed as if the earth and the river and the sky and I were one beat of the same pulse. Reared by his Grandma Nancy, who had been a slave and was a young woman during the American Civil War Found the protective fold of his neighborhood and nature his “windbreak against existence.”Īs a child I was accustomed to spending many hours alone in my rowboat, fishing along the river, when there was no sound save the lapping of the waves against the boat. Born November 18, 1899, in Daytona Beach, Florida
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