Vol. 20 is a special issue guest-edited by Anthony Sean Neal under the title “Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Spiritual Left.” The issue arrives, as its September 2021 date signals, during a period of acute national reckoning — the year following George Floyd’s murder, a summer of Black Lives Matter protests, and a pandemic that had already stripped away many of the comfortable distances between philosophical ideas and lived experience. Neal’s editorial introduction sets the issue’s ambition squarely: to recover Thurman and King not merely as icons of the civil rights struggle but as systematic philosophers of human and community development, thinkers who forged their ideas under conditions of legalized oppression and whose resources are, precisely because of that forging, available to anyone facing the existential demand to survive and flourish under adverse conditions. Neal acknowledges that Thurman is often de-contextualized — read as a spiritual universalist while the racial friction that never left his writing is quietly set aside — and that King is similarly fixed in time and space as a historical monument. The issue aims to read both figures in a more enlivened way, and to demonstrate the continuity of their philosophical lineage into the present.
The issue’s centerpiece is an Author Meets Critics forum titled “Thurman’s Philosophical De-Mystified Mysticism,” organized around Neal’s 2019 monograph Howard Thurman’s Philosophical Mysticism: Love Against Fragmentation (Lexington Books). Neal’s introduction to the forum argues for a new framework in Thurman studies, one that does not allow a repeat of prior scholarship’s inattention to Thurman’s embeddedness in the Modern Era of the African American Freedom Struggle (1896–1975). The book’s central claim — that love, for Thurman, is the force that overcomes fragmentation and constitutes the good community — is critiqued from two directions. Critic Michael Barber brings Emmanuel Levinas to bear, noting a structural contrast: where Thurman grounds the obligation to love in the internal commitment of the one who loves, Levinas locates it in the commanding face of the one to be loved; and where Thurman’s mysticism reaches toward oneness, Levinas raises concerns about any monism that risks absorbing the singular other. Barber also presses on the philosophical standing of Thurman’s grandmother, Nancy Ambrose — a figure Neal reads as both historical person and ethnographic symbol of the African philosophical heritage transmitted through the Spirituals — asking about the evidentiary basis for her African origins and her relationship to Heideggerian thrownness. Critic Eddie O’Byrn focuses on love as a mystical force and challenges Neal’s phrase “weaponized love,” arguing that the vocabulary of weaponry counteracts the very ethos it is meant to invoke. O’Byrn also calls for more explicit treatment of Thurman’s relation to Gandhi — particularly the 1935–36 “pilgrimage of friendship” to India — and to King, whose debt to Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited is well documented. Neal’s replies are searching and self-critical: he defends the “weaponized love” formulation as a deliberate disruption meant to force focused reflection on how love could overcome violence, while acknowledging that the phrase resists easy substitution; he develops the symbolic significance of Grandmother Nancy’s oral transmission of the Spirituals; and he offers a rich account of the Thurman-King relationship through the shared metaphor of the Dream, reading King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as a generational answer to Thurman’s exhortation in Meditations of the Heart to “keep alive the dream.”
Neal’s own article, “‘A Fulfillment So High’: New Directions in African American Philosophy for the Study of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr.,” extends the issue’s philosophical program by proposing four concepts as an organon for reading Thurman and King in tandem: Existential Transformation, Self-Altered Destiny, Self Examination, and Rejection of Irrelevance. The argument’s key move is to demonstrate that while Thurman and King were certainly engaged in the liberation of Black people from racial oppression, their philosophical resources are not exhausted by that context. The four concepts constitute a framework for self-transformation that is universally available — relevant, Neal argues, to anyone confronting oppressive conditions. The concept of Rejection of Irrelevance receives particular development through Neal’s contrast between proximal and distal reading: proximal readings enhance the portrait of the material condition of the subjects framed in a text and create relevance for readers in analogous conditions, while distal readings manufacture the distance of irrelevance. Thurman’s “sound of the genuine” and King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” are both read as exemplary performances of this rejection — each author insisting that knowledge be answerable to those with their backs against the wall.
Two additional articles complete the issue’s scholarly conversation. Larry Perry offers “Beyond Black Churches: Toward an Understanding of the Black Spiritual Left, featuring Du Bois, Bethune, Thurman, and Black Lives Matter,” drawing on Leigh Schmidt’s genealogy of the American spiritual left to construct a parallel Black genealogy. Perry’s central argument is that Schmidt’s otherwise rich portrait lacks the material to clothe the distinctly Black concerns of figures like W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Thurman himself — concerns shaped by racism, the ambivalent legacy of Black churches, and the particularities of Black politics. Perry traces the lineage from Du Bois’s naturalist religiosity and prophetic racial-justice hermeneutics, through Bethune’s pluralist late theology (shaped in part by Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited), to Thurman’s founding of the interracial, religiously pluralistic Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco in 1944, and finally to Black Lives Matter founders Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, whose eclectic spirituality — liberation theology, Ifá, and street-as-sanctuary — constitutes for Perry the movement’s most recent manifestation of Black Spiritual Leftism. The issue closes with a pointed exchange between J. Edward Hackett and Paul C. Taylor. Hackett’s article, “Kingian Personalism, Moral Emotions, and Emersonian Perfectionism,” argues that Taylor’s influential essay “Moral Perfectionism” — published in the commemorative volume To Shape a New World — commits hermeneutic violence against King by translating him into an Emersonian moral perfectionist while displacing the personalism King claimed for himself, that his teachers endorsed, and that frames his entire account of the Beloved Community as constituted by agapic love. Taylor’s reply, “Reading King’s Personalism, Or Not,” defends philosophical translation as a legitimate enterprise distinct from intellectual history, comparing his Emersonian reading to translation across natural languages — unavoidably imperfect but preferable to silence for those who do not speak the original idiom.
The Acorn Journal 