The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death: Being the Ingersoll Lecture on the Immortality of Man, 1947
Harper & Brothers, 1947. First Edition. Hardcover with Dust Jacket. First Printing with K-W print code to verso (October, 1947, though the DJ states 11-26-47). Small 12mo, green cloth with paper title label mounted to front cover. [6], 7-56, [8] pp. Some very light silverfishing to head and tail, faint offsetting to the endpapers, very clean and sharp otherwise; with the fragile DJ showing some light wear to the tips, two small ink stains to front tail and very short tears to the tail edge, clean and unclipped otherwise. With Harper & Brothers original packing slip dated 6/21 (year unspecified). Howard Thurman was a mystic, theologian, activist. He became mentor to many leaders in the Civil Rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., who famously travelled with Thurman's *Jesus and the Disinherited* in his suitcase. Thurman was professor of theology at his alma mater, Morehouse College, before taking deanships at the chapels of Howard and then Boston University. In 1944 he left his tenured position at Howard to help found the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, an interracial congregation in San Francisco. This Ingersoll Lecture is a continuation of themes first developed in Deep River, an exploration of Black American religion through the Spirituals. In it, Thurman offers an alternative to the 'Opiate of the Masses' theory: 'This religious emphasis ...gave the mind a new dimentsion of resourcefulness....Far From paralyzing action, religion made for detachment from the environment so that they could live in the midst of the traffic of their situation with the independence of solitude. The pragmatic results for them was an awareness that against the darkness of their days, something warred, 'a strange new courage.' To them it was the work of God, and who could say to them NAY?' (42-43). NEAR FINE / Very Good. Item #508276
Price: $125.00