Morehouse College, a tradition-rich, historically black institution in Atlanta founded two years after the Civil War, has a history of providing liberal arts education for students who go on to divinity schools in the North and become some of this country’s most respected and influential ministers.
Martin Luther King Jr. was one.
Members of First Presbyterian Church in Lexington will have opportunities this fall to get to know two others – one through a study of his most famous book and the other in-person in a sermon delivered from our pulpit.
The book study, offered by our church’s one-year-old Race Unification Committee (RUC) and open to all church members, will focus on Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited.
Thurman, a grandchild of slaves in Florida, earned a bachelor’s degree as Morehouse’s valedictorian in 1923 and three years later was valedictorian again in earning a divinity degree from Rochester Theological Seminary in New York. Afterward he served as dean of Howard University’s Rankin Chapel in Washington, D.C.; founded with a white co-pastor an interracial, interdenominational church in San Francisco; and then became the first African American to serve as dean of a chapel at a majority-white university – Marsh Chapel at Boston University. He also provided guidance for civil rights organizations and other social justice movements in the 20th century.
Martin Luther King Jr. visited Thurman, a friend of his father, who also studied at Morehouse, while King Jr. was completing a PhD at Boston University. In a trip pioneered by Thurman in the mid-1930s, King Jr. traveled to India to learn about Mahatma Gandhi’s political use of nonviolent protest, which also became the principal strategy of the American Civil Rights Movement. King was said to carry Thurman’s book with him during the movement.
Our church’s study of the book will meet twice monthly beginning Sept. 21. The RUC has permission to offer the book discussions in-person in the Fellowship Hall at 7 p.m. on the first and third Tuesdays. However, the RUC would like to know if different days and/or times would better fit your schedules. And the committee wants to know if individual church members would prefer to meet in-person, via Zoom, or have the ability to do both.
Register for the book study by emailing Bill Keesler, RUC chair. Copies of the book are available in the church office. Church members are encouraged to consider donating to help cover the church’s cost of $13 per book.
Howard Thurman died in 1981, 13 years after King. But on Sunday, October 10, 2021, a third Morehouse graduate will deliver the sermon at our church.
Since 2019, the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Lee Walton has been dean of the School of Divinity, the holder of the Presidential Chair in Religion and Society, and the Dean of Wait Chapel at Wake Forest University.
Walton, who grew up in Atlanta, spent his college freshman year at Wofford in Spartanburg, SC, on a football scholarship, but returned home and earned a bachelor’s degree at Morehouse in 1996. He then obtained a master’s degree and a Ph.D from Princeton Theological Seminary. While at Princeton, he served as pastor of a Presbyterian church in nearby Newark, New Jersey.
In 2006, he became an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of California. In 2010, he was hired as an assistant professor of African American religions in the Divinity School at Harvard University, where in 2012 he became Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in Harvard’s Memorial Church.
Walton is a social ethicist whose scholarship and first book have focused on black televangelism. His second book, “A Lens of Love: Reading the Bible in Its World for Our World” (2018), explores the Bible from the perspective of the most vulnerable and violated characters toward developing a Christian social ethic of radical inclusion and human affirmation. Harvard philosopher Cornel West described “A Lens of Love” as “rooted in the legacies” of King Jr; Benjamin Elijah Mays, a Howard University religious-studies dean who became president of Morehouse College for 27 years and a King adviser; theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; and Mississippi civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer.
Walton has been an outspoken advocate for civil rights and social justice and is often quoted by national and international media. In the past year, RUC members have heard him speak to Salem Presbytery’s Peace and Justice Committee, deliver the King Jr. Holiday address at High Point University, provide expertise during Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s documentary, “The Black Church,” on public television, and interview Isabel Wilkerson, author of the book “Caste” on American racism, on Wake Forest’s Face to Face Speaker Forum.
RUC members have been impressed and hope our congregation will be, too.
Bill Keesler, Race Unification Committee Chair