Shively Smith is a biblical scholar at Boston University (where Howard Thurman served as dean of chapel and a doctoral student named Martin Luther King Jr. listened to his sermons and learned at his feet). She has written two books about the epistles of Peter, and her new book, Reading Howard Thurman: His Practices of Interpretation through Womanist Eyes is essential reading in this moment when we are seeking justice and equality. I’m so grateful to share this curated version of a longer conversation I had with Smith on Substack, and so grateful for her and her work.
Greg Garrett: You tell us Thurman lived his life surrounded by Black women. In the book, you reference Maya Angelou and Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Kelly Brown Douglas, Toni Morrison, Dolores Williams. The subtitle of your book is about interpretation through womanist eyes. I wonder if you could talk with us just a little bit about your own orientation and how you understand womanist theology.
Shively Smith
Shively T.J. Smith: It’s important to talk about it as womanist theology. So “womanist” as a sort of discourse really did come up within the arenas of seminaries and theology and religious discussions, and it fundamentally is about what it means to begin — as a biblical scholar for me — in the text, paying attention to the stories, the histories, the locations, the voices, the fingerprints and footprints of Black women.
What does it mean to use the lens, the stories, the histories, the creativity, the innovations, the voices of Black women as a way of understanding biblical text, as a lens for understanding social relations and proximities?
Womanism, womanist interpretation, womanist theology begins there. It leverages an intentional beginning point. If you’re a chess player, first you intentionally put the pawn in a particular place to start the game, or the king, however you play. And so, same thing, womanist interpretation is an intentional beginning point.
Thurman is a product of that. Here’s Thurman in May 1980, one of his last public speeches. He’s in Atlanta at Spelman giving the baccalaureate address and he begins, “I am the product of a whole host of ladies raised by my mother and my grandmother, sisters, no brothers, daughters, no sons. And the first double teaching job I had was at a women’s college, Spelman.” Thurman introduces himself barely a year before he transitions, as someone whose story begins with the women of his life.
“Whenever you read Thurman, you’re never far from his grandmother, Nancy.”
Whenever you read Thurman, you’re never far from his grandmother, Nancy. You’re never far from a story of his mother, Alice. You’re never far from stories … Sue Bailey Thurman, with whom he spent 50 years, or his first wife, Katie Kelly. He was married to her for about four years before she passed. His daughters, the women, are always there.
One of the things the book tries to do is not to get stuck on Thurman, but to read past Thurman, back to his grandmother, to his mother, to other women people don’t even know about his deep connections with. Mary McLeod Bethune is an important figure for him. Eleanor Roosevelt. I mean, you’ve got all these women who are huge figures in his life.
And then also to read in front of him, which is to read ourselves and our communities in a way, paying particular attention to the women who are populating that. That’s very womanist. Womanist biblical interpretation cares not just about individuals, but communities. It cares about the wholeness of all. It cares about the music of our plurality and how we cultivate that and protect that. And Thurman seems to embody all of that in his work.
“Womanist biblical interpretation cares not just about individuals, but communities.”
It wasn’t hard to put those eyes to Thurman because he himself claims it. And then the other part was, it was liberating because those are my eyes. I’m a product of women, right? In a village of women. Both in family, extended family, within my field and career. Every time I go to churches or schools all over the country, I talk about our global siblinghood, what it means for us to walk into space and see each other as kin. And Thurman taught me that.
GG: Not all my readers will know who Howard Thurman is and why he matters. Why is he a significant figure in American Christianity, American civil rights history, American religious history?
STJS: Two big headlines give context that Thurman was a secret, but not.
In 1953, Life magazine comes out, “I Love Lucy” on the cover. It names the great preachers of the 20th century, and Howard Thurman is there, right? Less than a couple of decades later, the other big magazine, Ebony, comes out with an article that calls Thurman “the 20th century holy man.” There was something public about him because you’ve got these two really important magazines of the 20th century that capture him.
Howard Thurman
Thurman led the first African American delegation to India in 1935, which ended up with him sitting in a three-hour conversation with Mahatma Gandhi in his tent in Bandoli, this amazing conversation about the struggles of Indian Hindus and African Americans and their similarities and differences. They were in deep conversation with each other trying to understand what nonviolence looks like in a violent world.
Thurman’s going to come back from that changed. A few years later in 1944, he leaves his post as dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University to go to San Francisco to co-found the first multicultural interfaith congregation, and two of the greatest members at large for this congregation are going to be Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune. He does all this work in San Francisco standing against all that’s happening within (Japanese-American) internment camps.
In 1953, he comes here to Boston University to become dean of Marsh Chapel, the first African American dean at a predominantly white university. Martin Luther King Jr. is here finishing up. Thurman doesn’t formally teach him, but he is friends with him because Thurman is friends with Daddy King.
Otis Moss Jr. says some of the civil rights leaders were thinking they were going to get this great thundering pastoral person behind the scenes. They ended up with the mystic. So he is the mystic behind the scenes, pastoring those who pastor. I think that’s so important. Who pastors the pastors? Who functions as the spiritual guide, the one who is accompanying those huge figures and leaders and influencers in our day who are accompanying us?
Thurman is that unseen, behind-the-scenes counsel who is available to people across the country, and the world know that, and they seek him out when they need that grounding, they need that anchoring, or in Thurman’s own words, they need that common ground.
Greg Garrett
Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.