With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman

by Howard Thurman

It was in response to my public lectures in Lahore that I received the following letter from H. W. Luce, father of Henry Luce, who founded Time and Life. We were both wrestling with the dilemma created by the paradoxes in the American situation. Lahore February 12, 1936 Dear Mr. Thurman: I listened with a great deal of interest to your address last night at YMCA (as also in the one given by your colleague, yesterday morning, at Arya-somaj College). I shared also in the pleasure of the delightful group as your wife sang to them at the lovely home of Mr. and Mrs. Rallia Ram. I have also been a missionary in China for thirty years, am an ardent internationalist and inter-racialist. From boyhood up I (and some millions of other whites in the United States also) have been interested in doing all I could to assist your group to attain the highest possible best. That gives you my background and my family interest. Nevertheless, at the close of your address I had the feeling (shared by at least a few others) that, doubtless quite unintentionally, you had probably left a wrong impression on some of the thinking minds present. The strong impression left upon me was that you felt the Negro race in America had suffered all it has suffered at the hand of the American whites—that they had not lifted a finger to help, and that your people, so far as they had gone, had attained all by their own inherent power. Not so much in what you said as in what you omitted was the impression given; a...