“Thurman had helped to bring the message of Gandhi to an American audience and had mentored and inspired King, James Farmer, Pauli Murray, James Lawson, and countless others involved in the civil rights struggle. In 1960 Fellowship (the magazine of the Fellowship of Reconciliation) reprinted his prescient 1943 outline for a nonviolent revolution, ‘The Will to Segregation.’ Those who followed Thurman closely would have read or heard his comments on the civil rights struggle and known how crucial and important it was to him. But not many did so. Thurman’s lifelong aversion to attracting attention to himself did not change during this era. For most observers, Thurman remained on the sidelines. One of the most seemingly perplexing aspects of Thurman’s career is that he did not participate in any of the major civil rights campaigns in the early 1960s. There are no photographs of him marching, arms locked, with Martin Luther King, Jr.; no impassioned speeches delivered in bombed-out church; no letters to posterity written while incarcerated….

“Yet those who knew him well would echo the comments of Benjamin Mays: ‘Howard did not have to march to prove his freedom as a free man.’ Or the comment of the Rev. Otis Moss, a Thurman disciple and admirer, who said that though Howard Thurman ‘did not march from Selma to Montgomery, or on many of the other marches, [he] participated on the level that shaped the philosophy or creates the march — without that, people don’t know what to do before the march, while they march, or after the march.’ If Thurman would have been too modest to accept so much credit, it is probably close to how he viewed things.

“… Perhaps he felt that calling attention to himself would be an act of vanity and distract attention from the younger generation of Black leaders, the men and women who had actually put their bodies on the line for the revolution. (As he wrote Jesse Jackson in 1973, who wanted him to be a featured speaker in a Chicago rally: ‘All of my life I have shunned publicity and the limelight.’) Perhaps he felt that involvement was precluded by his own spiritual disciplines or that the public voices of the movement required a fierier message than he was comfortable delivering. We do not know.”