page_title: Sue Bailey Thurman
section_title: Boston
hierarchical_section_title: Sue Bailey Thurman / Mid-career / Boston
caption_attribution_description: English: Boston African-American Heritage Trail
context_page_description: Sue Bailey Thurman was an American author, lecturer, historian and civil rights activist. She was the first non-white student to earn a bachelor's degree in music from Oberlin College, Ohio. She briefly taught at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, before becoming involved in international work with the YWCA in 1930. During a six-month trip through Asia in the mid 1930s, Thurman became the first African-American woman to have an audience with Mahatma Gandhi. The meeting with Gandhi inspired Thurman and her husband, theologian Howard Thurman, to promote non-violent resistance as a means of creating social change, bringing it to the attention of a young preacher, Martin Luther King Jr. While they did not actively protest during the Civil Rights Movement, they served as spiritual counselors to many on the front lines, and helped establish the first interracial, non-denominational church in the United States.
  Thurman played an active role in establishing international student organizations to help prevent foreign students feeling isolated while studying abroad. She organized one of the first international scholarship programs for African-American women.
context_section_description: In 1953, Howard Thurman became the Dean of the Boston University School of Theology and, after ten years in California, the couple moved to Boston. The move was prompted by the desire to share their ideas of outreach and inclusion in a university setting, though they were aware that the arrival of the first black pastor in a white university would lead to difficulties. From the beginning, Thurman tried to create an inclusive environment, organizing monthly dinners for the Marsh Chapel Choir members and their friends. Shortly after they arrived, a Japanese student committed suicide leaving a note that she had no friends. Not only was she not known well at the university, finding her family to notify them was difficult. In response, Thurman organized the International Student Hostess Committee to keep international students from feeling isolated. By 1965, the committee was serving 500 international students at Boston University. The Thurmans were at times criticized by those who felt they should be visibly active in the Civil Rights Movement, but they believed their commitment was to addressing the spiritual needs of those who were visible, rather than participating in marches, protests and demonstrations. Among the papers of MLK were many letters from people such as Homer A. Jack, who co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality; Lillian Smith, author of the novel Strange Fruit; Glenn E. Smiley, national field secretary of Fellowship of Reconciliation, as well as King's own acknowledgement, which credited their spiritual guidance.
  Thurman continued her writing work in Boston. In 1958, she published The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro, which not only gave recipes but included black history. It retold stories of professional women and history to counter the belief that all black women were maids and domestics at a time when African Americans were excluded from basic civil rights. She recognized that in order to tell their history, a new approach was needed as there was no market for histories of the African Americans. In the preface to her book, she explained she was creating "palatable history", testifying to her shrewd marketing ability.
  During the 1960s, the Thurmans traveled widely, making various trips to study racial barriers that prohibited creation of community. A two-year sabbatical granted from Boston University made their travels possible. In 1962, they journeyed to Saskatchewan, Canada, to meet with tribal leaders about discrimination and in 1963, they embarked on a trip that included Nigeria, Israel, Hawaii, and California. In Nigeria, Howard Thurman lectured at the University of Ibadan. The couple's second round-the-world tour took them to Japan, the Philippines and Egypt.
  In 1963, Thurman founded the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston. Interested in history, she had discovered a settlement where free blacks had lived prior to the Civil War and their 1808 African Meeting House, which housed both Boston's first black church and the first segregated public school in the United States. The museum was created to save the site and provide a means to purchase other significant properties for preservation of African-American heritage in the area. Thurman also created a map of important African American historical sites in Boston with the help of her daughter, Anne Chiarenza, which she called "Negro Freedom Trails of Boston". The map highlighted twenty-two points of interest to black history within the city of Boston and was in part created to give black school children a sense that they were part of the history of the city. What is today known as the Black Heritage Trail was adapted from Thurman's original idea.
  While in Boston, in 1962, Thurman arranged for the sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller to create a commissioned "freedom plaque" for Livingstone College, of Salisbury, North Carolina. Bailey was an invited speaker at Livingstone in 1963 and at that time, in honor of United Nations Day, she donated a collection of dolls representing the member nations to the college. As far back as the 1930s, Thurman h
caption: Boston African-American Heritage Trail
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