Libuse Lukas Miller

Howard Thurman

A graduate of Morehouse College and Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, later Dean of the Boston University School of Theology, Howard Thurman met with Mohandas K. Ghandi in 1935. He began a study of the New Testament that led him to resolve to make Christianity "live for the weak as well as the strong-for all peoples whatever their color, whatever their caste." Together with the Rev. Alfred Fisk, he founded San Francisco's Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples to bring whites, blacks, and Orientals into the same congregation. It was considered the first fully integrated church in America, and is still in existence. In the early 1940s we got to know Howard Thurman; he visited in our home, and he was much impressed by Libuse's watercolor series. At Libuse's suggestion, he wrote a series of prose poems, or meditations, and The Greatest Of These was his first published book in 1944. We tried at the time to put out an edition of the meditations including the art work, but the project had to be abandoned because of its extreme expense. Howard Thurman published sixteen more books, including an autobiography, before his death in 1981.

—Franklin Miller Jr., April 1996