Jesus and the Disinherited

Jesus and the Disinherited

First edition
Author	Howard Thurman
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Jesus Christ, Biblical sociology, Christian theology
Publisher	Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, Beacon Press
Publication date	1949, 2012
Media type	Book
Pages	112
ISBN	0807010294

Jesus and the Disinherited is a 1949 book by African-American minister, theologian, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman.

In the book, Thurman interprets the teachings of Jesus through the experience of the oppressed and discusses nonviolent responses to oppression. The book developed out of a series of lectures that Thurman presented at Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas, during April 1948."^{[1][non-primary source needed]}

The ideas encapsulated in the book had been developing for a number of years. In February 1932, Thurman gave an address in Atlanta on “The Kind of Religion the Negro Needs in Times Like These,” which was an early version of what would become “Good News for the Underprivileged.” In the summer of 1935, he delivered “Good News for the Underprivileged” at the Annual Convocation Lecture on Preaching at Boston University. The address was printed in the summer 1935 issue of Religion and Life, and forms the basis of Jesus and the Disinherited. He would deliver “Christianity and the Underprivileged” again in February 1937 at Union Church in Berea, Kentucky, and at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. On December 10, 1937, Thurman delivered the address “The Significance of Jesus to the Disinherited” as the leader of Religious Emphasis Week at A&T College of North Carolina in Greensboro. A number of other addresses on the theme would take place in 1938, 1939, 1942, and 1947, with the lectures that became the book occurring April 11–16, 1948 as the Mary L. Smith Memorial Lectures at Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas.^[2]

Thurman continued to speak on the theme, delivering addresses in 1949, 1951, 1952, 1957, and in 1959 delivered a 12-part sermon series in the Boston University's Marsh Chapel on "Jesus and the Disinherited."^[3]

In his biography of Martin Luther King Jr., Lerone Bennett Jr. notes that King studied Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited during the Montgomery bus boycott.^[4]

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