Saint Mary McLeod Bethune the Mystic: The Rebuke of Reverend Howard Thurman

In this book, the author writes the renowned Reverend Howard Thurman for the first time. He had never written Thurman before. He had never met Thurman in person, never even seen him lecture or preach. It was only in the mid-90s that he began reading Thurman’s books, which at once made Thurman someone very dear to him. Now the author has written and sent Thurman nine letters to see fulfilled the critical issue he takes up with such intensity that “in retrospect I regret some of the things I said, by which I mean that I should have said some things differently, more gently.” Having something to do with “the historical prominence that you so enjoy,” the issue involves the venerable Mary McLeod Bethune and, h writes to Thurman, “a truth that history does not know about you, a truth that you have suppressed—intentionally, it seems, but perhaps blindly. The author blames Thurman even more than the “other person” involved in the “historical crime,” a person whose name is named and crime explained in conjunction with that of Thurman’s. The book reads somewhat like an epistolary novel, including original illustrations and original musically-set hymns, but is of such serious scholarship as to site and footnote the “circumstantial evidence” and provide an extensive and partly annotated bibliography.