Morehouse College welcomed back alumnus Julian Bond ′71 for the Howard Thurman Crown Forum on Thursday, November 12, at 11 a.m. in the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel. The celebration will culminate with a public conversation on Thursday at 6 p.m. on the intellectual and spiritual legacy of Howard Washington Thurman featuring The Honorable Andrew Young, former UN Ambassador; The Reverend Otis Moss Jr., retired pastor Olivet Institutional Baptist Church; and Dr. Barbara Holmes, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the Memphis Theological Seminary.

Julian Bond has been an active participant n the movements for civil rights and economic justice since his days at Morehouse as communications director for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to his current chairmanship of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

As an activist who has faced jail for his convictions, a 20-year veteran in the Georgia General Assembly and a university professor and writer, he has been on the cutting edge of social change since 1960.

The Howard Thurman Crown Forum will kick off a three-day celebration of the life and legacy of another famous alumnus. During the celebration, the first of four volumes of Thurman’s papers will be presented. The Howard Thurman Papers Project, which is a research project of The Leadership Center at Morehouse College, was founded in 1992 with a mission of preserving and promoting the work of Howard Thurman. The documents span 63 years and consist of more than 58,000 items, including correspondence, sermons and unpublished writings and speeches.

Howard Thurman, a 1923 graduate of Morehouse College, was one of the 20th Century’s most prominent American religious leaders and theologians. In 1953, he was named by LIFE magazine as one of the 12 greatest preachers of the century. As the first to lead a delegation of African Americans to meet personally with Mahatma Gandhi in 1936, Thurman would become one of the principal architects of the non-violent civil rights movement and a key mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., who graduated from Morehouse in 1948.

Howard Thurman (1899 – April 10, 1981), spiritual advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Howard Thurman graduated from Morehouse College in 1923. The Chapel for the Inward Journey and a Howard Thurman Meditation Room are in Sale Hall on the Morehouse College Campus in Atlanta, Georgia. The Howard Washington Thurman Memorial on the Morehouse College campus was dedicated in the mid-1990s. The stone bell tower is in the shape of an obelisk. The memorial is surrounded by flags and a reflection pool.