New York Times August 21, 2015 Parents’ Ceremony Serves Up Elements of ‘Morehouse Gospel’ By Samuel G. Freeman For the previous 364 days, the carved wooden chest rested unobtrusively atop a bookshelf in a dean’s office here at Morehouse College<http://www.morehouse.edu/>. Then, on a recent Wednesday afternoon, the dean, Lawrence E. Carter Sr., reclaimed the vessel for its annual duty as the repository of Morehouse’s hope and history. The coffer is formally known as the Thurman Chest, so named because one of Morehouse’s most illustrious graduates, the African-American theologian and civil rights advocate Howard Thurman, bought it in India in 1936. He had journeyed there to learn the concepts of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience directly from Gandhi. In 1981, after Dr. Thurman’s death and cremation, his widow, Sue, placed his ashes in the chest. When she died in 1996, both their remains were interred in a monument outside the campus chapel here. The chest, with its evocative image of boatmen navigating between two shores, then took on another purpose, as the centerpiece of Morehouse’s Parents’ Parting Ceremony. By the time evening descended on Aug. 12, the chest had been opened and placed at the entrance to the chapel as the parents of Morehouse’s 679 freshmen entered to take their seats. Fathers, mothers and couples paused at the chest and dropped in a card or two, on which they had penned their hopes for their sons at this all-male school. Greg Olaniran wrote that his son, Christian, should not be afraid to be himself. Yolanda Coronel wished that her son, Sebastian, would fulfill his dreams. Aline Williams and her husband, Dereck Caldwell, had not expected to be there. They had an evening flight back to Chicago. Or they did until Morehouse’s provost learned they would have to miss the parting ritual, and paid to book them a flight the next morning. So there they stood on the chapel plaza — Mr. Caldwell, a manager for a payroll company, and Ms. Williams, a caterer — writing out their visions for their son Konnor. To feel a sense of brotherhood. To have a spirit of service. To become a whole person. Then, the couple moved toward their seats as three African drummers led the freshmen in white shirts and crimson ties past the Thurman crypt. “It was one thing to be told about it, another to experience firsthand,” Ms. Williams, 50, said later. “I felt like I was walking into the past, into an ancestor vibe. I’ve had a wonderful life as a woman, but this was the first time I’d ever been jealous of one of my sons.” In the annals of African-American history, and specifically of historically black colleges and universities, there is indeed a proper noun known as the Morehouse Man. These men have included not only Dr. Thurman and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but also Julian Bond<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/us/julian-bond-former-naacp-chairman-and-civil-rights-leader-dies-at-75.html>, who died on Aug. 15; the director Spike Lee; the civil rights lawyer James Madison Nabrit Jr.; and innumerable politicians, scholars, scientists, ministers and executives. With the fall of legal segregation and the emerging ethos of diversity, however, Morehouse has faced the challenge of supplying meaning and purpose to young black men who can choose any college in the country. The Parents’ Parting Ceremony, created in 1996, has answered the need with a mix of African music and dance, black Christian preaching and specific homage to Dr. Thurman’s liberation theology. The elements add up to what the Rev. Dr. Peter G. Heltzel, a professor at New York Theological Seminary, has called “the Morehouse Gospel” — a belief system, as he put it in a recent essay, “characterized by a prophetic-mystical vision, a focus on racial justice and a commitment to nonviolent love.” Dr. Thurman set in motion the chain reaction that would imbue Dr. King with the Gandhi principles. Dr. Thurman introduced those precepts to Benjamin E. Mays, Morehouse’s midcentury president. The week after Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948, Dr. Mays taught about the Indian leader’s “soul force” ethos before a Morehouse student body that included a young Dr. King. When Dr. King led the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1955, he carried a copy of Dr. Thurman’s 1949 book, “Jesus and the Disinherited.” In that volume, Dr. Thurman lifted up the example of the historical Jesus — a Jew under the Roman boot — rather than the supernatural, resurrected Jesus. Christianity must again become, Dr. Thurman wrote, “a religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering.” Instead of focusing on redemption in the next world, Dr. Thurman pointed to the masses of poor and dispossessed and asked, “What does our religion say to them?” Among the students who encountered Dr. Thurman during subsequent years on the faculty at Boston University was a young minister and doctoral candidate named Lawrence E. Carter Sr. In 1979, 15 years after their initial meeting, Dr. Carter was offered the position of founding dean of King Chapel at Morehouse. He asked Dr. Thurman for advice. “He said, ‘Walk among the hundred crimson hills of Atlanta listening to the voice, and then I want you to become the voice,’ ” Dr. Carter, 73, recalled. “I didn’t think this flesh could become the channel of the Word. It took some time to get there. But we are not supposed to only preach. We are supposed to be the Word made flesh.” One opportunity to do so arose in 1995, when several Morehouse administrators began studying African rites-of-passage ceremonies and mulling how such a ritual could be adapted for an American college campus. “That was the core idea,” said Alvin H. Darden III, the dean of freshmen. “You have young men in a moment of reflection, of being concerned with the greatness of their parents and of their ancestors.” In one central point of the ceremony, with nearly all of the chapel’s 2,500 seats filled, the Rev. Winford Kennadean Rice Jr., a 2014 graduate attending Harvard Divinity School, led the parents and the freshmen in reciprocal pledges. The parents affirmed their love and acknowledged the importance of letting go; the students thanked the elders for their support and vowed to honor the family name. In the course of a sermon that included the promises, Mr. Rice invoked words from the more mystical side of Dr. Thurman: “Do not ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive, and go do it; for what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Then, with the chapel ceremony finished, the students assembled outside to sing the Morehouse alma mater. Before that, two representative parents, Corliss and Michael Davenport, carried the Thurman Chest, filled with its words of hope, into the memorial crypt, where it would be kept overnight. Just outside the crypt, the pavement was etched with some of Dr. Thurman’s words: “Morehouse, do not make God repent for having created you.” The next morning, the parents’ cards were sealed in another box, to be held intact until May 19, 2019, commencement day for these incoming freshmen. The Thurman Chest went back to safekeeping atop Dr. Carter’s bookshelf. Ms. Williams and Mr. Caldwell caught their plane back to Chicago. “As I reflected on it, what it meant, it’s as if Howard Thurman’s spirit will cover and guide all these young men,” she said. “Mr. Thurman’s spiritual ashes will be released with another job well done.” SANDRA M. PHOENIX Executive Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org<mailto:sphoenix@hbculibraries.org> www.hbculibraries.org<http://www.hbculibraries.org/> 800-999-8558, ext. 4820 404-702-5854 Skype: sandra.phoenix1 1438 West Peachtree NW Suite 200 Atlanta,GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (LYRASIS) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/> Honor the ancestors, honor the children.