July 11 Howard Thurman (1899–1981), Jesus and the Disinherited Thurman was an author, speaker, church leader, and one of the principal architects of the modern, nonviolent civil rights movement and a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In this excerpt Thurman lays out “what the teachings of Jesus have to say to those who stand at a moment in human history with their backs against the wall…the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed.”