Slavery

Slavery is presented as a historical injustice whose consequences persist in family memory, racial division, and religious debate. The book gives particular weight to the contradiction between Christian teaching and the use of Christian authority to justify enslavement: Howard Thurman’s grandmother had been enslaved, and an Indian college principal later challenged Thurman over the role Christians had played in the slave trade and in defending slavery.

Family Memory and Religious Inheritance

Thurman’s grandmother, a former slave, helped shape his faith. Because she could not read, he read the Bible aloud to her. She loved hearing its stories in the language of the King James Bible, but refused to hear passages by Saint Paul because he had instructed slaves to obey their masters. Her refusal makes the question of slavery more than an abstract historical dispute: it enters the family’s religious life through the choice of what may be read and trusted.

The episode also establishes a tension between the Bible as a source of faith and its use to sustain an unjust social order. Thurman’s grandmother did not reject the Bible as a whole; her selective refusal registered a specific objection to religious language that could be heard as requiring submission to enslavement.

A Challenge to Christian Authority

During Thurman’s 1935 visit to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, the principal of the Law College asked why Thurman was making a religious journey in the name of Christianity. The principal invoked the capture of Thurman’s ancestors from the west coast of Africa and the role of Christians in the slave trade: Christians had participated in buying and selling enslaved people, while ministers had cited Saint Paul to give slavery religious sanction. He placed that history alongside the segregation, lynching, and burning African Americans faced in the United States, including within churches.

The conversation lasted more than five hours. The principal challenged Thurman to answer for the apparent betrayal of people subjected to racial oppression. The encounter thus moved from the history of enslavement to its continuing moral and religious consequences, asking whether a faith associated with oppression could still speak credibly about freedom and justice.

Thurman’s Distinction and Response

Thurman did not defend a Christianity he regarded as compromised. Instead, he distinguished Christianity as historically practiced from the religion of Jesus Christ, and maintained that his own criticism of slavery and racial prejudice was more forceful than the principal’s. He also pointed to a minority in the United States who understood the spirit of Jesus Christ as calling for freedom, liberty, and justice for all people.

This response did not erase the historical charge or resolve the tension exposed by the conversation. Rather, it made the distinction between a religious tradition’s institutions and its ethical claims central to Thurman’s answer. The episode shows slavery functioning in the book not only as a past system of bondage, but as a test of whether Christian language can oppose the injustices that Christians have helped authorize.

The Term Beyond Historical Enslavement

The book also uses slavery as a comparison for exploitative labor. Simone Weil, seeking to experience the conditions of factory workers, took a leave from teaching and worked in a factory in 1934–35. Her journal records the pressure of production quotas, malfunctioning machinery, fatigue, and diminished self-respect; she described the work as like that of a slave. The comparison is distinct from the accounts of historical enslavement, but it shows how the language of slavery also serves to express the severe constraint and degradation Weil encountered in industrial labor.

A related public context appears in the first issue of The Catholic Worker, published in 1933, which reported on the exploitation of black Americans alongside unemployment, child labor, and labor organizing. The paper did not present these issues as a substitute for the history of slavery; it placed racial injustice among the contemporary social conditions its readers were urged to confront. Together, these references connect the memory of enslavement with debates about religious responsibility and with continuing forms of racial and economic injustice.