Professor Emeritus Walter E. Fluker (’88) announces Digital Version of The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman
Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Ethical Leadership Walter E. Fluker (’88) is pleased to announce the digital version of The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, a comprehensive five-volume documentary edition, is now live and freely accessible to the public. This significant milestone has been made possible by the collaborative efforts of The Howard Thurman Papers Project (HTPP) at BUSTH, the Center for Digital Editing at the University of Virginia, and an extensive team of editors, researchers, advisors, and generous funding institutions. This invaluable resource is available to the BUSTH community and beyond, and is accessible at https://thurmanpapersproject.org/.
Founded in 1992, the Howard Thurman Papers Project is dedicated to preserving and promoting the extraordinary legacy of Howard Thurman, whose works span over six decades. With a collection of around 58,000 items—ranging from correspondence and sermons to unpublished writings and speeches—the project has made Thurman’s vast contributions more accessible to scholars and the public.
“The idea of a digital edition of the printed volumes began in the spring of 2016 when I served as MLK Professor from 2010 to 2020,” says Prof. Emeritus Fluker. “In fact, it was through the Boston University Center for the Humanities that we received our initial grant for the digitization of the five-volume edition in 2017.”
Fluker adds that “[n]one of this would have been possible without the generous financial and material support from the following contributors: Boston University School of Theology, the Boston University Center for the Humanities, the Howard Gotlieb Archival and Research Center, the Lilly Endowment Inc., the Louisville Institute, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a timely gift from the family of Virginia Scardigli, a close associate of Howard Thurman and former secretary of the Fellowship Church.”