Staff Reports
A quietly powerful documentary about Howard Thurman is suddenly showing up on public television and on the PBS app, and that matters. Backs Against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story is being streamed and re-aired on local PBS stations, and it is reminding Americans that a different kind of voice once guided our country through hard times — a voice that pushed moral renewal more than new laws.
The documentary on PBS: what to watch for
Backs Against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story is a roughly 56-minute film directed and produced by Martin Doblmeier of Journey Films and now distributed through public-television outlets. It features voice work by Keith David and includes interviews with leading religious and civil-rights figures who explain Thurman’s influence. The film has picked up festival attention and award recognition, and its availability on PBS and the PBS app makes Thurman’s work easy to find for the first time in years — no academic library card required.
Who Thurman was and what he taught
Howard Thurman was a grandson of slaves who became a pastor, dean of chapel at both Howard University and Boston University, and a spiritual mentor to later civil-rights leaders. He met Gandhi and carried home a commitment to nonviolence, but his best-known idea was that laws and lawsuits are only part of the answer. In books like Jesus and the Disinherited he argued that the inward life — the soul’s habits of fear or love — determines whether a people heal. Boston University now houses his papers and runs programs to keep his work alive.
Why conservatives should stop ignoring Thurman
Conservatives often get boxed into thinking faith is only about personal piety or culture-war lines on cable TV. Thurman offers something sharper: disciplined spiritual formation as the basis for civic renewal. He didn’t argue that laws are useless, but he insisted laws won’t fix a society whose people remain bitter, fearful or tribal. That’s a useful corrective to our modern impulse to treat every political problem as a legal or bureaucratic puzzle. If you care about stable families, civil society, and shared citizenship, watching this PBS film is more useful than another think-tank memo.
So here’s the practical point: if we want less chaos and more common ground, start with people, not paperwork. Backs Against the Wall on PBS makes Thurman’s case plain and urgent — that love and moral courage matter in politics. Tune in, take notes, and then try practicing what you watched. It might not be glamorous, but neither was the work that built this country.
