Jesus and the Disinherited is a 1949 book by African-American minister, theologian, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman.

The book developed out of a series of lectures that Thurman presented at Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas, during April 1948.

In February 1932, Thurman gave an address in Atlanta on “The Kind of Religion the Negro Needs in Times Like These,” which was an early version of what would become “Good News for the Underprivileged.” In the summer of 1935, he delivered “Good News for the Underprivileged” at the Annual Convocation Lecture on Preaching at Boston University.

On December 10, 1937, Thurman delivered the address “The Significance of Jesus to the Disinherited” as the leader of Religious Emphasis Week at A&T College of North Carolina in Greensboro.

[1] Thurman explains the options of survival Jesus witnessed his people living in under the oppression of the Roman Empire.

[1] In Chapter 2,Thurman clarifies that within this section he will refer to a fear that is not of death, but is rather a “deep humiliation rising from dying without benefit of cause or purpose” (28).

Thurman determines that segregation, when accepted as normal circumstance, removes social protection from the group of lesser power.

He defines three ways of morally evaluating the fact that the disinherited resort to deception: acceptance, compromise, and complete sincerity.

[1] Complete sincerity revokes the power of the oppressors by removing “[the edge] from the sense of prerogative and from the status of upon which the impregnability of their position rests” (62).

One of the main factors borne of the lack of fellowship, Thurman emphasizes, is bitterness “made possible by sustained resentment” (69).

Because hate breaks down one’s moral and ethical values, Thurman concludes that Jesus rejected hatred.

To love this type of enemy is to shed all bitterness one may have harbored from the social betrayal and “to recognize some deep respect and reverence for their persons” (84).