Born in West Palm Beach in 1899, Howard Washington Thurman spent much of his childhood in this house in Daytona Beach, where he lived with his maternal grandmother Nancy Ambrose, a former slave whose faith influenced his own. Family friend Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune also mentored Thurman and greatly influenced him through her work in African American education. In Daytona, Thurman was able to finish the 8th grade, an opportunity rarely afforded to African Americans in the area at that time. He later attended secondary school at the Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville, then studied at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, graduating as valedictorian in 1923. After seminary training at the Colgate-Rochester School of Divinity in New York, which accepted only two black students per year, he was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1925. In the late 1920s he moved from student to teacher at several religious and educational institutions, and in 1929 he returned to Atlanta as Director of Religious Life at Morehouse College. From 1932 to 1944, Thurman served as the first Dean of Rankin Chapel at Howard University and became one of the most influential early voices sharing the nonviolent philosophy of the modern Civil Rights Movement in America. During a 1935 pilgrimage to India, he led the first African American delegation to meet Mahatma Gandhi, an experience that led him in 1944 to cofound the interracial and interdenominational Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, California. His 1949 book Jesus and the Disinherited later influenced many Civil Rights Movement activists and leaders, including a young Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1953, Boston University president Harold C. Case appointed Thurman the first black Dean of Marsh Chapel, where he served until 1965. Because of Thurman's contributions to education, African American civil rights, and religious integration, this house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.