Atlanta Daily World

Each Person Responsible For Own Order, Says Thurman

NEW YORK—"Each person is responsible for his own actions, for his nation and for world order. When an individual refuses to take responsibility for his government, control shifts from the hands of the people to the demagogues," said Dr. Howard Thurman when he spoke on the responsibilities of freedom to some 500 persons gathered Friday at Auburn, N. Y., to pay homage to the memory of Harriet Tubman, famed Negro "conductor on the Underground Railroad," who spent the later years of her life in that community and there established a home for the aged to be rebuilt and put into operation by the National Harriet Tubman Committee within the coming year.

Dr. Thurman, who besides serving as pastor of All Nations Church, San Francisco, is Dean of Marsh Chapel and professor of spiritual disciplines and resources at Boston University, spoke on liberty because Harriet Tubman was "an apostle of freedom," a woman who had a "hard core of purpose, a Cause freedom."

"Freedom," said Dr. Thurman "is basically a sense of alternatives. Where no alternative exists, there (Continued on Page 7 Column 7)
Each Person (Continued From Page One)

can be no freedom." Expanding his theme, the speaker pointed out there is a freedom that is characterized by the absence of responsibility, such freedom as children know. There is freedom of exhaustion, when a man has a choice of giving up or keeping on trying and through exhaustion, gives up. And there is the freedom of responsibility.

Claiming that there is no such thing as isolation of one life from another, Dr. Thurman said, "Each person has a responsibility for world order, for as long as any government anywhere oppresses people, no man anywhere is free."