Namaste ...
“The divine within me greets the divine within you ....   These words are at the heart of all I believe.  If to take the life of another human being, any other human being, is to destroy the divine of which I am a part, I can no more kill another than I can kill myself.  To acknowledge the divinity within me is to respect myself as a wonderful part of creation.  Therefore understand that you are unique, that you are divine.   Respect yourself, love yourself and war will not be made any more.”
This are the words from a Webpage I posted dedictated to my favorite word, and, I believe, a fitting lead-in to the subject of this Website, the Harlem Ashram.

      Founded by Ralph Templin and Jay Holmes Smith in 1940, the Harlem Ashram was an inter-racial, pacifist, Christian commune of which my mother, Jean (Wiley) Zwickel was a member.  It was through the Harlem Ashram that she (and Ruth Reynolds, who went on to become a dedicated, life-long independentista) met the great Puerto Rican patriot, Don Pedro Albizu Campos.
      It was how she met my father, Abraham, on an Ashram-sponsored civil rights march protesting the Jim Crow laws, in 1943.

      I cannot promise to develop this Website nearly as fully as it deserves, but I welcome any and all contributions.  Just click on the quill icon below to go to a form with which you may submit you comments.  If you have photos, or any other relevant graphics, please let me know to expect them (I have my spam-blocker set on "high") so that I may post them.

Peace,

—Daniel ben Avram ap Jean
 
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There appears to be little on the Internet on the Harlem Ashram.  I've only found a few.  I've excerpted the below from LittleIndia.com; there's a very good piece from Gandhi Institute.org/

PropaGandhi: Ahimsa in Black America

By Vijay Prashad

[Source URL: www.littleindia.com/*/ahimsa.htm]


AMONG ASHRAMS, the most famous was the Harlem Ashram formed in 1940 by Jay Holmes Smith and run by Richard T. Templin. Both men came to India as Methodist missionaries and both took great interest in the nationalist movement. When the imperialist government asked them to shun their pro-Gandhi work, they wrote a famous letter to the Viceroy. “We had not been long in India before we discovered that many of our senior missionaries, and the vast majority of our Indian Christian friends as well, considered it as intended to make us pro-Government, even in relation to the noble, non-violent effort of the current nationalism to induce in that Government a change of heart.” Smith and Templin, being white men, posed a serious threat to the idea of white supremacy so they were expelled back to the United States.
While in India, Smith and Templin joined sympathetic Indian Christians to produce the theory of Kristagraha, a meld of Christianity and Satyagraha. Satyagraha means Action on the Basis of Truth (satya, being truth, and agraha, being action), so Kristagraha meant Action on the Basis of Christ.

When Smith and Templin returned to the United States, they ran a relatively successful Kristagraha experiment among the hosiery workers of Reading, Penn., after which they set up the Harlem Ashram and the Non-Violence Direct Action Committee. Shridharani, who visited the Ashram and knew the two men, noted in 1941 that Kristagraha “can well be used for the good of all concerned when legal procedures fail and leave direct action as the only alternative — in the problem of race relations, for instance, and in that of sharecroppers. But the most natural soil in which Kristagraha could grow in this country in the interest of democracy is in the field of labor.”

Harlem in the 1940s was filled with social and political ferment, from Father Divine’s Peace Movement to what the African American journalist Roy Ottley called “fakirs and charlatans” (such as High John the Conqueror, love portion purveyor, Rajah Rabo, dream-book author, and Madame Fu Futtam, a seer). The Harlem Ashram fell into this world, and joined in the ongoing protests against draft registration and anti-Black business practices (the movement called Jobs-for-Negroes whose most famous figure was Abdul Hamid Sufi).

 
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