The Bahá’í Centenary 1844-1944/The Bahá’í Faith in the Colleges
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THE BAHAI FAITH IN THE COLLEGES
OVER a long period of years. Bahá’ís have. without organized assistance, interested themselves in presenting the spirit of the Bahá’í Faith to colleges. The wellreceived lectures of Mrs. Beatrice Irwin in the west, the Carolina college contacts of Mrs. Gail Woolson and Mrs. Marguerite Sears, the twenty-seven colleges and nineteen high schools visited, and in many instances revisited, by Mrs. Ruth Mofiet, and finally, the twenty-five years of magnificent service in the Negro Institutions of the South by Mr. Louis Gregory, whose achievement at Tuskegee in forming a permanent Bahá’í Group, leads the list, all these and undoubtedly other unrecorded adventures in meeting American youth, have helped immeasurably to carry news of the World Faith to American colleges.
It was in the winter of 1940, under the auspices of the Bahá’í Race Unity Committee, that the colleges received the first organized service from Bahá’í Institutions. The southern college project came out of keen awareness of the problem that exists between the two great races of that area and the conviction that such a problem, spiritual in its nature, could be solved by the healing agencies of the Message of Bahá’u’lláh to a stricken world.
Under the Race Unity auspices. Mrs. Dorothy Baker undertook a tour of investigation through Southern colleges to ascertain whether interest in the South warranted speaking tours especially built around college platforms. Thirty conferences were held with college leaders, with the result that eleven colleges made immediate openings for talks, and the rest, with few exceptions. encouraged a project of platforms scheduled with advance notice. Thereupon the Race Unity Committee launched its campaign in earnest. a campaign lasting from 1940 to 1943 when the formation of the College Foundation Com mittee. later known as the Bahá’í College Speakers Bureau, definitely transferred the college emphasis from the field of race relations to the general teaching field.
Under the direction of the Race Unity Committee alone, one hundred and sixty schools have entertained Bahá’í speakers. Mrs. Joy Earl visited eight Southern colleges. spending a number of days in each one; Mr. Lothar Schurgast visited two lively schools;' Mr. Louis Gregory lent inspiration to no less than fifty schools, covering a large area of the South: and Mrs. Dorothy Baker visited over a hundred schools and colleges of the South and Southwest, including Indian territory and coming as far north as Iowa. Under the subsequent committee Mrs. Baker's college visits have been extended to Vermont. Ohio, Michigan. and upper New York. The total number of schools and colleges to receive Bahá’í speakers is now over two hundred and it is estimated that some three hundred and fifty actual talks have been delivered before chapels, assemblies, classrooms, and student clubs.
Books have been left in all school libraries and pamphlet literature distributed freely to all students. Special interest was shown in the "World Order" pamphlets written by Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith. and there was no little interest in the Guardian himself as a point of stability in a rising civilization. One youth, at the close of a discussion period, came forward and said, “W7here does the Guardian live? I am to be inducted next week, and may find myself in Haifa! Perhaps I shall see the Guardian of the new civilization before you do!"
Older school men showed like interest in the writings of Shoghi Effendi. At one college in North Carolina the president sympathetically prepared the speaker for a bleak reception. "My students,” he remarked,
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THE BA}-IA‘! FAITH IN THE COLLEGES
"almost stopped the last speaker who mentioned peace. and he is a minister wearing the cloth. mind you!” Looking carefully through the Bahá’í pamphlet, "A Pattern For Future Society," he said. ‘'0 but I understand. You Bahá’ís do not teach pacifism; you offer a program. Every college should hear this." The talented head of an Indian Normal College where no speaking appointment had previously been made, said, after scanning the pamphlet, that if necessary. classes could be disbanded to hear such a subject. As a matter of fact, a tuberculosis clinic of some importance was actually postponed the following Monday because that was the only day that could be offered.
The subject almost always dealt with the need for a unified world with a universal Faith at its heart. Class-room discussions often followed the chapel presentations and in these instances the great. warm. spiritual side of the Teachings of Bahá’u’lláh were more fully given. Questions moved around the historic religious cultures of the past and the hope of a great. new upward sweep of civilization today through the spiritual potency of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh.
Most of the colleges were on the beaten track of civilization and city life. One, however. offered a real contact with the "hill" type of youth. It was a Kentucky Junior College, so far removed that the speaker was strongly advised not to go. She persisted in her intention, and was well rewarded. She found that graduates of this two-year college are accepted with full credit by every university in the country. They have an International Relations Club. and invited the speaker to spend the weekend there and hold discussions. Unfortunately this invitation could not be accepted, but the Club made the pamphlets the subject of discussion for several meetings, and requested further literature. So courteous were these shy. soft-spoken people that after luncheon in the candlelighted, rustic dining hall, one of the young men offered to ride over the mountain with her lest she be fearful of going alone. It would be only a short stretch back on foot, he assured her! Sixteen miles of Southern courtesy!
A unique institution to hear the Message of the Bahá’í Faith and its Guardian was a
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Spanish-American Normal College. These students spoke Spanish and English equally well. They were fiery, ardent young people, who felt keenly the Bahá’í view of America's spiritual leadership. One young woman said, "After the war we might be able to travel, as you do, and go about in the Latin countries, telling these things in Spanish!”
On the campus of a large State Negro University. the members of the faculty came forward at the close of Chapel. and talked for almost an hour. giving up their lunch period to do so. The Bahá’í principles interested them not at all. but they were held by the thought that a spiritual commonwealth had been born. indivisible in its nature, and committed to a unifled racial life in its essential pattern; that it could never be rent apart religiously, and that its unique organism, under the Guardian, was already an actual, living. breathing civilization, slowly growing up. This was no hollow promise but a tested Reality.
The race question came up occasionally but never offensively. The friendly reactions of the Southern white schools to a colored Bahá’í speaker, in the light of existing prejudices, are of deep interest. In the heart of Mississippi. where race feeling runs high. the students waited in long rows in the hall to shake his hand and wish him well. It was their first adventure in receiving a colored speaker, and only their second experience with the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh. Proof of the rising tide of sympathy was the invitation of a white West Virginia College to this speaker to attend and address state-wide seminar on race relations held by teachers and students in the college auditorium in June of this year. A white speaker, while visiting one of the Negro schools, found that a young Negro dean of unusual thoughtfulness and charm entertained some doubt of the wisdom of the pattern of unity required in Bahá’í community life. "Don't you think we might compromise a little because of the Ku Klux Klan?” he asked. A listener quickly rose to defense of the Bahá’í pattern, saying: "The speaker has said that this Faith is the Kingdom of God in practice. If this is true you cannot compromise or divide it without losing it. In Europe we have class war; in India
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we have caste war; in the Holy Land we have religious strife; if Bahá’ís do not compromise the issue of a Ku Klux Klan in this country then they are our hope of a real world community in all countries. There is enough unorganized aspiration and sentimental feeling in every country and in every religion, but where except among the Bahá’ís do we see a world organism with unbroken standards?” The dean became thoughtful and then slowly said, "This is a world Faith then. This Faith is different. This Faith may be worth dying for.”
One could never tell where the interest would flare most brightly. Here an aristocratic college in the heart of the "bluegrass,” there a four-year business college of practical turn of mind, and again one of the state colleges, colored or white, would
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press the speakers to stay on for a day or two, or send others. There were Baptist schools, Presbyterian schools, Methodist schools, and State Colleges; colored schools, white schools, Indian schools; city schools and hill schools, and one was a large and beautiful Quaker College. These schools were worlds within a world, each college a unit unto itself. Sometimes a college head feared that his young world was hopelessly self-sufficient, hopelessly disinterested in the world outside, and hopelessly disinterested in God. Often he would say, "The Bahá’í viewpoint is needed here; come often to our young people; it is the thing they have been waiting for.”
And so the long'trek goes on, to win American youth for God, for a common humanity, and for World Order.
