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Summer 1995

World Order

ELIMINATING VIOLENCE: A REQUISITE
FOR A SPIRITUALIZED CIVILIZATION
EDITORIAL

THE STATUS OF BAHÁ’ÍS IN IRAN
FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

ROBERT S. ABBOTT AND THE CHICAGO
DEFENDER: A DOOR TO THE MASSES
MARK PERRY

THE ATLANTA BAHÁ’Í COMMUNITY
AND RACE UNITY: 1909-50
MIKE McMULLEN

A REVIEW OF ERIC BOWES’ THE GOSPELS
AND THE CHRISTS
SEN McGLINN

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World Order

VOLUME 26, NUMBER 4

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE, AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN
THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY
RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:
FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH
BETTY J. FISHER
HOWARD GAREY
ROBERT H. STOCKMAN
JAMES D. STOKES

Consultant in Poetry:
HERBERT WOODWARD MARTIN

Subscriber Service:
RHONDA SPENNER

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WORLD ORDER Subscriber Service, Bahá’í National Center, Wilmette, IL 60091. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts can be typewritten or computer generated. They should be double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should send four copies—an original and three legible copies—and should keep a copy. Return postage should be included. Send manuscripts and other editorial correspondence to WORLD ORDER, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091.

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WORLD ORDER is protected through trademark registration in the U.S. Patent Office.

Copyright © 1995, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2   Eliminating Violence: A Requisite for a Spiritualized

Civilization

Editorial

4   Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

7   The Status of Bahá’ís in Iran

by Firuz Kazemzadeh

15   Robert S. Abbott and the Chicago Defender: A Door

to the Masses

by Mark Perry

24   Wind

poem by Diana Malouf

25   The Runner

poem by J. A. McLean

27   The Atlanta Bahá’í Community and Race Unity:

1909-50

by Mike McMullen

44   Completion of the Cycle

poem by Christine Boldt

47   Understanding the Gospels

book review by Sen McGlinn

Inside back cover: Authors & Artists in This Issue

[Page 1]

[Page 2]

Eliminating Violence:
A Requisite for a Spiritualized
Civilization

VIOLENCE has always been part of human experience. It was practiced in prehistoric times and was part of classical cultures. It has been both deplored and glorified in poetry and song, in art and literature, in mythology and philosophy. War—violence organized and directed by government—has for centuries been the proud activity of rulers and nobles and the shortest route to fame and honor. But violence has a much larger scope. It has plagued relationships between and among individuals and groups: husbands and wives, parents and children, employers and workers, races, classes, guilds, unions, corporations.

While the world has progressed to the point at which war is no longer hailed as the source of manly virtue, and attempts are made to establish world peace, other forms of violence grow and proliferate. Buildings explode in places far removed from centers of power, burying men, women, and children in the rubble. Airplanes are blown out of the sky. Murder and arson turn city life into a nightmare. Beatings and torture are indulged in by those who are entrusted with enforcing the law. Malice, revenge, anger, and antagonism permeate politics and business as well as popular culture. Dictionaries give the word aggressive its primary meaning of belligerent and hostile, but they also define it as bold and enterprising. In the phrase “an aggressive young executive,” “aggressive” is used as a term of praise and one preferred to “vigorous” or “energetic” precisely because it carries the connotation of hostility that is highly prized.

The elimination of violence from social and individual life is probably the hardest task humanity could set itself. It demands the spiritualization of civilization, the adoption of an ethos of tolerance, trust, and love. Such an ethos, unfortunately, is not created by legislative action or popular referenda. It must be laboriously constructed within every human soul that commits itself to a journey through the many “valleys” leading to a knowledge of self and a knowledge of God. The energy flowing from Divine Will must transform individuals and make it possible for them, in turn, to devote themselves to building a society free of the hatreds that are destroying the world we inhabit today.

All the divinely inspired Teachers have appeared to assist humanity overcome its adolescent immaturity and enter an age of adulthood. But Bahá’u’lláh, Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, has enunciated clear and specific teachings to accelerate and direct the maturation process. These teachings [Page 3] state, for example, that women and men are equal, that all individuals must be treated fairly and nonviolently, that racial differences must be overcome, that international systems to ensure equity and justice must be established, and that the values behind economic systems need to be radically reconceived. Bahá’ís believe the periodic renewal of religion and the appearance of divinely inspired Teachers carry the promise and the hope that humanity can redeem itself, that it can overcome the turmoil of its adolescence and enter the age that would fulfill its ancient dream.

[Page 4]

Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

IN this issue WORLD ORDER presents several articles sharing the theme of oppression and liberation. Dr. Firuz Kazemzadeh’s “The Status of the Bahá’ís in Iran” represents another overview of the persecution of the Iranian Bahá’í community, though not from the point of view of specific persecutions. Rather, it considers the legal and theological principles by which the Islamic Republic of Iran has justified its massive violation of the human rights of the Bahá’ís. The persecution of the Persian Bahá’ís that it describes continues to this day, albeit through subtler means than used in the early 1980s. The Bahá’ís are denied education and employment rather than being systematically imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. The result of this milder form of persecution has already been to deny an entire generation of young Bahá’ís the opportunity to serve their country through careers in professions requiring higher education, as well as to prevent many of them from earning a living sufficient to raise families. Dr. Kazemzadeh’s paper also represents an historically important event: it was presented on 20 November 1994 to an audience of scholars at the session on “Cultural Pluralism and Prejudice in Iranian Society” cosponsored by the Society for Iranian Studies and the Middle East Studies Association at MESA’s annual meeting.

The second article, Mark Perry’s “Robert S. Abbott and the Chicago Defender: A Door to the Masses” focuses on the United States rather than Iran and on African Americans rather than Iranian Bahá’ís, but it also tells the tale of struggle against oppression and prejudice. Robert Abbott, born in Georgia in 1868, moved to Chicago in 1897 and in 1912 founded a small newspaper called the Chicago Defender. The paper soon emerged as the primary voice of Chicago’s African-American community and one of the premier black newspapers in the United States. It made Abbott a millionaire. But in 1912 he also met ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, son of the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá visited Chicago. Subsequent contact with the Chicago Bahá’í community convinced Abbott to become a Bahá’í in 1934. Judged by secular standards of American society and culture, Abbott is probably the second most prominent American Bahá’í of African descent. The most prominent was probably Dr. Alain Locke, a founder of the Harlem Renaissance. The fact that both men were African Americans and prominent in efforts to bring about racial equity in America speaks highly of the Bahá’í Faith’s commitment to racial unity and of the impact this principle has gradually had on America. Dr. Perry’s article is an important contribution to the study of the Bahá’í involvement in the struggle for equality, as well as another important contribution to the study of African-American Bahá’ís.

Race unity is also an important theme of Dr. Mike McMullen’s “The Atlanta Bahá’í Community and Race Unity: 1909-50.” The story of the Atlanta Bahá’í community begins about 1909 and is typical of other early American Bahá’í communities: the Bahá’í teachings were little understood and were often mixed with other ideologies (in this case the “Liberal Catholic Church,” a new-thought group); there was [Page 5] little or no organization, resulting in the slow growth in the number of Bahá’ís. The arrival of new Bahá’ís from the north in 1937 brought clearer understandings and organization to the Atlanta Bahá’í community. The white Bahá’ís reached out to the city’s African Americans, which soon resulted in a racially integrated Bahá’í community. Establishing racially integrated Bahá’í meetings, however, proved to be a struggle not only because of trouble with the Atlanta police but also because of resistance from some white Bahá’ís. Dr. McMullen’s article shows the Atlanta Bahá’í community’s growth as slow and steady, courageous and inspiring; it is a testament to the enlightened faith of a few obscure but visionary souls whose actions stood in utter contrast to the larger social backdrop. Since the 1940s the Atlanta Bahá’ís have established solid connections with the historically African-American colleges of greater Atlanta; have forged strong ties with the Jimmy Carter Presidential Center and the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change; have founded a family development center; and are participating in the efforts to prepare Atlanta for the 1996 Summer Olympics.

The issue closes with a review of Eric Bowes’ book The Gospels and the Christs by Sen McGlinn. Mr. McGlinn points out a number of dilemmas a Bahá’í faces when writing about the New Testament, for understanding the biblical text in its ancient cultural and linguistic context can require considerable education, yet the results of such study cannot be easily conveyed to the average reader. Mr. McGlinn notes some limitations of Mr. Bowes’ book, as well as describing the foundation it has laid. He makes it clear that serious, critical work on the Bible by Bahá’ís has barely begun; that there is much to do; and that the work to be done requires a thorough, systematic education in Greek, Hebrew, the cultures and societies of the ancient Mediterranean world, and the history of interpretation of biblical texts. Such study will move Bahá’í literature beyond the limitations imposed by introductory pamphlets and books and into the world of serious scholarly discussion of Christianity.

To the Editor

THE ENVIRONMENT

The Summer of 1994 is tops—timely articles that are occurring right now—especially “Toward a New Environmental Stewardship" [by Michael Karlberg].

We have been subscribers since 1966 when World Order resumed publishing.

JOHN AND MARGARET GALLAGHER

Hayward, California

[My article “Protecting Humanity and Its Environment: A Bahá’í Perspective”] was impressively edited. The only exception I took to it was that the important word “groundwater” was replaced by “well.” Wells receive their water from the groundwater aquifer thousands of which are found throughout each state or country. The pollution that occurs in groundwater obviously affects the water quality, and the entire Superfund programs are based on cleaning up groundwater contaminations from many diverse sources. In spite of this omission, the paper is splendidly edited. . . .

DR. JOHN J. COLEMAN

Radicev, Odvojak, Croatia

We apologize for the mistake made in last-minute corrections.
—The Editors

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[Page 7]

The Status of Bahá’ís in Iran

BY FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

Copyright © 1995 by Firuz Kazemzadeh. This essay is based on a paper presented on 20 November 1994 at the session on “Cultural Pluralism and Prejudice in Iranian Society” cosponsored by the Society for Iranian Studies and the Middle East Studies Association at MESA’s annual meeting.

THE STATUS of the Bahá’í religious minority in Iran is unambiguous. The Bahá’ís are unprotected infidels and as such do not enjoy any of the rights accorded to members of recognized religious minorities—Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians—legitimized by the Islamic Constitution.

Adherence to the Bahá’í Faith makes one an outlaw. Killing a Bahá’í does not constitute homicide, and the family of the victim has no claim to blood money (qiṣáṣ) or to any compensation whatsoever. An insurance company is free not to pay benefits on a policy if either the insured or the beneficiary is a Bahá’í. Bahá’ís may not be employed by the government, collect pensions earned over a lifetime of service, teach in schools, or attend universities.

The Bahá’í community’s institutions have been disbanded or taken over, and their properties, including meeting places, libraries, hospitals, and even cemeteries, confiscated. The holiest Bahá’í shrine in Iran, the house of the Báb in Shiraz, has been razed and the spot turned into a parking lot. Over two hundred Bahá’ís, most of them leading members of the community, have been executed, some after torture. Thousands have spent time in jails. Tens of thousands have been rendered homeless, and some thirty thousand have fled their country.

The attitude of the clerical regime toward the Bahá’ís is determined by theology. Whereas the Jews and the Christians are “people of the Book,” and the Zoroastrians were somehow assimilated to the “people of the Book” centuries ago, the Bahá’ís profess belief in a prophet who appeared twelve centuries after Muḥammad, Whom Muslim traditionalists consider the last divine messenger, the Seal of the Prophets. Therefore, most Muslims will not accord legitimacy to the Bahá’í Faith.

The problem is further exacerbated by certain Bahá’í positions that most Muslim clerics find intolerable. While accepting the validity of Islam and other religions and upholding the divine inspiration of the Qur’án, the Bahá’í Faith rejects such concepts as holy war and the ritual uncleanliness of infidels. It has abandoned Islamic dietary laws and many rituals. It champions the equality of women and men, teaches the harmony of religion and science, emphasizes education, manages its community without a professional clergy, and looks forward to the establishment of universal peace and world government.

[Page 8] While the Bahá’í community has suffered persecutions since its inception, the current attacks on the Iranian Bahá’í community coincided with the revolutionary turmoil of the late summer of 1978. They were largely inspired by the Society for Islamic Propaganda (Anjoman-e Tablighat-e Eslami, also known as Anjoman-e Zedd-e Bahaiyat, or Anti-Bahaism Society, and Anjoman-e Hojjat, the Society of the Twelfth Imam, known simply as Hojjatiyeh). The Hojjatiyeh was founded in the 1950s by a number of mullahs determined to uproot the Bahá’í religion from Iran. It cooperated with Savak, the Shah’s secret police, who were always willing to use the Bahá’ís as scapegoats and thus to occupy the clergy with something other than opposition to the regime.

Once the revolution had triumphed and the Islamic regime was in power, scattered attacks became a nationwide pogrom led by the Hojjatiyeh and assisted by the Sacrificials of Islam (Fadayan-e Eslam), a fanatical terrorist group.

The first post-revolutionary cabinet, headed by Mehdi Bazargan, a person widely reputed to favor human rights, gave full support to anti-Bahá’í activities both at home and abroad. In the spring of 1979 the authorities began to confiscate Bahá’í community properties. The Misaqiyeh Hospital, the largest Bahá’í charitable institution in Tehran, was expropriated, and the school of nursing attached to it was closed, as was the Bahá’í home for the aged. Bahá’í financial institutions were seized, as were Bahá’í centers with their meeting halls and libraries. Simultaneously Iranian diplomatic representatives in various countries and at the United Nations either denied the persecution of the Bahá’ís or accused the Bahá’ís themselves of perpetrating unspecified crimes against Islam and the people of Iran.

The policy of the government of the Islamic Republic toward the Bahá’ís was a manifestation of the deep-seated antagonism of the Shiite clergy toward a faith and people whom they viewed as heretics subversive of Islam. During an interview with Professor James Cockroft of Rutgers University in December 1978, Ayatollah Khomeini, still in exile in France, was asked:

Question: “Will there be either religious or political freedom for the Bahá’ís under an Islamic government?”

Answer: “They are a political faction. They are harmful. They will not be accepted.”

Question: “How about their freedom of religion—religious practice?”

Answer: “No.”

[Page 9] On this there could be no compromise. Four years after Khomeini’s interview, a Shiraz judge, Hojjat ol-Eslam Qazai, proclaimed:

The Iranian Nation has risen in accordance with Koranic teachings and by the will of God has determined to establish the government of God on earth. Therefore, it cannot tolerate the perverted Bahá’ís who are the instruments of Satan and followers of the Devil and of the super-powers and their agents. It is absolutely certain that in the Islamic Republic of Iran there is no place whatsoever for Bahá’ís or Bahá’ísm. Before it is too late the Bahá’ís should recant Bahá’ísm, which is condemned by reason and logic. Otherwise, the day will come when the Islamic Nation will deal with the Bahá’ís in accordance with its religious obligations and will . . . God willing, fulfil the prayer of Noah, mentioned in the Qur’án, ‘and Noah said, Lord, leave not one single family of infidels on earth.’

Not only does the Constitution of the Islamic Republic fail to accord Iran’s largest religious minority internationally recognized rights and freedoms, the Constitution by implication excludes all other religions, leaving the government free to pass laws, make administrative decisions, and adopt any regulations with regard to “unrecognized” religions. The Attorney General, Musavi Tabrizi, declared in the summer of 1981 that “The Qur’án recognizes only the People of the Book as religious communities. Others are pagans. Pagans must be eliminated.” Theoretically the status of the Bahá’ís in Iran is no different than that of Shintoists or Buddhists, all being classified as pagan. In reality, of course, Shintoists or Buddhists are likely to be foreign nationals unconcerned about issues of religion in a country where they are temporary residents, whereas Bahá’ís, Iranian by birth, language, and culture, fall victim to repression.

In the first decade after the Islamic revolution any individual or group was free to attack Bahá’ís, although there existed as yet no statutory law permitting execution, incarceration, or confiscation of property on the basis of belief alone. However, a body of laws, judicial decisions, administrative regulations, and authoritative pronouncements by a number of mojtaheds has gradually come into existence.

One of the early measures that had a particularly devastating effect on a community that had no clergy and administered its affairs through democratically elected councils known as spiritual assemblies was announced by the Attorney General of the Islamic Revolution, Hojjat ol-Eslam Seyyed Hoseyn Musavi Tabrízi, in an interview with the newspaper Keyhan in which he banned Bahá’í administrative institutions and criminalized membership in them. Musavi [Page 10] Tabrízi accused Bahá’ís of espionage, sabotage, agitation, and hoarding, adding that

All these problems have caused us to announce on this day that all collective and organizational activities of Bahá’ísm in Iran are banned, even though this has always been so. This is being announced on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The constitution of the country has also not recognized them.

I must say in this connection that some of those [Bahá’ís] who have been arrested have stated that their activities have never been officially banned. . . . Therefore, because of such sabotage activities and illegalities which prevail in the Bahá’í administration, such administration, according to the opinion of the office of the Attorney General of the Islamic Republic is hostile [muḥárib] and plotting [conspiratorial].

The Hojjat ol-Eslam added that,

if a Bahá’í performs his religious acts in accordance with his own beliefs, such a man will not be bothered by us, provided he does not invite others to the Bahá’í faith, does not conduct propaganda, does not form assemblies, does not give news to others, and has nothing to do with the administration. Not only do we not execute such people, we do not even imprison them, and they can work within the society. If, however, they decide to work with the administration, this is a criminal act and is forbidden, the reason being that such administration is considered to be hostile and a conspiracy. Such people are considered conspirators.

The National Spiritual Assembly, the governing body of the Iranian Bahá’í community, had suffered severe blows since 1979. All nine members of the assembly were abducted in the summer of 1980 and disappeared forever. Their nine elected successors were arrested the next year, and all but one were executed. It was the third group of nine that received the news of the banning of Bahá’í institutions. In its written response to the outlawing of Bahá’í institutions, the National Spiritual Assembly refuted the accusations made by the Attorney General, pointed out the lack of evidence to sustain his charges, and announced

the suspension of the Bahá’í organizations throughout Iran, in order to establish its good intentions and in conformity with its basic tenets concerning complete obedience to the instructions of the Government. Henceforth . . . the National Assembly and all local spiritual assemblies and their committees are disbanded, and no one may any longer be designated a member of the Bahá’í administration.

[Page 11] The most important document defining the status of the Bahá’ís in Iran is a memorandum sent on 25 February 1991, by Dr. Seyyed Mohammad Golpaygani, Secretary of the Supreme Revolutionary Cultural Council, to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Faqih (Jurist) and supreme leader of the Islamic regime. The document was prepared at Khamenei’s request, taking into account his views “regarding the Bahá’í question”:

In arriving at the decisions and proposing reasonable ways to deal with the above question, due consideration was given to the wishes of the Esteemed Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran [Khamenei], namely that ‘in this regard a specific policy should be devised in such a way that everyone will understand what should and what should not be done.’ The respected President of the Islamic Republic [Rafsanjani], as well as the Head of the Supreme Revolutionary Cultural Council, while approving these recommendations, instructed us to convey them to the Esteemed Leader so that appropriate action may be taken according to his guidance.

There follows a “Summary of the Results of the Discussions and Recommendations.” The language of the recommendations has obviously been influenced by the need to appear moderate and humane in the court of international public opinion, should the confidential document fall into the hands of outsiders. Thus point 2 of section A states that “They [Bahá’ís] will not be arrested, imprisoned, or penalized without reason.” What a valid reason might be is never explained. The next point, A-3, states: “The Government’s dealings with them must be in such a way that their progress and development are blocked.”

Section B of the document deals with “Educational and Cultural Status.” It allows Bahá’ís to enroll in schools, “provided they have not identified themselves as Bahá’ís.” The Memorandum then states that “They must be expelled from universities, either in the admission process or during the course of their studies, once it becomes known that they are Bahá’ís.” This policy, of course, had been implemented long before the Memorandum was written. Bahá’ís have been excluded from universities either as students or faculty for more than a decade. The sixth and last point in Section B carries a threat against Bahá’í communities in foreign countries: “A plan must be devised to confront and destroy their cultural roots abroad.”

The last section of the Memorandum, “Legal and Social Status,” would permit Bahá’ís “a modest livelihood as available to the general population.” [Page 12] It further permits Bahá’ís access to means of ordinary living “such as ration booklets, passports, burial certificates, work permits, etc.” However, point 3 of Section C specifies, “Deny them employment if they identify themselves as Bahá’ís.” The last point says broadly, “Deny them any position of influence, such as in the educational sector, etc.”

At the bottom of the second page of the Memorandum there appears in the handwriting of Ayatollah Khamenei himself the following endorsement: “In the name of God! The decision of the Supreme Revolutionary Cultural Council seems sufficient. I thank you gentlemen for your attention and effort.”

The 25 February 1991 document, first made public by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in March 1993, has become known as the Secret Blueprint for the Destruction of a Religious Community. The policies it advocates have been pursued consistently and relentlessly since 1979. Such policies will, if continued over a long period of time, pauperize and reduce the Iranian Bahá’í community to the status of untouchables.

Dismissals from employment, refusal of pensions, demands for the return of earned salaries are too numerous to be considered here. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights has accumulated hundreds of documents showing persistent violations of the rights of the Bahá’ís on the basis of their religion alone. In many instances the authorities suggested recantation of faith as a means of avoiding unfavorable action by the government, further proving the religious motivation of the persecution.

The current status of the Bahá’ís in Iran is apparent from two recent judicial decisions:

1. Soleyman and Rahman Eynollahi kidnapped and murdered Ruhollah Ghedami, a Bahá’í. Their “involvement in kidnapping Ruhollah Ghedami, which resulted in his death,” the court found, “is firmly established.” However, in view of pronouncements by Khomeini and other theologians to the effect that qiṣáṣ (blood retribution) applies only to the murderer of a Muslim, the court ruled:

In this case, the victim, as admitted by all the blood relatives and plaintiffs and residents of the neighborhood, was a member of the misguided and misguiding Bahá’í sect. Therefore the issue of retribution is null and void. And . . . the right of “blood money” (damages) also does not apply. No blood money is due to other than protected infidels, etc. Therefore, as to capital punishment and damages, the accused are acquitted.

2. In November 1993 a court in Karaj rendered a verdict in the case of Behnam Misaqi and Keyvan Khalajabadi, accused of having communicated with the Bahá’í World Center, having sent reports to Bahá’í institutions abroad, held gatherings in their homes, and engaged in other Bahá’í activities. [Page 13] The court quoted Ayatollah Khomeini’s pronouncements to the effect that Bahá’ís were foreign agents, serving Western powers, which had for centuries been planning to destroy Islam “by inventing fake religions such as Bábísm, Bahá’ísm, and Wahhabism,” and in the case of Bahá’ís “the privileges of the people of Dhimma [protected infidels] do not apply.” The court held that, “Thus, due to the religious laws and theological codes mentioned above, the accused cannot be considered among the Kuffár-i-Dhimmí and therefore the court condemns them to death as Kuffár-i-Ḥarbí [unprotected infidels at war with Islam].”

Such documents, and others that originated in virtually every department of the government, clearly define the position to which the Bahá’í community of Iran has been relegated. Although the pressure of international public opinion expressed in several resolutions passed by the United Nations General Assembly, as well as by parliaments of many nations, has led to a relaxation of pressure on individual Bahá’ís, the repression of the community has not ceased. It is that community’s strength and the quiet support of a large part of the Muslim Iranians that sustain the Bahá’ís in a period of trial and suffering unprecedented in this century and reminiscent of their persecution during the nineteenth.

[Page 14]

Robert S. Abbott

[Page 15]

Robert S. Abbott and the Chicago
Defender: A Door to the Masses

BY MARK PERRY

Copyright © 1995 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

ON 31 August 1868 Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, with His family and companions, passed through the sea gate into ‘Akká, the prison city of the Ottoman Empire, from which He would, in succeeding years, raise His Banner to proclaim across the farthest reaches of the world “the unity of all mankind.” On 28 November of that same year a poor baby was born in the American South, seemingly cut off from any light of justice and hope. Yet that Banner would suddenly and powerfully attract his attention, gain increasingly the heartfelt respect of his mature years, and win his allegiance in the twilight of his life.

Robert S. Abbott was the son of former slaves. In 1897, at the age of twenty-nine, he moved to Chicago, where eight years later he established one of the most influential newspapers in United States history, the Chicago Defender. Through the voice of the Defender, Abbott played a major role in the promotion of racial equality in America. Of all African-American newspapers his was the most outspoken in the defense against racial prejudice and the denial of human rights. In many regions of the South it was banned by law, and any African-American person—man or woman—possessing or distributing it could become the victim of mob violence. One of his most significant achievement was in raising the call in the Defender for Southern African Americans to escape the oppression of their homelands and migrate to the relative safety of the North. The Southern African Americans responded eagerly and from 1917 trekked northward in great waves to begin a new stage in their history.

The life of Robert Abbott, like the lives of many other early believers in the world religions throughout history, cannot be adequately treated in conventional biographic form. The basic facts of his career are clear and readily understood. Rather, it is the essence of his spiritual journey, his relation to the Bahá’í Faith, that arrests one’s attention.

The enthusiasm Abbott felt for the Bahá’í teachings may have originated in his early spiritual education. In many ways his family and upbringing were atypical of the social and cultural norms of the Reconstruction period in his native Georgia. The son of Thomas Abbott and Flora Butler Abbott, former slaves, he was born in 1868 on St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia. In 1869 his father died. In that same year his future stepfather, John Hermann Sengstacke, arrived in Georgia from Germany, where he had been raised. Flora had gained a speaking knowledge of German from the immigrant shopkeepers for whom she had frequently worked, and it was not long before this coincidence brought her to John’s attention in the small community. John and Flora were married in 1874.

[Page 16] John Sengstacke was not an ordinary German immigrant. Although he was European in appearance, he, too, was the son of a slave mother. In 1847 his father, Herman Sengstacke, a wealthy merchant new to America, had witnessed the plight of a slave girl, Tama, standing on the seller’s block. Out of compassion he bought her and lawfully married her in Charleston, South Carolina. The following year John was born to them. Since the law specified that children follow the condition of their mother, John, and his younger sister to come, were legally slaves; therefore, John’s father eventually decided to send them to be raised by relatives in Germany.

Thus, when John Sengstacke became Abbott’s strict and loving stepfather, he brought to the boy an indelible consciousness of the oneness of humanity and the inherent dignity of humankind. Throughout the year— seven during World War II when some of Abbott’s relatives became Nazis—he maintained regular correspondence with those members of his family in Germany who accepted him as their own and helped them with significant sums of money.

Abbott also protected another family in Georgia, the descendants of Captain Charles Stevens, who had owned his father, Thomas Abbott. The Depression reversed the Stevens family’s fortunes, and they turned for aid to Robert, the millionaire son of the Captain’s slave:

Not only did he respond generously, but he afterwards helped to educate their children. He contributed to their upkeep for nearly six years, and, in the process, a warm personal relationship was reestablished. For like his father, Thomas, he felt a loyalty and sense of responsibility to these people when they were faced with extreme difficulties.

His was extraordinary behavior.

If the youthful Abbott’s social environment was progressive, so too was the religious sense gained from his stepfather. John Sengstacke labored as a missionary Congregational minister in a Baptist region near Savannah, Georgia, where the incessant sectarian antagonism he faced finally led him, shortly before his death in 1904, to write in his diary what one cannot but think may well have influenced his stepson throughout his upbringing: “There is but one church, and all who are born of God are members of it. God made a church, man made denominations. God gave us a Holy Bible, disputing men made different kinds of disciples.” Abbott’s missionary childhood in rural Georgia was filled with images of his father working to uplift a people who desperately needed self-development and self-knowledge, of Sundays as days of rest and devotion, of work days spent with his father as he made his rounds and tended his duties in the church and community. Abbott’s childhood education was religiously orthodox yet distinctly independent, fundamentalist in form yet socially progressive in spirit. Undoubtedly this unusual home life set the standard for his own career in the world and paved the way for his acceptance of a religion the principles of which were unique and yet similar to his own.

Nevertheless, Abbott’s path to the Bahá’í Faith was a journey that challenged many of his childhood ideals and also opened to him endless opportunities. His was a social environment devoted not to justice for the descendants of slaves but to an oppression that cannot but be recognized as a medieval anachronism; his was a suppressed culture ignorant of its own potential; his was the only people in America forbidden to read and to gain [Page 17] thereby all the advantages locked up in the written treasuries of past ages; his was a people whose utter despair sparked what may be described as one of the greatest manifestations of faith—pure and persevering—that Western Christianity has ever witnessed; and his was a life of humanitarian service that— although imperfect and compromised by circumstances—must be regarded as one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of American society.

There were others of Abbott’s generation who won the laurels for representing African Americans in academia, politics, education, science, medicine, the arts, and international affairs; others who demonstrated greater talents; others who more surely captured the imagination, admiration, and affection of the public; and still others whose names seem more securely fixed in the memory of posterity. Nevertheless, Abbott’s contribution remains unprecedented, and all the more distinguished by the fact that he was one of only a handful among his peers and contemporaries in the elite of American society—those of African and European background—to embrace the Bahá’í Faith.

The African slaves in America, though illiterate, were clearly people of the Book, for in the words of the Bible they gained their solace and spiritual strength. The power of the word can perhaps be measured by both the assiduity with which illiteracy was forced upon the enslaved population, and by the alacrity with which Robert Abbott took up his pen and the advantages of law to champion the rights of his brothers and sisters still struggling under the heels and shadows of slavery’s inheritors. Out of Chicago, where the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh was first mentioned in America, his weekly newspaper, the Defender, made its first tentative claims for the ears of oppressor and oppressed alike. Abbott survived by unstinting toil and effort; by pennies, nickels, and dimes; and by the unfailing aid of friends and family. His makeshift and inauspicious beginnings seemed barren, miserable, and all but ridiculous. The slaves’ descendants had had free access to the word for only one generation. They were still barred from proper schooling and thus remained, for the most part, beyond the reach of any literature. They had minimal economic resources and commercial experience to support such an enterprise. They were yet to contend with innumerable and powerful enemies in both the rural and urban societies. They had no example to follow, no traditions to recall, no elders to guide them in an unfamiliar world. To found a newspaper for the African-American masses in 1905 seemed the height of folly, the creation of a deluded imagination, and at best woefully premature in a city the internal political and social terrors of which were typified in those years by the notorious “jungle” of the Stockyards, ominously overshadowing Abbott’s original readership in the streets of Chicago’s South Side.

Yet slowly the venture took wing, beginning on 5 May 1905 as a newsletter the size of a handbill, sixteen by twenty inches, six columns, and four pages, and running to three hundred copies. From 1909 to 1912 the Defender won its first loyalty from the public by a muckraking campaign against Chicago’s notorious red light district—known as the “Levee”—which festered on the doorstep of the African-American community. In 1912—the portentous year when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Son of Bahá’u’lláh and His appointed successor, visited North America to spread His Father’s Faith—the first regular newsstand sales began. The publisher was his own delivery man, depositing papers while gathering news in the neighborhoods and storefronts. In 1915 the handbill finally [Page 18] reached the size of a standard newspaper, at eight columns and eight pages. By 1916 there were subscribers in seventy-one localities in the United States. In May 1917, twelve years after its founding, the Defender boldly launched a highly successful campaign promoting the mass exodus of African Americans from the stagnant rural south to the “promised land” of the vibrant, war-driven cities of the North, swelling the African-American population of Chicago alone from 40,000 to 150,000 in a few years and eventually seeing them arrive at the daily rate of 1,000. Financial success was achieved by 1918, along with power that catapulted Abbott to the foremost ranks of African-American political leaders that included W. E. B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, and Marcus Garvey. In 1921 the Defender moved into its own plant, a remodeled synagogue. Abbott became a millionaire and by 1929 drew a salary of $2,000 a week. The Depression and mismanagement brought the business nearly to an end in the mid-1930s, yet Abbott recovered and upon his death in February 1940 bequeathed to his heirs a viable newspaper that is still publishing today from its South Side headquarters.

Little did his readers across the nation know that for most of his career Abbott had been inspired by the Bahá’í Faith. In 1912, when the Defender’s first newsstand sales began, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá visited Chicago three times, and Abbott attended His first talk in the city at Jane Addams’s Hull House. Referring to the African Americans and whites in America, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said that

numerous points of partnership and agreement exist between the two races; whereas the one point of distinction is that of color. Shall this, the least of all distinctions, be allowed to separate you as races and individuals? In physical bodies, in the law of growth, in sense endowment, intelligence, patriotism, language, citizenship, civilization and religion you are one and the same. A single point of distinction exists—that of racial color. God is not pleased with—neither should any reasonable or intelligent man be willing to recognize—inequality in the races because of this distinction.

But there is need of a superior power to overcome human prejudices, a power which nothing in the world of mankind can withstand and which will overshadow the effect of all other forces at work in human conditions. That irresistible power is the love of God. . . . Bahá’u’lláh has proclaimed the oneness of the world of humanity. He has caused various nations and divergent creeds to unite. He has declared that difference of race and color is like the variegated beauty of flowers in a garden. . . .

. . . Let all associate, therefore, in this great human garden even as flowers grow and blend together side by side without discord or disagreement between them.

On that occasion Abbott met ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Who placed His hand on Abbott’s head and said, as Abbott recalled years later, “He would get from me some day a service for the benefit of humanity.”

Little is known about Abbott’s relationship with the Bahá’í community in the years after his meeting ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in 1912 and before his conversion in 1934, but his interest in the Faith was sustained in various ways.

[Page 19] He was a member of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which investigated the causes of the 1919 Chicago race riot. Two house-bombing victims of the riot, Mrs. Mary Byron Clarke and her husband, both active Bahá’ís, were included in the Commission’s report and may have caught Abbott’s attention. Another Bahá’í, Dr. Zia Bagdadi, “was, as a fellow Bahá’í recalled, the one white man who went into the African-American sections during the riot and brought food to the hungry.”

Of all the Chicago Bahá’ís, Dr. Bagdadi ranked, along with Miss Kaukab MacCutcheon, as the most active promoter of the Bahá’í Faith among the city’s African Americans; moreover, he was among the American Bahá’ís most dedicated to the principle of race unity. Since he served as one of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s attendants during His days in Chicago in 1912, it is quite likely that Dr. Bagdadi first met Abbott at the Hull House talk and was present when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá spoke to the fledgling publisher. In the 1930s Bagdadi, like MacCutcheon before him, “succeeded in publishing Bahá’í articles” in the Defender. After Abbott’s conversion Shoghi Effendi (‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s grandson and His appointed successor) wrote through his secretary to Dr. Bagdadi, stating that Abbott “may truly be regarded as your spiritual son.” Thus it appears that Abbott’s primary connection with the Bahá’í community before his conversion was his friendship with Dr. Bagdadi. Nothing more of this friendship is yet known.

As early as 1924 the Bahá’í Faith won a degree of allegiance from Abbott that resulted in his being included, with his wife, Helen, in the Chicago Bahá’í community membership list. Abbott’s interest led him to seek and read many Bahá’í books and continued to inspire him until at last he became a Bahá’í during the 1934 National Bahá’í Convention.

On Sunday, 3 June, the final day of that Convention, held in Foundation Hall at the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette, those assembled witnessed a “touching and impressive incident.” Dr. Bagdadi described the event a few days later in a letter to Shoghi Effendi:

just before the closing of this Convention, speaking on the subject of publicity, I happened to think of Doctor Abbot [sic], Negro publisher of a newspaper in Chicago. I mentioned how I succeeded in publishing Bahá’í articles on the first page of his paper. As I finished this statement, someone in the audience shouted, “Dr. Abbot is now here with us.” The Delegates expressed their desires to hear a word from him, and he responded by declaring his faith in the Bahá’í Cause! This was one of the happiest moments in the Convention. The publisher is to appear before the Chicago [Page 20] Assembly next Tuesday to answer the formal questions required from any one who wishes to join the Bahá’í Faith.

The “word” heard from Abbott, as reported by Louis Gregory, was brief, forceful, and dramatic:

Dear friends: Sorry I am hoarse and do not want to find it necessary to speak all over again. Happy am I to see people whom I have been praying to God all my life to see, those who recognize me as a man. Everywhere I have travelled I have been received as a man save in my own country. Here my people have been cruelly treated and even burned at the stake! . . . ‘Abdu’l-Bahá when in America put His hand on my head and told me that He would get from me some day a service for the benefit of Humanity. I am identifying myself with this Cause and I go up with you or down with you. Anything for this Cause! Let it go out and remove the darkness every where. Save my people! Save America from herself!

On 12 June Abbott met with the Chicago Assembly to enroll in the Chicago Bahá’í community. The Assembly later reported to the National Spiritual Assembly that Mr. Abbott “stated he had been interested in the Cause many years and met ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in 1912. He further stated he had read many of the Bahá’í books.”

Abbott’s conversion was a singular event in the annals of the American Bahá’í community. An African-American millionaire, and a powerful newspaper editor whose influence had literally moved the masses and was still capable of making a great social impact, had given public allegiance to an obscure religion. A formidable champion of an oppressed population, Abbott, by his acceptance of Bahá’u’lláh, represented, perhaps for the first time in Bahá’í history, the potential of the downtrodden in America to embrace the Faith in masses. The door to widespread recognition of the Faith had suddenly become unlocked through the combination of a respected leader and access to a powerful medium of publicity, the Defender, which, as Dr. Bagdadi mentioned in his letter to Shoghi Effendi, had already published several Bahá’í articles and which would continue to do so in the wake of its publisher’s conversion.

But though the door was unlocked, it was not yet open, nor would it swing wide until some three decades later with the occurrence in South Carolina of the first mass enrollment of Bahá’ís in the United States—and even then in a manner not directly connected with this early and unprecedented triumph in Chicago. For Robert Abbott’s commitment to the Bahá’í Faith was, apparently, strongly influenced by the political and social circumstances that had shaped his success. Shoghi Effendi sensed these potential barriers and expressed them for the first time in a letter to Dr. Bagdadi: “The utmost effort, I feel, should be exerted in order to enable Dr. Abbot [sic] to embrace whole-heartedly the Faith and promote effectively its best interests.”

[Page 21] Further assessments in the following months elucidated the delicate nature of Abbott’s membership in the Bahá’í community. In an August 1934 letter regarding the teaching committee of the Spiritual Assembly of Chicago, Shoghi Effendi, through his secretary, applauded the Chicagoans: “The recent conversion of so able and so well-known a leader as Dr. Abbott is, indeed, sufficient proof of the effectiveness and continued zeal with which the believers in Chicago are toiling for the spread and wider recognition of the Faith.” In a postscript Shoghi Effendi added:

The many evidences of your activities and unsparing devotion to the Cause of God, reinforced by the incessant labours of the Chicago teaching committee have indeed brought immense joy to my heart. Dr. [sic] Abbott’s acceptance of the Faith marks indeed thus far the culmination of your meritorious and exemplary services. Kindly assure him of my great love, my bright hopes for a brilliant career of service and of my appreciation of the part he has had in the annual Convention. I will pray for him from the depths of my heart.

Thus there were “bright hopes” and encouragement for the full realization of all the potential latent within Abbott’s conversion. Yet there was an unmistakable, unsurmounted barrier, concerning which in September Shoghi Effendi, through his secretary, conveyed to the National Spiritual Assembly:

The news of Mr. Abbott’s acceptance of the Faith has brought deep satisfaction and joy to Shoghi Effendi’s heart. He is fully aware of the possibilities that such an acceptance involves. He will pray that Mr. Abbott may increasingly realize the importance and challenging character and the implications of the principles and teachings of Baha’u’llah, and that he may feel prompted to unreservedly, publicly and universally uphold them. As the newspaper of which he is the proprietor and the responsible editor seems to be political in character, the Guardian wishes to call your attention to the necessity of careful deliberation on this very delicate matter. Without acting precipitately but with the utmost tact, wisdom and firmness, measures should be taken to acquaint Mr. Abbott with the requirements prescribed by our Faith. The Guardian does not object if your Assembly feels it advisable to proceed very slowly and cautiously in this connection, provided the matter is fully elucidated to him eventually. Precedents that are dangerous in character should under no circumstances be allowed, as these must necessarily constitute compromises, which have to such a great extent impaired the effectiveness of Christianity in the early stages of its development.

The potential for injurious compromise was as great as that for victory in the conversion of this famed and powerful editor of a newspaper whose primary objective was to eliminate racism, one of the most controversial issues in American society, and named by Shoghi Effendi “the most vital and challenging issue” facing that nation’s Bahá’í community. That Shoghi Effendi compared this circumstance to the infancy of Christianity clearly indicated its critical nature. Had the Defender become identified with both the [Page 22] Bahá’í Faith and political activity, the entire American Bahá’í community might well have been seen as a political “machine” and have faced opposition from many sides, both religious and political, and experienced a decimation of its membership as a result of this disunifying influence. Schism, the antithesis of the Bahá’í goal of unity in diversity, was a singularly treacherous pitfall the presence of which lay only barely concealed in this political element so suddenly and dramatically introduced into the midst of the American believers.

No further mention is made of Robert Abbott in the available Bahá’í records, and nothing is yet known of the steps taken by the National Spiritual Assembly to acquaint him better with the Bahá’í teachings concerning noninvolvement in partisan political affairs and the other “requirements prescribed by our Faith.” Yet the absence of additional references indicates that Abbott, in his six years as a Bahá’í before his death, probably neither harmed the Faith nor promoted it with the wide success for which he had hoped. This may have been due to poor health, as he was sixty-six when he became a Bahá’í. His “In Memoriam” article in The Bahá’í World states that “whenever his health permitted, he associated with great sincerity and devotion with the Bahá’í friends and spared no effort to promulgate the Bahá’í Faith, especially the Principle of the Oneness of Humanity, the justice of which he felt so profoundly.” Furthermore, Dr. Bagdadi, his closest and most enduring contact with the Bahá’í community, left Chicago for Augusta, Georgia, by early 1936 and died in 1937, thus increasing Abbott’s distance from the community, a distance that amplified the difficulties of the majority of the Chicago Bahá’ís in surmounting the barriers between the races.

It appears, too, that the Bahá’í Faith called for shouldering many responsibilities that would have limited Abbott’s independence, and thus he preferred to remain somewhat in the background and maintain his professional devotion to the Defender. Although the Defender provided the widest publicity for the American Bahá’í community at this time, the Bahá’í message was clearly subordinate to the paper’s ongoing political and commercial interests, which were the means of maintaining its readership. Thus a compromise resulted. While Abbott was able to identify his personal life wholly and sincerely with the Bahá’í Faith, he struggled, in his old age and poor health, and in the depths of the Depression, to maintain control of a difficult and unwieldy publishing enterprise, the financial stability of which was already jeopardized and might not have survived a close identification with an obscure religion from Persia.

Nevertheless, the compromise had its fruits. In the 1930s Abbott published a number of articles in the national edition of the Defender that vigorously championed the Bahá’í Faith and provided its best publicity in the nation at the time. In the 5 March 1932 issue he ran an article on the Bahá’í Race Amity Banquet in New York City, which honored and united the feuding Urban League and NAACP. On 17 March 1934 the Defender ran a large photograph of the Bahá’í House of Worship showing its recently completed dome and with a caption stating: “Members of the [Page 23] Race [African Americans] are always welcome at this church.” On 26 May 1934 he published an editorial entitled, “Lack of Culture Our Greatest Handicap,” with a section headed, “Bahaism Opens the Way.” Shortly after the National Bahá’í Convention at which he announced his belief in the Bahá’í Faith, he published a report entitled, “Bahá’í Delegates End 26th Annual Convention: Followers of Faith Gather at Temple in Wilmette.” In the 23 June 1934 issue he published an editorial with the headline, “Churches Not Playing Proper Role in War Against Prejudice: Bahá’í Movement Stands Alone as Enemy of Color Bar, Says Editor.” Periodically in 1934 and 1935 he published passages from the Bahá’í writings on “A New World Order” in the newspaper’s Features section and included the names of Baha’u’llah, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi as the sources. Other articles on the Bahá’í Faith and references to it continued to be published in the newspaper until his death and even thereafter. Yet it appears that financial constraints in concert with disfavor within the editorial staff of the paper led to the reduction of Bahá’í publicity some time in 1935. Shortly thereafter an entire page devoted to news and activities of Christian churches was instituted.

In a wider perspective, Abbott’s conversion was only one of a number of direct and indirect associations between the Defender and the Chicago Bahá’í community. The German mother and African-American father of Phil Jones, one of the key officers of the Defender, founded the Manasseh Club, a social organization in Chicago for interracial married couples, among whom were several— the Edwards, the Richardsons and the Roaches—who later enrolled in the Chicago Bahá’í community. Ellsworth Blackwell, who served on the National Spiritual Assembly in the 1950s, joined the Chicago Bahá’í community five months after Abbott and was a former employee of the Defender. David Kellum, a veteran writer for the newspaper, having begun his career there as a youth, and the force behind the nationally known “Bud Billiken” parade in Chicago, joined his wife, Kathelynea, as a member of the Chicago Bahá’í community in his later years and served as a member and officer of the Spiritual Assembly of Chicago.

The relationship between Robert Abbott and the Bahá’í Faith can be seen as having religious and secular elements. Although Abbott strictly avoided aligning himself or his work with any political party, there is no doubt that the Defender was a political entity as well as a commercial enterprise and that its readership was also a political constituency, as was true with many newspapers. It is only logical, then, that its publisher be viewed at least in part as a political actor. Yet the religious relationship was sincere and remained unbroken, and in this, of all the figures of comparable wealth and influence in America—his more famous fellow advocates of racial equality, and his more powerful peers of any color in the publishing world—Abbott stood alone. He died on 29 February 1940. At his funeral Albert Windust, the chairman of the Spiritual Assembly of Chicago, participated in the memorial service, representing the Bahá’ís.

The rise of Robert Abbott from the near clutches of slavery to the heights of wealth, fame, power, and prestige is evidence of unique [Page 24] abilities and circumstances. The immediate fruits of such a life are clear: the founding of a ground-breaking newspaper; the successful advocacy of social and human rights for an oppressed people; humanitarian service to friends, family, and foes; and the audacious promotion of an as yet obscure religion. Yet one must carefully consider what the more enduring significances are, for it might otherwise seem that these fruits came and went with him, that the power of the Defender and his unparalleled position to bring the Bahá’í message to the masses faded like a dream on his death.

The great and lasting contribution made by Robert Abbott to Bahá’í history is the simple, profound act of his recognition of Bahá’u’lláh, for by doing so he proved to the world that the Bahá’í Faith is a universal message, a truth for slave and slaveholder, poor boy and wealthy publisher, African American and European American, ignorant and learned. His life represented them all, and his conversion—like the unveiling of Ṭáhirih—sounded the bell of freedom from the past, a bell the reverberations of whose tolling are still being propagated throughout the world and will doubtless reach, in due course, the hearts of all humanity.

Wind

What waves have you thrust against the shore

Before you thrust yourself at me?

Did you sweep through the Pillars of Hercules

Before you swept across the fields?

Wind

Ever blowing everywhere and nowhere

Carry me away from the Bay of Tangier

To the land I left on the other side

July 16, 1989
—Diana Malouf

Copyright © 1995 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States

[Page 25]

The Runner
(Inspired by an incident in Tahirzadeh)

You ran, Beloved,

down market street

in haste

to the scene of the martyr’s death.

You, the one for whom all things run,

the mechanized clockwork universe runs,

the one whom all things,

vacuous and indeterminate,

in subtle, undivided wholeness run to . . .

You were the runner.

Doctors, they say, never run

to the theater of operation,

even when the patient is dying.

But you ran.

Was it to be there,

when the spirit escaped

the bloodied shell,

the still quivering, warm flesh,

To extend your kingly embrace,

to smile your royal smile,

to enfold in compassion the piteous one

who has just thrown his life at your feet?

For you are all at once

the cause, the precipitate, the reward,

to prove that life has no meaning

but in the conquering of death,

that quintessential significance lies

in the casting down of life,

more precious in your sight,

than the holy light of creation.

—J. A. McLean

Copyright © 1995 by J. A. McLean

[Page 26]

[Page 27]

The Atlanta Bahá’í Community and
Race Unity: 1909-1950

BY MIKE McMULLEN

Copyright © 1995 by Mike McMullen. This article is a revision of a paper presented at The Bahá’í History Conference: A Celebration of the Centenary of the Bahá’í Faith in North America, in Wilmette, Illinois, 3-5 June 1994. It stems from doctoral research done through the Sociology Department at Emory University in Atlanta. I would like to thank Ann and John Haynes and Vera Taylor, coordinators of the Atlanta Bahá’í Archives, and Roger M. Dahl, archivist for the National Bahá’í Center, for their assistance and the Local Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Atlanta, Georgia, who have guided much of my research and given me access to their records.

The First Bahá’í in Atlanta

ATLANTA, Georgia, at the turn of the century was a city divided by race and class, deeply entrenched in the Jim Crow racial caste system. In 1895 it was the site of the Cotton States and International Exposition, where Booker T. Washington, founder and president of Tuskegee Institute, gave a speech that became known as the “Atlanta Compromise” and that has drawn much criticism from African Americans. In the speech Washington gave de facto endorsement to segregation, saying, “‘In all things that are purely social, we can be separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Although a separate-but-equal “racial peace” prevailed on the surface, events of the early 1900s revealed the depth of racial disunity. In 1906 Atlanta experienced a race riot and in 1915 was the site of the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan initially flourished in the post-Reconstruction era as a reaction to the limited political and economic gains made by freed slaves. However, by the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the Klan had virtually died out because of the Federal government’s hesitant steps to crack down on expanding white-supremacist violence in the South and the recovery of the Democratic party, which began to impose legal segregation and to disenfranchise African Americans with Jim Crow laws, thus fulfilling many of the Klan’s goals. But the Klan was resurrected in suburban Atlanta when “Colonel” William Joseph Simmons, a former minister and fund-raiser for fraternal organizations, led a group clad in white robes up Stone Mountain to gather by a flag-draped altar and burn a cross.

Such was the social milieu of the activities of the first known Bahá’í in Atlanta—Dr. James Charles Oakshette, who arrived in 1909 and stayed for twenty-eight years, dying on 15 November 1937. Dr. Oakshette was born on Christmas Day in 1858 in London, England. [Page 28] He was educated at Oxford, earning a doctorate in philosophy and theology. In addition to his native English, he knew Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Gaelic, and German. Apparently his first vocation was that of a congregational minister, and he held churches in London, Canada, and in Chicago. Later he studied medicine, graduating from the University of Illinois Medical School in 1896. For several years he was a professor of physiotherapy on the medical staff of the university. He also lectured in theosophy and was a master of the Rosicrucian order. These interests are consistent with the observation by Bahá’í historian Robert H. Stockman that many of the early American Bahá’ís were interested in and involved with various spiritual and philosophical movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Although there is no record of when Dr. Oakshette became a Bahá’í, he learned about the Faith from Lua Getsinger, one of the most prominent of the early American Bahá’ís, while doing research in Chicago. Mrs. Carl Scheffler, another early American believer, has written that Dr. Oakshette was known in Chicago as a Bahá’í and that her husband knew him. Charles Mason Remey, a Bahá’í in Washington, D.C., who traveled extensively throughout the United States teaching the Faith, corresponded regularly with Dr. Oakshette and kept all of Dr. Oakshette’s letters.

It is unclear what profession Dr. Oakshette pursued while in Atlanta; one would presume that it was medicine. However, he taught the Faith actively and is listed in early editions of The Bahá’í World as the contact person for Atlanta’s Bahá’ís. Raymond Lindsey, an early Atlanta convert, said that Dr. Oakshette held weekly classes in his room at the Hotel Nassau on J. E. Esslemont’s introduction to the Bahá’í Faith called Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era and that he kept the local public library stocked with Bahá’í books, having to replace them often when they disappeared.

Records indicate that during the last ten years of his life, Dr. Oakshette established the Liberal Catholic Church of St. Michael the Archangel to further the Bahá’í teaching work in Atlanta. The Liberal Catholic Church (LCC) grew out of the Old Catholic Church of Holland and was the result of a reorganization in 1916 of the Old Catholic Church of Great Britain. Its “Statement of Principles,” written in 1927, shows that many aspects of its creed resemble Bahá’í principles, such as the essential unity or oneness of all religions. For example, it says in part that the LCC, although independent from Roman Catholicism or Protestantism, believes

[Page 29]

that there is a body of doctrine and mystical experience common to all the great religions of the world and which cannot be claimed as the exclusive possession of any. . . . it holds that the other great religions of the world are divinely inspired and that all proceed from a common source, though different religions stress different aspects of this teaching and some aspects may even temporarily drop out of recognition

and that

It has no wish to proselytize from among the adherents of any other Church, and as an earnest of this, welcomes all to regular and full participation in its Services without asking or expecting them to leave their original Church. . . . Its congregations are mainly composed of men and women who had ceased to attend Church.

Cleo Lindsey, her son Raymond, and Raymond’s wife Estelle Lindsey, all three of whom would eventually become Bahá’ís, attended the Liberal Catholic Church. They report that Dr. Oakshette taught the Bahá’í Faith in his sermons and used Bahá’í prayers throughout the church services (Raymond Lindsey later said that, when he became a Bahá’í, he recognized many of the prayers as ones that Dr. Oakshette had used in the LCC). Raymond Lindsey was so attracted to Dr. Oakshette’s teachings that he approached him and said that he too wanted to be a Liberal Catholic priest. Dr. Oakshette told him “it was not the right thing to do; there was something better in store for him.” Dr. Oakshette gave him a copy of Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era to read.

---

DR. JAMES CHARLES OAKSHETTE

---

It must be remembered that in 1927, when Dr. Oakshette organized his church, many Bahá’ís had not yet withdrawn their membership from other religious organizations. However, the requirement of withdrawing from such organizations, once announced to the Bahá’í community, caused Dr. Oakshette much concern. He asked Mrs. Ethel N. Furbush, a Bahá’í from Michigan who lived in Atlanta for less than a year during 1936 and 1937, to “consult the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States and Canada on his behalf when they met in Nashville in January 1937 in regard to retaining his membership there, as he was so well loved and [Page 30] respected that he was able to give the Bahá’í Cause to his parishioners. . . .” Mrs. Furbush reported that the National Assembly allowed him to retain his association with the church. Thus Dr. Oakshette used the pulpit of the Liberal Catholic Church to teach the Bahá’í Faith until his death on 15 November 1937.

Dr. Oakshette was actively engaged in early race unity work in Atlanta. Roy Williams, an African-American member of the National Bahá’í Teaching staff, who made trips to Atlanta in the late teens and early 1920s, wrote that

During my first teaching trip I met Dr. Oakshette by arrangement with him in his office in the Hurt Building. This had to be done very secretly but he never showed any fear and we spent many happy hours discussing ways and means and contacts he knew among colored people. I have never met a more charming and lovable character—doing all that he possibly could almost alone under the harsh conditions then existing in Atlanta . . . he told me of his many persistent contacts with persons in all walks of life in Atlanta—whether black or white—Jew or Christian—Protestant or Catholic. No doubt these seeds have or will bear fruit as he was without doubt a true and selfless Bahá’í . . . Of all the Southern or Northern Bahá’ís I have met all over the country I can truthfully say that . . . Dr. Oakshette personified the best of the ideals of the Cause under all conditions—even the worst that existed in Atlanta around 1919-1920-1921.

Louis Gregory, an outstanding Bahá’í teacher and a frequent traveling companion of Roy Williams, also had kind words to say about Dr. Oakshette: “‘He had a marvelous comprehension of the Teachings and of the stations of the Great and Holy Ones and I feel assured that his reward is great.’” Gregory also recorded the fact that it was through Dr. Oakshette’s efforts that the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce invited ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son and appointed successor of Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, to visit Atlanta during His 1912 trip to America. A history of the Atlanta Bahá’í community written by the early Atlanta Bahá’í Olga Finke, a stalwart believer from New York whose residence in Atlanta spanned five decades, quotes Louis Gregory as writing:

The year he settled in Atlanta is unknown to me, but I am reasonably sure that he was resident there in 1912, since that year, the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce invited ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to come to Atlanta. This was probably due to the influence and suggestion of Dr. Oakshette. My informant was the late Joseph H. Hannen of Washington, D.C., very early Bahá’í, who often taught in the South on his business trips.

Although ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s trip did not take him into the Deep South, the fact that the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce invited ‘Abdu’l-Bahá attests to the influence that Dr. Oakshette had in various circles in Atlanta’s civic life.

[Page 31] Other Atlanta Bahá’ís

THE PATHS of other Bahá’ís intersected in Atlanta during the early years when Dr. Oakshette was its sometimes lone, but always steadfast Bahá’í. Fred Mortenson came to Atlanta from Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the fall of 1914 and left in the spring of 1916. While working in the mailing department of the Atlanta Constitution, he taught the Faith to several persons, including James Mann, who later moved to Peoria, Illinois, and James Elmore Hays, the first native white Georgian to accept the Bahá’í Faith. Louis Gregory told Olga Finke that Mortenson and Hays were actively engaged in teaching both African Americans and whites before Gregory’s first visit to Atlanta in 1915. Gregory said of his week-long visit to Atlanta in the fall of that year:

Mr. Hays and I cooperated. We went everywhere together, eating at the colored Y.M.C.A. He said he was badly scared when he received news of my coming but afterward revived his courage. Addresses were made at Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morris Brown University, Spellman [sic] Seminary, Gammon Theological Seminary, Clark College, the First Congregational Church, Dr. H. H. Proctor then pastor. Mr. Hays accompanied me to all these places, that his time and strength would allow, abandoning his sleep and rest period (daytime) for this purpose.

Roy Williams added:

I refer to a young white Georgian by the name of Elmore Hayes [sic]—This Baha’i was like a shining sun—strong of physique and equally strong of spirit. He was entirely devoid of any racial prejudice. He was my and Louis Gregory’s closest companion whenever we were in the city. . . . The amusing albeit very dangerous methods he employed to spend an hour or two with me will always live in my memory. Under cover of darkness walking across the city sometimes very late at night, he would come to our house at 2 Beckwith Street, and sit, eat and talk for hours—just a happy intimate fellowship. He and Dr. Oakshette were very closely allied in Baha’i work.

Hays eventually moved to New York City where he married; little is known about him after he left Atlanta.

The development of the early Atlanta community was greatly facilitated by traveling teachers and speakers who came through the city, Louis Gregory and Roy Williams being the most notable of such visitors. Together they visited Atlanta six times between 1915 and the late 1930s. Dr. Oakshette and transient Bahá’ís such as Mortenson and Hays appear to have made initial contacts that were nurtured by Gregory’s and Williams’ visits. All this activity helped to demonstrate for the African-American community in Atlanta the Bahá’í commitment to racial unity and constructive social change.

Over the years friendly relations developed between the Bahá’ís and various African-American institutions in Atlanta, primarily among the churches and colleges. In 1920 Wllliams spoke in Atlanta to a meeting of more than one hundred ministers, after which Bishop Flipper of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church commanded them to open their pulpits to allow Bahá’ís to speak to their parishioners. Not everyone was as accommodating, however. Williams wrote that

The only incident I have ever heard of a Baha’i being chased from a platform occurred to me in Atlanta. At Clark University—the President (then white) when he heard me refer to Baha’u’llah and Jesus in what he termed equal positions—stopped me in the middle of my address to the students and faculty. He very bitterly denounced [Page 32] me and the Cause and demanded I get off the campus at once. Well the result was startling—the entire faculty got together and protested and obtained the use of the Colored Congregational Church (Rev. Russell) for the same night and jammed the church to the doors to fully hear the message.

Gregory reported that another AME minister in Atlanta, Dr. Ponton, had acknowledged to him his belief in Bahá’u’lláh but could not formally accept the Faith due to his livelihood in the AME church. Of the First Congregational Church, still a prominent African-American congregation in downtown Atlanta, Gregory said: “The First Congregational Church of Atlanta has always opened its doors to Baha’i talks. Its present pastor, Rev. John C. Wright is at heart a Baha’i. He has always kept me busy when there with men’[s] and women’s clubs, and other meetings and organizations of his church, as well as the Sunday School and service.” It was also in Atlanta that Gregory and Willard McKay, a white college professor and a Bahá’í, in December 1931 formed one of two interracial teaching teams at the request of Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, speaking at the First Congregational Church again and the chapel of Morris Brown University before going on to Alabama, Tennessee, and Ohio.

Other traveling teachers also came through Atlanta in the years before a Spiritual Assembly was formed, continuing to strengthen ties between the Bahá’í Faith and Atlanta institutions. Among them were Charles Mason Remey, Ruth Moffett, Jeanne Bolles, Gertrude Gewertz, Mildred Mottahedeh, and Harlan Ober. Throughout this time, Dr. Oakshette was a quiet, behind-the-scenes worker, arranging meetings and providing contacts.

New Bahá’ís in Atlanta

THE HISTORY of the Bahá’í community of Atlanta began in 1937, when two women, Olga Finke and Doris Ebbert, moved there on 5 October. Archival records and reminiscences by local Bahá’ís who knew them suggest that Finke and Ebbert were tenacious, determined, sometimes stubborn, and always committed. Finke was from New York City. Before settling in Atlanta, she had spent almost three years at a school for African-American children in Piney Woods, Mississippi. (She had also taught at an African-American nursery school in New York City.) She reported in a letter to Edward Struven, the caretaker of the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois, that it was through Louis Gregory’s contacts that she obtained the job in Mississippi, where she was able to put to use her training as a Montessori nursery school teacher. The school was run by the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran church, whom Finke described as “fundamentalists.” She says in that same letter that “The first day that I arrived in Piney Woods I was told by Mr. Jones [the director] that I must not talk on the Bahai Cause to any one. I wanted to leave at once but Mr. Gregory urged me to stay, saying that I can at least live the life.” It appears that her determination to teach the Bahá’í Faith won out, because she reported to Struven that, after being there for two years, she was able for a short time to have small meetings to discuss the Bahá’í Faith before one of the Lutheran ministers stopped the meetings by forbidding the teachers to attend. Eventually, the school headmaster let Finke go, because she was, as Finke put it, “too far ahead of my time.” It was while at Piney Woods that she met Doris Ebbert, a fellow teacher from Ipava, Illinois, who became [Page 33] very interested in the Cause.

Finke’s search for another post after leaving Mississippi says a great deal about race relations in the United States at that time and about the Bahá’í community’s strategy for teaching the Faith to whites and African Americans. Finke told the National Bahá’í Teaching Committee in Wilmette, Illinois, the headquarters of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada (the national governing body of the two countries) that she was interested in continuing to live in the South to teach the Faith. In a 4 August 1937 letter from Charlotte Linfoot, secretary of the National Bahá’í Teaching Committee, Finke was advised that

Recent communications from the Guardian [Shoghi Effendi] seem to imply that it would be wise for individuals to concentrate on teaching members of their own race rather than to follow the plan which many of the believers have followed in trying to bring the races together in study classes, etc. In other words, we feel that he wishes the white people to teach the white people and the colored to teach their own race, and then when they have become believers, they will come together naturally, through the power of the Teachings. Unity is the result of the Faith, rather than the reverse, and it can be experienced in its fullness only among confirmed believers.

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OLGA FINKE

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Finke reported that this advice was echoed by Gregory in his correspondence with her, saying “Mr. Gregory thinks that I ought to try to get into a white school rather than colored this time as they are better able to pay for such services as my nursery school can render.”

Keeping the National Teaching Committee’s advice in mind, Finke asked the Committee to help her in choosing a place in the South where she could set up a Montessori nursery school and begin teaching the Bahá’í Faith. The National Teaching Committee named no specific place but asked her to survey locations that would most likely support a school financially, saying that she should become self-supporting within two or three months. It is unclear whether Finke made such a survey, but she indicated that the decision to move to Atlanta was on the advice and encouragement of Ethel Furbush, who was about to leave the city. Thus Finke moved to Atlanta and invited Doris Ebbert from Piney Woods to accompany her in setting up her school (Ebbert was not yet a Bahá’í.) At [Page 34] the continued prompting of Gregory, Finke decided to solicit only white students.

Thus, a month and a half before Dr. Oakshette —the one constant in the first thirty years of Bahá’í teaching work in Atlanta— died, the two women who were to replace him moved to the city. Two days after arriving in Atlanta, Finke and Ebbert visited the gravely ill Dr. Oakshette. Finke reported that

The picture of Abdu’l-Baha was hanging on the wall at his bedside. He was very weak and hardly able to speak above a whisper and even this required great effort. Nevertheless Dr. Oakshette managed to convey to Miss Ebbert his conviction that Baha’u’llah is the Manifestation of God for this day. This statement made a great impression upon Miss Ebbert, coming as it seemed from a Catholic priest. So we find Dr. Oakshette loyal to his task of teaching the Bahá’í Faith to his dying day.”

Dr. Oakshette was buried in Westview Cemetery in Atlanta, receiving a Liberal Catholic funeral service conducted by Father Harkness, Dr. Oakshette’s assistant.

The first few months in Atlanta were very uncertain for Finke and Ebbert. Since the school year had already started when they arrived on 5 October, they found it difficult to attract students. A series of letters between Finke, Linfoot, and Georgie Brown Wiles, secretary of the Regional Bahá’í Teaching Committee and a resident of Nashville, indicate that Finke and Ebbert were struggling financially and that they repeatedly asked for support from the National Teaching Committee and the National Spiritual Assembly. In several letters the National Teaching Committee told Finke that the National Assembly was not in the business of helping people start their professions (in this case, setting up a school); it was committed only to providing a stipend of two or three months for food and lodging while Bahá’ís settling in a new area became self-sufficient. Linfoot advised Finke, in a tersely worded letter dated 10 January 1938, that,

In view of your letter of December 30th, we are now sending you $100.00, making a total of $175.00 for the entire project of opening Atlanta, or $25.00 in excess of the amount budgeted out of the National Treasury for any single project. In view of our repeated emphasis upon the importance of surveying the possibilities and the necessity of teachers becoming self-supporting within two or three months, and since that much time has elapsed since you opened your school, this is the maximum we can provide for this Baha’i project.”

Because of their initial financial difficulties, Finke and Ebbert looked for ways to reduce costs. Ebbert used the carpentry skills learned from her father and built all of the school’s furniture, while Finke took on odd jobs such as sewing. Their spirits were given a boost during Thanksgiving week 1937 when Louis Gregory visited the city and gave a series of talks at the First Congregational Church and at Booker T. Washington High School. Gregory advised Finke and Ebbert to [Page 35] write a letter to Shoghi Effendi, telling him of their plans. In an 11 January 1938 letter to Georgie Wiles, Finke wrote that, when she sent her letter to Shoghi Effendi, Ebbert was not a Bahá’í, but she thought “it was about the time that the Guardian wrote the letter that she accepted the Teachings in their entirety.”

By mid-January 1938 the school began to attract its first pupils. In a 13 March 1938 report to the Regional Bahá’í Teaching Committee, Finke said, “We look upon our school as a Bahai enterprise. We teach the little children Bahai prayers and Memory verses from the Sacred Writings. We also try to explain the fundamental Bahai principles in very simple language for tiny children.” However, their school was never entirely successful. After several years, they closed the school, and Ebbert eventually worked as a maid, while Finke worked for the city of Atlanta.

Throughout Finke’s and Ebbert’s stay in Atlanta, they remained active in Bahá’í teaching efforts and promoted the Bahá’í perspective on social issues in public forums. Both women frequently wrote letters to the editors of local newspapers on various issues, even into the 1970s near the end of their more than forty years in Atlanta. As one might anticipate, racial unity was often the theme. On one occasion Finke wrote to the Georgia Power Company, protesting the treatment of African-American passengers on the company’s street cars that she rode:

Lately, however, this unjust discrimination is not being accepted with as much docility. In fact, it seems to me that if your company does not do something about this situation very soon, your company may unawares be responsible for the spilling of blood among the citizens of Atlanta. . . . “God created one earth and one mankind to people it.”

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DORIS EBBERT

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Ebbert once wrote a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Referring to protests by state Democrats who denounced the invitation of African-American leaders to an upcoming speech to be given by Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ebbert wrote, “it makes me wonder if there is any hope for a democracy in this state. These men must not have heard that Negro soldiers just finished fighting in a world war for democracy, liberty and justice.”

[Page 36] The Formation of the
Spiritual Assembly of Atlanta

BY 1939, within two years after Finke’s and Ebbert’s arrival in Atlanta, the community had grown to more than nine members, including several Bahá’ís who resided in Atlanta temporarily. Cleo, Raymond, and Estelle Lindsey, who had learned about the Bahá’í Faith through Dr. Oakshette’s Liberal Catholic Church, became Bahá’ís in 1938. After Dr. Oakshette died, the Lindseys lost contact with the Bahá’ís but continued to read Bahá’í books, which they checked out of the Atlanta public library. It was through Finke’s persistent efforts that contact with the Lindsey family was reestablished. When Finke noticed that someone was borrowing Bahá’í books from the library, she made three or four appeals to the public librarian for the Lindseys’ address. Her perseverance paid off, and the Lindseys began going to Bahá’í meetings again.

According to 1939 membership records, the community consisted of Olga Finke, Doris Ebbert, Terah C. Smith (from Binghamton, New York), Renai Gordon (from Montreal), and Raymond, Cleo, and Estelle Lindsey. In addition, a Mrs. Ballard lived in Atlanta before April 1939, and three African-American Bahá’ís—Albert James and Thelma Allison, from Nashville, and Dr. W. D. Thomas, from Florida—were also temporarily in Atlanta around the time Bahá’ís form or elect Spiritual Assemblies. Apparently efforts were made to form a Spiritual Assembly that year, but records indicate that Horace Holley, secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada, notified the Atlanta community that it was not yet “strong enough” in terms of permanent, nontransient members. Had an election taken place, the first Spiritual Assembly of Atlanta would have been integrated.

During 1939 the small group of Bahá’ís in Atlanta held integrated Feasts and Holy Day celebrations and commemorations, but meetings to teach the Faith were segregated by race. This was in accordance with the advice from Shoghi Effendi, who in a 22 March 1937 letter, supported the National Assembly’s policy of segregated teaching meetings, but integrated Bahá’í meetings, saying “Nothing short of such an ultimate fusion of the two races can insure the faithful application of that cornerstone principle of the Cause regarding the oneness of mankind.”

Through the efforts of Orcella Rexford, a full-time traveling lecturer on health foods and diet who visited Atlanta in late 1939, five individuals became Bahá’ís by the following spring. Rexford held a series of classes on health foods and during the last session gave a talk on the Bahá’í Faith. After Rexford left town, Terah Smith continued deepening classes (small study groups in which participants read and discuss Bahá’í scripture) for those who were interested. All who eventually became Bahá’ís were white, none ever having met any of the African-American Bahá’ís. Thus, when elections took place in April 1940, the first Spiritual Assembly of Atlanta was not integrated. Its nine members [Page 37] included Terah C. Smith, Renai Gordon, Raymond Lindsey, P. D. (Birdie) Cunningham, Doris Ebbert, Olga Finke, Mrs. William L. (Anna Dora) Fey, Lucy Walker, and Mary Huck.

Early Conflict in the Atlanta
Bahá’í Community

WITH A Spiritual Assembly finally elected, Atlanta Bahá’ís began planning various teaching activities. Raymond (who was on the Spiritual Assembly) and Estelle Lindsey felt strongly that it was now time for mixed-race teaching meetings, possibly because the recent election of the Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Atlanta inspired greater concern for building bridges between Atlanta’s divided races. They invited their African-American neighbors, as well as the white and African-American members of the Bahá’í community, to a special dinner and deepening. Although the meeting went well, afterward there was “vigorous protest” by some of the white Bahá’ís, and Terah Smith warned the Lindseys not to have any more mixed meetings.

Although initially discouraged, the Lindseys decided to have another mixed meeting the following week. The whites who had protested the previous week did not show up, but the Lindseys’ African-American neighbors did come and brought more than fifteen of their friends. Toward the end of the meeting the police arrived, saying that they had received complaints from whites in the neighborhood about a mixed-race gathering. Raymond Lindsey, about to be arrested, replied that this was a religious meeting and that they had a right to meet. One of the Bahá’ís had brought Volume 5 of The Bahá’í World to the meeting; someone opened the book to a picture of the seal of the United States government, saying that the Bahá’ís are recognized as a legal religion. The police remarked that, “If the United States Government is back of this we can do nothing about it.” The police escorted the African Americans out the back door of the Lindsey house and told Raymond that, if he wanted to meet with them, he should go to their homes.

That night Estelle Lindsey, who was upset about the police disrupting a Bahá’í meeting, had a dream in which she and Raymond were going up a steep hill in an old, junky car. On the side of the road she saw many children, white and African American, standing together. In the midst of them stood ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, [Page 38] who was handing out cards with the Bahá’í message on them. Although the dream helped confirm for her the need for mixed-race teaching, none of the Lindseys’ African-American neighbors would return for any more meetings.

Because of such incidents involving mixed-race meetings, there was growing conflict in the nascent Atlanta community, potentially dividing the newly formed Assembly over issues of teaching and race. There also seems to have been little initial communication between African-American community members and the all-white Assembly, since “the Local Assembly . . . was not cognizant of the fact that Mrs. Essie Robertson wished to be accepted into the group.” The following year Robertson became the first native African-American Georgian to accept the Faith, having been taught by Thelma Allison during the period of segregated teaching meetings.

A National Spiritual Assembly
Visit to Atlanta

ANY potential schism was averted by the National Spiritual Assembly’s decision to meet for the first time in the Deep South in November 1940 and to give guidance to the struggling community. Louis Gregory, the first National Spiritual Assembly member to arrive in Atlanta, asked Finke and Ebbert to arrange a meeting in their home with all the Bahá’ís. However, only the Lindseys (Cleo, Raymond, and Estelle), Finke, and Ebbert came. The next day a meeting with Dorothy Baker, another member of the National Spiritual Assembly, was held at Terah Smith’s house. Finke reported that this time the entire community attended:

Mrs. Baker announced at this gathering in her own humorous way that she is the great granddaughter of Henry Ward Beecher, one of the outstanding preachers who advocated the emancipation of the Negro in the pre-Civil war days. At this time Mrs. Baker also demonstrated the great Bahá’í principle of consultation. Every single individual was given an opportunity to express himself. The fact that Mrs. Essie Robertson had been waiting to be accepted into the Faith, was brought to the attention of everyone present. Mrs. Baker made it clear that the Baha’i community could never restrict anyone because of color. . . . On Sunday evening a public meeting was held also at the Biltmore [Hotel], for both colored and white people. The three speakers were Mr. Harlan Ober, Mr. Horace Holley, and Mrs. Dorothy Baker, all National Assembly members. This meeting was also criticized by some persons of the white race but the colored people who were present were very appreciative to see the oneness of mankind being practiced.

At the next meeting of the Local Spiritual Assembly [Dec. 1940] Mrs. Essie Robertson was accepted as a believer. Some of the white members who had been asked to sign cards ceased attending Baha’i Assembly and Feast meetings, but there were other Baha’is living in the city who could take their places, when the new Assembly [Page 39] was elected. Mrs. Robertson became the first colored Baha’i to serve on the Atlanta Assembly [in April 1941]. . . .

Mrs. Robertson became a vital member of the Atlanta community—holding Feasts, teaching meetings, Spiritual Assembly meetings, and even regional teaching conferences in her home on 850 Beckwith Street. The Assembly remained integrated throughout the rest of the decade.

The National Spiritual Assembly’s public meetings and teaching conference in Atlanta healed many wounds and set a standard in that community for race-unity activities that continued throughout the decade. This is not to say that no further conflicts ever emerged in Atlanta over race, or that no Bahá’ís ever left the Faith because of opposition to the principle of race unity. However, it did mean that the Bahá’ís in Atlanta began a journey that set them apart from the rest of the Jim Crow South, a journey that continues into the present. Gayle Morrison in To Move the World, a biography of Louis Gregory, quotes from a letter written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi to the National Spiritual Assembly, commending them for their efforts in Atlanta:

The Guardian is very pleased to learn of the success that has attended the sessions at Atlanta and the removal of the disagreement within the community of that city and the work achieved by the regional conference and the public meeting open to both races. A special effort, he feels, should now be made to lay a foundation of unity between the white and colored Bahá’ís and weld the groups [in the region] into communities capable of forming Assemblies representative of both races.

The Decade of the 1940s

IN THE 1940s Atlanta was undergoing subtle changes. The decade was the beginning of the twenty-three-year reign of Mayor William B. Hartsfield, known for his progressive stance on racial issues and as the man who first described Atlanta as “The City Too Busy to Hate.” In 1944 the Southern Regional Council was formed to combat racial discrimination; in 1947 a Federal District court battle was won by African-American public school teachers trying to equalize pay scales; and in the late 1940s Atlanta made efforts to integrate its police force.

With its first major crisis over, the Atlanta Bahá’í community grew and expanded its activities throughout the 1940s. It went from thirteen Bahá’ís in 1940 to fourteen in 1941, seventeen in 1942, nineteen in 1943, twenty-one in 1944, and twenty-three in 1945, when the numbers leveled off for the rest of the decade. The community was legally incorporated in 1945.

The Spiritual Assembly maintained an active teaching program, including large public teaching meetings. Many of the public-meeting spaces in hotels, such as the Biltmore, allowed mixed-race meetings. However, sometimes the only available facilities, such as the Ansley or Henry Grady hotels, allowed whites-only meetings, because of the strict observance of Jim Crow laws by hotel management. When only segregated facilities were available, another meeting with the same speaker would be held the next evening at a facility open to both races, generally in one of the African-American churches or colleges [Page 40] or in the African-American YMCAs or YWCAs. Thus ties began to strengthen systematically between the Bahá’í community and African-American institutions—ties that built on the efforts of Roy Williams and Louis Gregory, who had spoken at these institutions in previous decades.

Two major events during the 1940s hastened the development and maturation of the Atlanta Bahá’í community. The first was a visit from 29 September through 2 October 1946 by National Spiritual Assembly member Dorothy Baker. The opening days of her visit were devoted to intensive consultation with the Atlanta Spiritual Assembly about teaching and race unity. In a letter to the Assembly before her visit, Baker outlined her hopes for the Atlanta Bahá’í community:

This is such a heroic moment in the life of the South that I am going to take the liberty of cabling the Guardian before coming and asking his prayers in your deliberations, in order that you may become a true hub in the South with spokes of certainty and illumination going out in all directions.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . It is a pretty big adventure and I must confess that I would not suggest it for all southern centers. My faith in Atlanta is great, and my faith in the guidance of Baha’u’llah as we arise to really try to solve this deep-seated challenge and basic issue is absolute.

The result of the consultation was a nine point policy governing aspects of teaching across the color line in the South. It stated that mixed-race meetings are “blessed” and that there should be no racial division whatsoever within the Bahá’í community. It encouraged Bahá’ís to make efforts to reach potential believers from both the African-American and white races. Finally, it enjoined Bahá’ís to maintain “simultaneous” teaching activities for both races “with the ultimate objective of bringing them together.”

In an inspirational message sent to the Spiritual Assembly of Atlanta after their meeting, Baker wrote:

I have always felt that great teachers would come out of Atlanta, and a growing spiritual influence. . . .

. . . I am truly proud of you, each and every one, and intend to warm the hearts of the National Assembly and the Guardian himself by saying so, for you have tackled the most subtle problem in justice that we have ever had to meet. . . . God bless you all.

The volatile nature of race relations in 1940s Southern culture can be seen clearly in the Atlanta community’s second major turning point during the decade. Large public meetings and even small meetings to teach the Bahá’í Faith were often racially segregated during this period; however, Bahá’í events such as study classes, Feasts, and Holy Days were always integrated. But finding a safe location for these meetings was often difficult. One event more than any other hastened the establishment of the present Atlanta Bahá’í Center. At the Feast on 28 [Page 41] April 1947 the Bahá’ís had gathered at Finke’s and Ebbert’s house on Sells Avenue. After the devotional part of the meeting, loud knocking was heard on the door, accompanied by the footsteps of a number of persons. Ebbert answered the door, and one of the nine men who had gathered asked her, “‘Are there negroes and whites here?’” When he was told there were, he said, “‘Bring the niggers outside!’” Ebbert refused, and Raymond Lindsey, Dr. David Ruhe, and Margaret Ruhe (the latter two were members of the Atlanta Spiritual Assembly during much of the 1940s) moved forward to confront the crowd. While the three Bahá’ís talked to the crowd, the three African Americans attending the Feast, together with some of the white Bahá’ís, went to the back of the house, called the police, and began saying prayers. The Spiritual Assembly’s official report to the National Spiritual Assembly explained that “One [of the men standing outside] stated that they did not want us to sell the house to negroes, to which Miss Ebbert told them she was the owner of the property and intended to keep on living in it, and that we would take the matter up with the police, [with] the state of Georgia as we were incorporated under the religious laws of the state, and with the Federal Government if necessary.”

The report went on to say that the police finally came, dispersed the crowd, and escorted the African-American Bahá’ís to their homes, after telling all the Bahá’ís not to have any more mixed-race meetings in that part of the city. Although the men had placed a Ku Klux Klan sticker on Ebbert’s door, the police said that the men were more likely to be part of the West End Cooperative Association, a white supremacist organization the goal of which was to keep the west end of Atlanta segregated, thus explaining why they asked Ebbert if she intended to sell the house.

The Feast on 28 April 1947, probably more than any other event, prompted the Atlanta Spiritual Assembly to find a building in an integrated, nonresidential section of town where Feasts and other meetings could be held safely. Ironically, only two months before the incident, the Atlanta community had received a letter from Shoghi Effendi, which read in part:

The friends must, at all times, bear in mind that they are, in a way, like soldiers under attack. The world is at present in an exceedingly dark condition spiritually; hatred and prejudice of every sort, are literally tearing it to pieces. We, on the other hand, are the custodians of the opposite forces, the forces of love, of unity, of peace and integration, and we must constantly be on our guard, whether as individuals or as an Assembly or a Community, lest through us these destructive, negative forces enter into our midst. In other words, we must beware lest the darkness of society become reflected in our acts and attitudes, perhaps all unconsciously. Love for each other, the deep sense that we are a new organism, the dawn-breakers of a New World Order, must constantly animate our Bahá’í lives, and we must pray to be protected from the contamination of society [Page 42] which is so diseased with prejudice.

The Atlanta Bahá’ís immediately began looking for rental space to be used as a Bahá’í Center. Two months later, on 29 June 1947, they had the grand opening of the city’s first Bahá’í Center at 44½ Marietta Street, a rented upstairs room in the Gazette Building in downtown Atlanta. The grand opening took place after the Spiritual Assembly of Atlanta received a 19 June 1947 letter from the National Spiritual Assembly, saying,

We all urge your Assembly to make every effort to acquire a meeting room in an area of the city where mixed meetings are held without difficulties.

We also urge you to confine such meetings as are now held to those involving Assembly business, Nineteen Day Feasts or other anniversaries and with prayer and guidance continue your teaching efforts with individuals or small groups in areas and under circumstances which will not attract further opposition to you at the present time . . . Teaching in your area calls for the utmost unity, love and courage and we know that you have them all.

We beg to inform you that the whole matter of your position under the present Atlanta laws is being carefully studied by a special committee with a view to taking up the implied restrictions as a violation of the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.

The rented room downtownwas not the final solution. About a year and a half after the Bahá’ís began using it, the management of the building changed, and it was closed for renovations. The frustration of being at the mercy of one’s landlord was resolved by Leroy Burns, an African American who became a Bahá’í in July 1945. Burns was a postal employee who was planning to build a home for himself and his wife but decided that, since he and his wife already had a home, the Bahá’ís had the greater need. He already owned some property on Edgewood Avenue, one block of historic Auburn Avenue in the heart of the African-American section of Atlanta, and decided to build a Bahá’í Center for the Atlanta community at that location. Burns and his son, Onslow Burns, made the cement blocks for the building with their own hands, stacking them in the back [Page 43] yard until needed. Raymond Lindsey, a building inspector for the city of Atlanta, used his professional skills to make sure the building passed city codes. The community was able to move into its new home in late July 1949, and it was dedicated the next year. A number of Bahá’ís living in Atlanta at the time (Estelle Lindsey, Dr. and Mrs. Ruhe, and Margaret Burns) report that the location of the Center was the cause of conflict in the early stages. Some whites were uncomfortable with its being in a predominantly African-American part of town. But the genuine need for an interracial meeting place seems to have quickly won over most, if not all, community members, even those with initial reservations.

Conclusion

THE Atlanta Bahá’í Center remains to this day a physical legacy of the turbulent history of the early Atlanta community—a history that was marked by both setbacks and victories. Not only was the need for a Center symbolic of the struggle in which Bahá’ís of the Deep South were engaged merely to live their Faith, but its construction brought African Americans and whites together in a cooperative effort to promote the oneness of humanity. Atlanta Bahá’ís continue to look on their small but historically rich Center as a source of encouragement and recognize it as an accomplishment during a difficult period in the history of the Faith in the South. It is still a place for Feasts, Holy Day celebrations, deepenings, meetings to teach the Faith, Spiritual Assembly meetings, and Children’s classes. It was built—literally—by hand as a place where all races could gather in unity.

A brief survey of the Atlanta Bahá’í community’s first forty years cannot pretend to be a definitive history. Rather, it is an overview of the initial struggles and victories of what is now one of the largest Bahá’í communities in the American South. This history, although not without conflict and trials, has been a cogent witness to the power of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh to unify humankind, especially in the segregated and racially polarized South, and attests to the courage and vision of the early Atlanta Bahá’ís of both races. The journey continues today, as evidenced by Bahá’í cooperative efforts in promoting race unity with admired Atlanta institutions such as The Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Center, and the historically African-American colleges that make up the Atlanta University Complex. These ties build on ties made to African-American institutions initiated by Bahá’ís during the first part of this century.

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Completion of the Cycle

III. EARTH (On the Strand)

I live in a room with high ceilings;

the pilasters at my windows

extend beyond their frames,

past my capacity for desire,

bounded at their borders

by my ineffable limitation.

Death is medium

into which one sinks slowly:

shell upon shell

we build our houses of darkness

against the effervescent intrusion

of the germ of life.

I have stuffed the cracks of my walls

with old newspapers and with dusty pages

against stray currents of insanity

that leak in

through the keyhole,

under the door,

around my windows.

I have stifled the drafts of inspiration,

taught them to be still,

to scarcely breathe,

to lie motionless

amid the dust of corner cobwebs.

I have seen them glistering suspended motes

of that captured dust:

light and dust and motion

creating themselves in a momentary genesis;

then, gone—

as I rip another page from a forgotten journal,

crumple the words to a sizable piece

for stuffing into the crevices of my delusion.

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IV. FIRE

. . . make of my prayer a fire that will burn away the veils which have shut
me out from Thy beauty, and a light that will lead me to the ocean
of Thy Presence.”
—Bahá’u’lláh

Fire is burning! Praised Creator!

I have breathed a prayer of flame!

Lighted lamp will guide the seeker,

Lead her to Thy sea of names.

Oceans of Thy Words surround me;

Still the fire is kindled bright . . .

Walls, afire, enashed are crumbling—

Hear the flames, O Lord of Light!

—Christine A. Boldt

Copyright © 1995 by Christine A. Boldt

[Page 46]

[Page 47]

Understanding the Gospels

A REVIEW OF ERIC BOWES’ The Gospels and the Christs (AUSTRALIA: BAHÁ’Í PUBLISHING AUSTRALIA, N.D.), 68 PAGES

BY SEN MCGLINN

Copyright © 1995 by Sen McGlinn.

ERIC Bowes, in his useful booklet The Gospels and the Christs, has related the pictures of Christ found in the Gospels to Bahá’í belief and to Bahá’ís’ dialogue with Christians. It is difficult to provide chapter summaries, as the material is rather diffuse, and the chapter titles seem to have been made up for the contents page after the text was written: “Introduction,” “About the Gospels,” “St. Matthew and St. Mark,” “St. Mark and the Acts of the Apostles,” “St. Luke’s Account,” “St. John’s Account,” and “Religion— Science—Reason.” In fact, the book has more the character of a general discussion of the Gospels, with deviations and byways, split up into six pieces.

Although one can object to some minor aspects of the book, its intent and general execution are laudable. In sixty-two pages Bowes describes the particular character of the presentation of Christ in each of the Gospels and also some of the problems arising from first the oral and then the handwritten passing on of the Apostles’ memories. The approach is conservative, both in regard to the attribution of the Gospels to the Apostles, or at least the apostolic age, and to later textual problems. Only the most certain instances of textual corruption are mentioned, as Bowes says that

it behooves us to go no further than to suggest to our [Christian] acquaintances that, because there are known variations in translations, it could be that what is written in our Bibles today may not be precisely what was written in the earliest days of Christianity. That being so, it may be wise to interpret any alleged sayings of Jesus in the light of, or in the context with, His combined sayings and the life He lived.

Thus Bowes steers a middle course between naive interpretations of the Bible, which simply ignore the existence of the problems, and the opposite extreme that is so skeptical it would leave one with no basis for dialogue with Christians who, though becoming aware of its problems, continue to use the Bible as their Holy Book.

One result of the gradual diffusion of an awareness that all is “not quite right” with the Bible has been an increase in interest in noncanonical books, gnostics, Essenes, the lost years of Christ, and so on. Any of these is a legitimate research interest, and any might provide some new insight into the life and person of Christ. None will yield any useful results, however, to the amateur. A deep knowledge of the cultures, languages, literatures, and history of the period is necessary to form a reasonable judgment in these fields, where the available evidence is fragmentary and where in many cases the documents were intended to deceive. Though one could hardly say that Bowes is an amateur in the field, he is writing for an amateur audience in a general [Page 48] and introductory way and might better have left mention of matters such as Jesus’ missing years or possible Essene background to another work in which he would have space to substantiate his suggestions.

Having discovered that the New Testament text that we have is the product of a very human process in the early Christian church, there is a temptation to discount it as an “official story” and to prefer the noncanonical books and the writings of the Gnostics simply because they were “suppressed.” This is to take a caricature of the church from later times as an ossified, obscurantist, and power-seeking hierarchy and read it back into the distant past. For example, in discussing the process of selection of the books of Bible, Bowes says that “one can, in the light of other known events which took place in the early days of the Church, assume fairly safely that deliberate intent to control the minds of the people was one powerful reason [for the selection].” This is grossly unfair to the good faith of the leaders of the early church and is based on a misunderstanding of how the canon was formed. It is true that one finds early Popes and councils giving lists of accepted and unaccepted books, but they do so long after the believers have, substantially, made the decisions. By using some books in the worship of the community, and not others, the body of believers made its choice. Because there were differences between Christian communities about a few books, and because the choice came under attack from break-away groups, clarifications and defenses of the church’s choice were made by its leaders—leaders who were quite often directly elected by their congregations. The church was young, fluid, and more or less faithful, with an authority structure only partially clarified and the center of power quite low in the community. There is no reason to speak as if the New Testament had been written or composed by the Spanish Inquisition.

Those who have read Bowes’ previous book These Things Shall Be will be familiar with his rather rough and breathless style. The Gospels and the Christs is much more readable but still contains occasional lapses of grammar (“similarly to what Matthew did,” p. 49) and, quite frequently, quotations that do not appear to relate to the question being discussed in the surrounding text. The chapter titled “St. Mark and The Acts of The Apostles” barely mentions either book, and the last chapter on religion, science, and reason might better have been omitted altogether. The way in which Bowes mixes factual information about a gospel with his own thoughts, inspirational applications of the biblical text to life, and comparisons with Bahá’í teachings may also be somewhat irritating to some. However, the conversational style is quite appropriate to the simple level of the book. If readers want detailed scholarship in New Testament studies, they can go to any number of commentaries and handbooks. In The Gospels and the Christs Eric Bowes relates New Testament scholarship, at a level accessible to everyone, to the life and belief of the present Bahá’í community. I recommend the book and hope that there will be more, and better, to follow.

[Page 49]

Authors & Artists

CHRISTINE BOLDT, whose poems have appeared in World Order, as well as in other journals, is publications manager for H. M. Gousha, Co., a division of Simon and Schuster.

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH is professor of history emeritus at Yale University and Editor of World Order.

SEN MCGLINN is a freelance editor who has pursued biblical studies and theology at Knox Theological Hall and the Holy Cross Seminary in Dunedin, New Zealand. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Otago, New Zealand. His interests include theology, literature, and church and state.

MIKE MCMULLEN is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Houston, Clear Lake campus. He holds an M.A. in sociology from Emory University and a Ph.D. from Emory University in Atlanta.

DIANA MALOUF is an assistant professor of English at Northern Michigan University. She has published translations of poems, a short story translated from Arabic into English, and academic articles on translation.

J. A. MCLEAN, a frequent contributor to World Order, holds a degree in literature from the Université de Paris (Sorbonne) in French literature, degrees from the universities of Ottawa and Toronto in religious studies, and a degree in the science of education from the Université du Québec in Hull. He also holds an M.A. degree in comparative religion from the University of Ottawa and is completing a Ph.D. in religious studies at the same university. His interests include philosophy, poetry, and world religions.

MARK PERRY is a Research Associate in the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace, Center for International Development and Conflict Management, at the University of Maryland at College Park. His essay “Pioneering Race Unity: The Chicago Bahá’ís, 1919-39" appeared in World Order’s Winter 1985-86 issue. Dr. Perry’s interests include classical flute and guitar and jazz drumming.

ART CREDITS: Cover design by John Solarz; cover photograph, Steve Garrigues; p. 1, photograph, Darius Himes; p. 6, photograph, Patrick Falso; p. 14, photograph, courtesy, Chicago Daily Defender Library; p. 26, photograph, Ken Francisco; pp. 29, 33, 35, photographs, courtesy National Bahá’í Archives; p. 46, photograph, Steve Garrigues.

[Page 50]