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Religion • Society • Polity • Arts

WORLD
ORDER

Common vision, purpose, and methodology—
precursors to universal consciousness

In this issue. . .

A New Level of
Universal Consciousness
Editorial

The 1952 and 1954 Trials
of Bahá’ís from Yazd, Iran
by Kazem Kazemzadeh
letters translated, introduced,
and annotated by Firuz Kazemzadeh
plus recollections of a youth
attending the 1954 trial
by Iraj Ayman

Alain Locke:
Four Talks Redefining
Democracy, Education,
and World Citizenship
edited and introduced by
Christopher Buck and
Betty J. Fisher

Matters of Opinion
A Review by
Derik Smith of
Alain Locke:
Faith and Philosophy
by Christopher Buck

Volume 38. No. 3

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Religion • Society • Polity • Arts

WORLD
ORDER

2006-07 VOLUME 38, NUMBER 3

WORLD ORDER AIMS TO
STIMULATE, INSPIRE, AND SERVE
ITS READERS IN THEIR SEARCH
TO UNDERSTAND THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN
CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND
CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS
AND PHILOSOPHY.

EDITORIAL BOARD

Betty J. Fisher

Arash Abizadeh

Monireh Kazemzadeh

Diane Lotfi

Kevin Morrison

Robert H. Stockman

Jim Stokes

CONSULTANT IN POETRY

Herbert Woodward Martin

INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS

World Order is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 536 Sheridan Road, Wilmette, IL 60091-1811. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher or of the Editorial Board.

Peer review: Submissions to the journal will be subject to external blind peer review if they fall outside the expertise of the Editorial Board or upon request by the author.

Submissions and other editorial correspondence should be addressed to the Editor, World Order, 7311 Quail Springs Place NE, Albuquerque, NM 87113-1780 or emailed to <worldorder@usbnc.org>. Detailed information for contributors may be requested in writing or by e-mail.

Manuscripts may be typewritten or computer generated; manuscripts accepted for publication are requested on computer disk (Microsoft Word or WordPerfect preferred) or by electronic submission. Article and review manuscripts must be double-spaced throughout and prepared in a 12-point Courier font; the footnotes must be at the end of the text and not attached electronically to the text. Each manuscript should list on the first page the article title, the author(s), and addresses, including telephone, fax, and e-mail.

Articles may range in length from some 3,750 to 6,250 words.

Reviews vary in length. Review Notes run from some 500 words; Mini-Reviews run from some 1,000 to 2,500 words, and Review Essays, from some 3,750 to 6,250 words.

Poems should be single spaced with clearly marked stanza breaks.

World Order is indexed in the ATLA Religion Database and The American Humanities Index and is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

INFORMATION FOR SUBSCRIBERS

Subscription Rate: U.S., 1 year, $25 USD; 2 years, $48 USD. All other countries, 1 year, $30 USD; 2 years, $58 USD. Single copies, $7 USD plus shipping and handling. Make checks or money orders payable to Bahá’í Distribution Service. Send address changes to and order subscriptions from the Bahá’í Distribution Service, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL, 60091-2844 U.S. Telephone: 1-800-999-9019, United States and Canada; 847-425-7950, all other countries. Or please e-mail :<subscription@usbnc.org>.

Back issues still in print may be obtained from the Bahá’í Distribution Service at the mailing address above or by e-mail at <bds@usbnc.org>. Orders for back issues on microfilm or microfiche can be obtained from National Archive Publishing Company, 300 North Zeeb Road, P.O. Box 998, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-0998 USA. Telephone: 1-800-420-6272. E-mail: <info@napubco.com>.

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2008 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States; all rights reserved. World Order is protected through trademark registration in the U.S. Patent Office. Printed in the U.S.A. ISSN 0043—8804.

ART CREDITS

Cover design by Ric Doering; p. 6, photograph, courtesy Steve Garrigues; pp. 9, 15, photographs, courtesy Firuz Kazemzadeh; p. 17, photograph, courtesy Iraj Ayman; p. 18, photograph, courtesy Steve Garrigues; p. 20, photograph, courtesy Glenford E. Mitchell; pp. 25, 40, photographs, courtesy Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University

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VOLUME 38, NUMBER 3

CONTENTS

2   A New Level of Universal Consciousness

Editorial

4   Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

7   The 1952 and 1954 Trials

of Bahá’ís from Yazd, Iran

by Kazem Kazemzadeh

Letters translated, introduced, and annotated by

Firuz Kazemzadeh

8   Kazem Kazemzadeh’s First-Hand Account

of Defending Bahá’ís from Yazd in 1952

13   Kazem Kazemzadeh’s First-Hand Account

of Defending Bahá’ís from Yazd in 1954

16   Recollections of a Bahá’í Youth Attending

the 1954 Trial

by Iraj Ayman

19   Vahid

poem by John Bryden

21   Alain Locke: Four Talks Redefining

Democracy, Education, and

World Citizenship

edited and introduced by Christopher Buck and

Betty J. Fisher

42   Matters of Opinion: A Review of

Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy

by Christopher Buck

by Derik Smith

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Editorial
A New Level of Universal Consciousness

Shakespeare’s King Lear, after losing all he has through his own foolishness and The heartlessness of two of his three daughters, finds himself, bareheaded and unprotected, in a violent storm. With his fool and a few faithful followers, he comes upon a desolate hovel. Lear stops, and, for the first time in his life, allows his fool and the other subjects to go in first, as he muses on the plight of all those who suffer:

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this!

We can find unfortunate modern parallels to Lear’s plight. In the past four or five years we have witnessed tsunamis, fires, floods, and earthquakes: More than 225,000 people perished in the tsunamis that hit Asia in December 2004. Some 1,800 died in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, and thousands of others suffered billions of dollars in losses of houses, buildings, and other property. At least 69,000 died, and more than 374,000 were injured in the May 2008 earthquake in China—among them, infamously, scores of school children.

Of course, it is impossible to stop natural disasters from occurring, but each of these cataclysms had preventable elements. Warning systems could have been in place; schools could have been built to stricter code; levees could have been reinforced; evacuation plans could have been drafted. Yet year after year we witness similar disasters with inevitable and immense losses of life, health, property.

To some extent such disasters take their tolls because of the inability, or at least the unwillingness, of those outside their path to consider, let alone sympathize with, the plight of others. Because we do not acknowledge the pain and misery that could but has not happened to us, we do not plan sufficiently in advance, and we do not spend money to ameliorate or prevent disasters. We refuse to think about the horrors that may occur to some unlucky souls somewhere else or in some other circumstance. As yet there is little evidence that society has developed the universal human sympathy that would induce it to take actions to mitigate the unspeakable human suffering arising from these disasters. Like so many King Lears, most of us develop a universal sympathy for the lowest and weakest and most unprotected in society only when we ourselves suffer a reversal of our fortunes. Yet the Bahá’í scriptures [Page 3] say that in this age people should strive to feel the same love and compassion for the entire human family that they do for their immediate families, for we all are members of a single human family.

But no less urgent is the responsibility to take action in the wake of such disasters. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains:

Realizing that wealth is desirable is not becoming wealthy. The admission that scientific attainment is praiseworthy does not confer scientific knowledge. Acknowledgment of the excellence of honor does not make a man honorable. Knowledge of human conditions and the needed remedy for them is not the cause of their betterment. . . .

The attainment of any object is conditioned upon knowledge, volition and action. Unless these three conditions are forthcoming, there is no execution or accomplishment.

Many do readily sympathize, as individuals, with those who suffer: The outpourings of aid and assistance by individuals and groups following a calamity are always forthcoming, and governments do spasmodically offer charitable assistance to those in dire straits. But what is needed is something entirely new in the world—empathetic and compassionate action of a completely different magnitude and kind. Were the peoples and the governments of the world to organize their natural sympathy and to marshal their resources in advance of massive disasters and then to systematize their practical response to them when they occur, they could flood any afflicted region with more assistance than it could possibly use.

But there is need for more than the habit of providing a massive response. In the world’s greatest hospitals, for example, a suffering patient is not visited by a solitary doctor (initially) but by a team representing every major specialty. They observe together; they diagnose together; they consult together; then they prescribe a course of action—together. And most often, the patient recovers and thrives. These teams embody applied and skillful compassion of the highest order.

The suffering peoples of the world desperately need a similar new and sophisticated kind of response—one that would find governments, nongovernmental entities, and individuals working together in service to their countless brothers and sisters—with a common vision, purpose, and methodology, infused with a new level of social maturity.

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Interchange

Letters from and to the Editor

The editors did not set out to prepare a theme issue, but somehow, from a disparate selection of pieces, a theme emerged anyway: the need for “A New Level of Universal Consciousness.”

The editorial, which bears that title, challenges us to make deliberate choices to attain what Shakespeare’s King Lear discovered the hard way after foolishly giving away his kingdom, putting his trust in two unreliable children, ignoring his one faithful child, and losing his mind: that heartfelt watchfulness seasoned with wisdom is the antidote to selfishness that results in “too little care” for the needy among us. Those who do not completely ignore the needy have a variety of responses ranging from sympathizing in the abstract to offering prayers; writing checks (often around holidays) and feeling they have done their duty (or at least secured a tax deduction); and leaving home, family, and jobs to help out during floods, hurricanes, and other disasters. Such actions are steps in the right direction. But, as the editorial argues, the world needs an “empathetic and compassionate action of a completely different magnitude and kind”—a response including government, civil society, and individuals, united with a “common vision, purpose, and methodology,” to prepare for handling disasters before they happen, not after.

Two letters written by Kazem Kazemzadeh (1898-1989), the lead defense attorney in 1952 and 1954 trials held in Tehran for Bahá’ís from Yazd, Iran, speak to the need for a new type of universal will and consciousness in defending the defenseless in courts of law worldwide. The letters give voice, more than half a century after the fact, to a widow and her five children murdered in 1951 (the smallest child accidentally and the remaining family members to cover up the child’s death) and to the members of the local Bahá’í governing body for Yazd and the several poor Bahá’í farmers in a nearby village whom corrupt policemen, intent on deflecting attention from the real murderers, accused of the crime. The accounts of the two trials capture the difficulties and stress suffered by the defendants and by the Bahá’í defense lawyers as they attempted to defend the innocent in an atmosphere laden with hostility and prejudice. The 1954 trial, held after an appeal from the 1952 trial was entered, resulted in reduced sentences, but the injustice of the verdict made a mockery of the concept of justice embodied in the statue of justice in the court room, her eyes blindfolded and a balance held in her hand. The letters are translated from the Russian by the lead attorney’s son, Firuz Kazemzadeh, and are published in World Order for the first time.

One of World Order’s editors had heard Firuz Kazemzadeh talk about the 1952 and 1954 trials a number of times over dinner and was particularly moved by the group of Bahá’í youth selected to surround and protect the Bahá’í lawyers as they entered and left the Tehran courtroom, the atmosphere being so fraught [Page 5] that there was considerable concern that the attorneys might be killed by the highly charged mobs attending the trial. She was amazed to find that she had worked with one of those Bahá’í youth for many years. Iraj Ayman, fifty-three years after the 1954 trial, has recorded his recollections of the event, which is still as vivid to him today as it was when he sat in the courtroom. The Editors know that there are others still alive whose fathers and relatives participated in the trials and very much hope that they will be able to add to the accounts about the two trials of innocent Bahá’ís.

In Volume 36, No. 3, World Order published a biographical article by Christopher Buck examining for the first time the Bahá’í connections of Alain Locke (1885-1954), a well-known race leader and social philosopher who set off the Harlem Renaissance in 1925 with the publication of The New Negro: An Interpretation of Negro Life. In the earlier issue we also published three essays that Locke wrote. In this issue we are pleased to publish four of Locke’s many talks, all given during the last fifteen years of his life, between the late 1930s and 1947, the years before the United States entered World War II and those immediately after the end of the conflict. But war is not the center of Locke’s talks. Rather his themes center around ones that resonate today as they did when Locke was speaking: the need for a new definition of democracy, for a different approach to education, and for a concept of citizenship suited to the new universal world in which we are living.

This issue concludes with a review essay by Derik Smith, an assistant professor of English literature at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, of Christopher Buck’s Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy, published in 2005. The book, Smith explains, makes a “significant contribution to scholarship on the history of the Bahá’í Faith in America” and provides much new information on Locke’s relationship to the Faith. It also sheds light on the thinking of a philosopher who constantly reexamined and updated his own conclusions and who urged those with whom he came in contact to work at reinventing themselves by adopting approaches suited to the age in which they lived—in this era by aspiring to a new level of universal consciousness.

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[Page 7]

KAZEM KAZEMZADEH

The 1952 and 1954 Trials of
Bahá’ís from Yazd, Iran

LETTERS TRANSLATED, INTRODUCED. AND ANNOTATED BY FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH
WITH RECOLLECTIONS OF A YOUTH ATTENDING THE 1954 TRIAL BY IRAJ AYMAN

Copyright © 2008 by Firuz Kazemzadeh.

KAZEM KAZEMZADEH

(1898-1989) received his primary education at the Bahá’í school in Ashgabat, graduated from that city’s Russian classical gymnasium and the low faculty of Moscow University; served on the staff of the Iranian embassy in Moscow; and practiced law in Tehran. He was for many years a member of the Spiritual Assembly of Tehran and the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Iron. In 1956 Kazemzadeh moved to the United States, where he taught at Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles, and served on the Spiritual Assemblies of the Bahá’ís of New Haven, Connecticut, and of Santa Monica, California.

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

Professor Emeritus of history, Yale University, is the author of books and articles on Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. He served thirty-five years on the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and for many years as editor of World Order, writing editorials, articles, and reviews for the magazine.

Ever since its inception in nineteenth-century Iran, the Bahá’í Faith has been subject to persecution by an unholy alliance Of Shiite clergy and a despotic state. Vilification, slander, economic pressure, withdrawal of fundamental human rights, denial of justice, and even massacre have been instruments used by the extremist elements among the mullahs, often supported by government authorities, in their attempts to exterminate the Bahá’í community in the country of its birth. Even the partial modernization that followed the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and the downfall of the Qajar dynasty that greatly decreased the power of the Shiite clergy failed to bring relief to Iran’s Bahá’ís. Through the entire Pahlavi (1925-79) period, discrimination and pressure, punctuated by outbreaks of physical violence, continued unabated.

In the wake of World War II Iran underwent a period of confusion and turmoil. The reemergence of political parties and the resurgent power of the [Page 8] Shiite clergy produced instability that endangered the Bahá’ís, who could be attacked with impunity since the authorities were largely unwilling, and at times even unable, to protect them. The influence of the clergy further increased in 1953 when its leaders, the Ayatollahs Borujerdi and Kashani, sided with the Shah in his conflict with Prime Minister Mosaddeq. The Shah was now beholden to the mullahs who demanded, as payment for their services, freedom to suppress the Bahá’ís. The supposedly independent judiciary was tightly controlled by the government and decided cases at the direction of either the Cabinet or the Court. The majority of the legal profession were either intimidated or, with some outstanding exceptions, shared the prevailing prejudices of Iranian society. Persecution intensified with the estabiishment Of the Islamic regime and continues to this day.

The following two documents deal with two trials of Bahá’ís falsely accused of inciting and committing murder. I have translated them from the Russian and have added footnotes to clarify a number of points.

The background to the trials involved a widow and her five young children all of whom were murdered in 1951 in Abarqu, a small town or village near Yazd in south-centtal Iran. Local police suspected a relative; but, since he was a person of standing in the community, they referred the case to Yazd, the provincial center. Suddenly original suspicions of the local police were discarded. Instead, the authorities arrested the entire membership of the Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Yazd and several other Bahá’ís, among them three simple farmers in Abarqu. The farmers were accused of the murders and the members of the Spiritual Assembly of incitement to murder. The case was widely advertised in the press. The trial was held in Tehran, giving it maximum publicity. The original verdict was appealed, and a second trial was held. At the conclusion of each trial, my father, the lead defense lawyer, wrote the following letters to me.

—FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

Kazem Kazemzadeh’s First-Hand Account
of Defending Bahá’ís from Yozd in 1952

June 1952
My Dear Son:

The trial of the Yazd friends began on May 7 and ended on May 27. You cannot imagine what we endured in those twenty-one days. What agitation, what anxiety for the fate of those unfortunate men, what apprehension and fear for our own lives have we, defenders of a righteous cause, experienced. And the outcome of the trial? Four sentenced to death, three to ten years imprisonment, nine [members of the [Page 9] Spiritual Assembly] to three years. This verdict dealt us a moral blow from which we have yet to recover.

One could expect anything from such a court and such judges; but to condemn three innocent peasants who had done nothing, from whom the examining magistrate obtained a confession by trickery, charlatanry, and deception— that I did not expect. These unfortunates are illiterate. They affixed their fingerprints to the protocol of the investigation not knowing what was written there.

More than a thousand persons were in the hall where the trial was held. In a box reserved for the press there sat forty to fifty head of mullahs. The public was select in the full sense of the term— that is, they picked from the street anyone who suited their purpose and paid him three tumans. The guards numbered some 100 to 150 men. On the third or fourth day of the trial all who wanted to enter the hall were searched. It was said that weapons were found on and confiscated from several people.

---

KAZEM KAZEMZADEH
lead defense lawyer for the 1952 and 1954 trials
of the Bahá’ís of Yazd, Iran, c. 1954-55

---

In addition to the assistant prosecutor, ten lawyers participated as parties to the civil suit. There were only four of us defense attorneys of whom one, having assessed the situation, got sick (apparently of an upset stomach); another appeared on the final day of defense arguments and said a few words about the United Nations, human rights, and so on, constantly emphasizing that he was hostile to the religious convictions of the defendants.

After the speech of the assistant prosecutor, a Sunni, we, the defense, lodged a protest and resigned. This, if you will pardon the expression, assistant prosecutor read a speech prepared for him ahead of time pouring forth mud, insults, and slander on the accused and their beliefs. At the end of his spurious speech he demanded severe punishment of the defendants so as to avoid vengeance of the people. It was after this speech of the assistant prosecutor that we, the defense, resigned, declaring to the Court that we had been deprived of the necessary guaranty [of safety] and that, after the assistant prosecutor’s speech one heard in the hall shouts of “Execution, execution!”

[Page 10] The Court found itself in a difficult situation, and we did not feel too well either. According to judicial procedure, after our resignation the Court should have appointed two or three defense attorneys. The defendants could reject such defense attorneys in which case they must choose their own attorneys and recommend them to the Court. There was apprehension that, if the defendants chose us for the second time, the Court would refuse the request on the ground that we had been chosen before and had resigned. There was such a precedent. But if, as a form of protest, the defendants refused to choose their attorneys, the Court on its own could appoint attorneys, as was done for four other defendants; and such attorneys, not knowing the case and not caring for the accused, would have talked a lot of irrelevant nonsense and would have recounted in detail that they regretted being compelled, in accordance with the instructions of the Court, to defend individuals to whose convictions they were adverse, that in our country the official religion is Islam of Shiite denomination, and so on. One of the defense lawyers appointed by the court literally said such things.

Considering all this, when the presiding judge told me and Navidi that we were wrong to resign and that we would be given full guaranty [of safety], we said that we would be ready to defend the accused as advocates appointed by the Court. He, the presiding judge, agreed and appointed us. The further peripeteia of our resignation and appointment are too detailed, and I shall not write about them.

Private advocates began their speeches. They were a bunch selected from among three or four arrant fanatics, three or four lawyers in the worst sense of that term. I would have liked more fully to characterize these gentlemen but don’t think one could find a better epithet than “Persian lawyer” in the worst sense to characterize these persons.

These gentlemen, having turned the rostrum of the court into a tribune of a political or religious meeting, said that Bahá’ís had no prohibition against marrying their sisters or daughters; that they considered everything, including dog excrement and human semen, ritually clean; that in Baha’u’llah’s laws nothing was said about how to treat a female thief, while there was a law about a male thief (Kitab-i-Aqdas speaks of the punishment of thieves in the masculine gender, and these gentlemen, alleged lawyers, concluded that female thieves were not to be punished); that Bahá’ís must change the furnishings of their homes every nineteen years or suffer excommunication.

Another lawyer, editor of the newspaper Dad, who broke the record of maliciousness and hostility, devoted forty minutes of his speech to reading the so-called “Memoirs of Prince Dolgorukii” and came to the banal conclusion that this religion [Page 11] was created by a Russian diplomat. Words such as spies, murderers, men without fatherland, traitors, apostates, were repeated incessantly, but the presiding judge never stopped the overzealous advocates. When the lawyers, foaming at the mouth, described the method of the murder of the unfortunate woman and her five children, the public either expressed its indignation at the “cruelty” of the accused or applauded the orator who demanded the death penalty for all eighteen men. When applause was heard, the presiding judge would ring and direct the guard to remove the violators of order from the hall; but this was only a formality perfectly understood by both the public and the guards. Therefore, during the entire trial not one person was ejected.

In the intermission suspicious persons distributed leaflets that demanded that the Court severely punish the accused. One leaflet bore a drawing: a woman is sitting on the rug by a samovar, and around her, five children. These supposedly are Soqra and her five children resting at the family hearth after a day’s work; and below, another picture—cadavers of the woman and five children covered with blood, the blood represented by red stains—shabby, grubby pictures in a cheap Persian manner. However, even these shabby leaflets made a strong impression on Persian minds and feelings, if Persians have them. From every side one heard words of revilement cast at the defendants and even at their attorneys.

Had I the time and the inclination I would have written a whole book about this trial, and the book would have turned out quite interesting and instructive. But, alas, there is a more urgent issue before me than writing a book, the issue of daily bread. For twenty-one days I was deprived of rest and sleep. I frequently sat up until four in the morning and got up at six. You can imagine your father limited to two hours of sleep. I have lost much weight and turned pale and weak. Yet at the trial I acted heroically. A smile never left my lips. I calmed the defendants, kept persuading them that the case could be won, frequently conversed with them. And an impression was created among all those present at the trial that I was the most reckless, the strongest, and the bravest of the defense lawyers. I will write you another time about my speech and the reactions of others.

All of us defense lawyers spoke well and with dignity; but the Court frequently stopped us even in instances where we attempted to reply to certain insinuations or slanderous statements by the accusers. Thus, when at the start of my speech I said that the pamphlet entitled “Memoirs of Prince Dolgorukii” was read here and that to avoid possible misunderstanding I intended to prove that this document was a forgery composed by a Persian and not by a Russian diplomat, the presiding judge said that the document had no particular significance for the trial. In order not to [Page 12] contradict the presiding judge on whose caprice and mood depended the fate of my clients, I replied that, following his instructions, I would not touch this issue and would confine myself to pointing out the fact that the content of this pamphlet kept changing all the time. Some “facts,” too obviously mendacious, have not appeared in new editions; chronological errors were corrected, and so on. For comparison of their texts I deposited with the Court two of the pamphlets printed at different times, from which it will be clear to the Court that the memoirs were counterfeit. With the pamphlets I gave the Court a note pointing out several examples of such divergences.

My speech, given in two sessions, lasted some three or four hours. Having finished the speech that had been completely written and typed out, I submitted a copy to the Court. After the speeches of the defense, the assistant prosecutor spoke again so as to give an opportunity for private [civil] accusers to pour their bile and malice upon the unfortunates. After that came our turn, and we gave an appropriate answer to the slanderers. The Court declared a recess and left for deliberations. This was at ten o’clock in the morning. We defense attorneys left the court. The defendants were returned to prison since deliberations could last several hours.

During the Court’s deliberations, all the dark forces were set in motion, and all buttons were pushed, and all means used. Today, when we visited the prison for consultations with the condemned, an officer of the prison guard said that the presiding judge who brought out such a draconian verdict was afraid to leave the hall of the trial and kept asking the guard to make sure that there would be no one in his way. From 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. when the verdict was announced, the public did not leave the hall, expressed its impatience, and constantly made its presence known by uttering prayer-like exclamations.

And thus under pressure of these elements and of others hidden from the eyes of ordinary mortals, the Court rendered its shameful unprecedented decision. Of course, the verdict will be appealed, but the facts remain. The criminal court consisting of five judges, motivated by both religious fanaticism and other, more realistic, considerations, terrorized by a fanatical clergy and a group of adventurers, brought out a verdict that was received with an ovation by a handpicked and paid crowd and the revulsion and indignation of all honest people.

Dear son, I have filled ten pages but recounted only a hundredth of what I went through during this historic trial. I shall write more. I finish for now. I kiss you . . . and Wish you happiness and achievements. Pray for us. Write more often. We are all in good health.

Yours,

Kazem

[Page 13] Kazem Kazemzadeh’s First-Hand Account of
Defending Bahá’ís from Yozd in 1954

My Dear Firuzi:

Your letter in which you inform us about going to work at Harvard brought us great joy. God willing you will achieve great success and fulfill your hopes in this arena. I could not answer your letter in a timely fashion because I was busy at the trial.

As you know, two years ago a so-called criminal court in Tehran condemned nine members of the Spiritual Assembly of Yazd accused of subornation to the murder of an unfortunate woman, who lived in Abarqu, and of her five children to three years’ imprisonment; and three Bahá’í peasants indicted for the murder of the members of that family to execution; and two more Bahá’ís to ten years imprisonment each. The Supreme Court (again so-called), after two years of procrastination, at last got enough courage to rescind this, if you will pardon the expression, verdict as it related to the three who had been condemned to death, to one member of the Spiritual Assembly who had been sentenced to three years at hard labor, and to another Bahá’í, condemned to ten years at hard labor. As far as the last two men were concerned, the verdict was voided for the simple reason that both convicted men were over sixty years old, and the law does not provide for hard labor for old people.

The case of these five was remanded to the Second Section of the Criminal Court for a new trial. The members of this court, particularly its presiding judge, were relatively decent and honest men. The trial began on June 13 and lasted fourteen days. At first everything went well, and all of us got the impression that all the defendants would be exculpated. The defense team consisted of me, Navidi, and Razi. In addition to the assistant prosecutor, a rooster with a hen’s brain, our adversaries were four other unmitigated rogues—that is, lawyers.

When our turn came, Mr. Razi in a very ardent speech refuted all the slanderous accusations. Then our opponents resorted to their old tried weapon—there materialized at the trial mullahs, bearded men with rosary beads, fanatics, followers of Navvab Safavi, founder of the Fadayan-e Eslam group; there appeared the murderers of the former minister Hazhir and of Kasravi. As I spoke, one heard shouts, curses, and threats. Order was maintained in the court by some thirty policemen and outside [Page 14] by a regiment of soldiers. Admission to the trial was only by tickets that were distributed by the prosecutor. Whenever an applicant was recognized as a Bahá’í, he was refused a ticket.

The closer we came to the end of the trial, the more furious became the attacks of the enemies. There appeared newspaper articles targeting the defendants. Three days before the end of the trial, leaflets were distributed in the hall calling for the death penalty for all the accused. After my first speech, when the judges had not yet left the hall, one character in clerical garb, a big fellow (later we heard that he was Kasravi’s murderer) shouted at full throat, “We demand the death penalty for all the defendants. Otherwise we will hang them ourselves and will cut to pieces their defense attorneys and the members of the Court.”

The day before the end of the trial, taking advantage of mourning on the occasion of the Imam’s death, a crowd of shopkeepers, tramps, and adventurers gathered in a mosque. Speeches were made, calling to finish with Bahá’í murderers, to march to the court, and to demand the harshest punishment of the accused. And, as is the custom, all sorts of idle stories and fairy tales circulated about the Bahá’ís who supposedly bribed everyone and everything. Fortunately, the authorities took appropriate measures and prohibited the crowd’s leaving the mosque.

On the eve of the trial’s last day, a member of parliament, to intimidate the Court and the minister of justice himself, asked the government a question, made up by our enemies, about the course of the trial. The last three days of the trial presented an interesting picture. Through the corridors of the court there marched arrogantly back and forth all sorts of terrorist fanatics. Behind them, like obedient slaves, crawled young men with black beards. Every moment one heard the thunder of “Salavat” [God’s blessing], as some mullah appealed to the faithful to defend the foundations of Islam from the infidels, and the crowd shouted “Sallallah Muhammad va al-e Muhammad” [God’s benediction upon Muhammad and Muhammad’s family]. Others were recounting the tragic death of a Muslim woman and her five children at the hands of apostates. Sounds like wailing rose from the crowd. At the doors of the court there stood armed gendarmes. We were stared at as if we were monsters. At the end of each session we defense lawyers were surrounded by policemen who accompanied us to the cars because there was information about preparations of an attempt at our assassination. In addition to the police, we were guarded, secretly, by ten to fifteen [Bahá’í] young men.

Obviously, to render a just verdict in the case of innocent Bahá’ís in such an atmosphere heroes would have been needed; but since the judges were not heroes but just common contemporary Persians, all these demonstrations, threats, and pressures had their requisite effect, and they brought out the following verdict: the three men who had been condemned to death at the previous trial were given ten years in prison. The member of the Spiritual Assembly of Yazd was acquitted because the fact of his participation in and presence at the meetings of the Assembly had [Page 15] not been proved. The old man who had been sentenced to ten years was given five years.

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THE NATIONAL SPIRITUAL ASSEMBLY OF THE BAHÁ’ÍS OF IRAN
Seated, left to right: Ali Akbar Furutan, Adelaide Sharp, Shoallah Alai. Standing, left to right: Jalal
Khazeh, General Sohrab, Monir Darakhshan, Zikrullah Khadem, Kazem Kazemzadeh

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At first we were all stunned by this unjust verdict. But gradually, as passions subsided, and we coolly weighed all the circumstances, we came to the conclusion that even for that we should say “Thank you.”

Two weeks of the trial have completely frayed my nerves, and now, when by every article of every law I deserve a rest, I must again perform the heavy duties of the secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly because Mr. Furutan left for the provinces and his trip will last about four or five months. I have filled six pages, and they are waiting for me at the Assembly’s office. Kiss my lovely and dear granddaughter. . . . I kiss you.

Yours,

Kazem

July 5, 1954

[Page 16]

IRAJ AYMAN

Recollections of o Bahá’í Youth
Attending the 1954 Trial

IRAJ AYMAN

Copyright © 2008 by Iraj Ayman.

IRAJ AYMAN
received his Ed.D. from Edinburgh University in Scotland and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Southern California in 1958. He completed post-doctoral studies at Harvard University. He is professor emeritus of The University of Teacher Education in Iran and has been a visiting Professor of education and management at The University of California, Los Angeles, and of The University of the Philippines. A UNESCO Educational Adviser, he teaches classes in spiritual development and the nature of education for the Wilmette Institute.

November 17, 2007

My recollections of what I witnessed and learned about the infamous trial of the Bahá’ís of Yazd in 1954 belongs to half a century ago and may not be as sharp, exact, and accurate as I wish it could be. But I was an eyewitness to the horrifying scene of that maliciously staged trial of innocent Bahá’ís, including the members of the Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Yazd.

The background of the trial was this: Omidsalar, an influential tribal chief in the area of Dehbid and Abarqu (two small towns located between the two cities of Abadeh and Yazd) and a member of the Parliament, was interested in taking as one of his wives a very young girl who was living with her widowed mother, Soqra, and her four other younger siblings in one of the small villages near Abarqu. Soqra did not want Omidsalar to take her daughter. One night a few of Omidsalar’s men went to Soqra’s home to force her to agree with Omidsalar’s demand. In their struggle they inadvertently caused the death of Sughra’s baby child. Frightened by the possibility of being recognized as the murderers Of the innocent baby, they decided to eliminate the entire family. Hence they murdered Soqra and her children.

Omidsalar, who was familiar with the situation of the Bahá’ís in Dehbid and Abadeh, worked out a plot to show that the Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Yazd had arranged that murderous act. This was because in 1943 he had initiated an anti-Bahá’í upheaval that lead to an all-out attack on the Bahá’ís of Abadeh and the burning of their Ḥaẓíratu’l-Quds (Bahá’í community center) Thus, due to the earlier riot in that area, the end result of the election conducted in the Abadeh area, which was not in favor of Omidsalar, was nullified, and he won the election and became a member of Parliament. In that case the criminal court in Yazd ruled in his favor. So he was confident that, if the members of the Spiritual Assembly of Yazd were accused of causing the murder, the criminal court of Yazd would rule against the Bahá’ís.

[Page 17] The result of Omidsalar’s plot was that the local authorities in the Abarqu area arrested and imprisoned a number of Bahá’ís who had pioneered there, as well as the members of the Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Yazd (who were accused of being the main plotter of that murderous act). The prosecuting attorney of Yazd issued an indictment, full of lies, abuse, slander, and accusations against the Bahá’ís, which was printed and widely distributed throughout the country. Finally, the local authorizes in Yazd sent the prisoners and the entire file to Tehran. Thus the court proceedings ensued that Kazem Kazemzadeh has recorded in his historic letters about the 1952 and 1954 trials.

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IRAJ AYMAN
a youth eyewitness of the 1954 trial of the Bahá’ís
of Yazd and one of the young Bahá’ís selected as
security guards for the Bahá’í defense lawyers

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As for the trial itself: I accompanied a small group of young Bahá’ís who were asked to attend the court proceedings and serve as security guards for the Bahá’í lawyers. Since we were not joining the crowd in what they were shouting all the time, it was obvious that we were Bahá’ís. The trial was conducted in the grand hall of the Supreme Criminal Court, which had a high ceiling. Behind the panel of judges there was a huge and imposing statue of Justice (a lady with covered eyes holding a balance in her hand). Several spectators were in the balcony facing the panel of the judges. There is no jury system in Iran. Instead, there were a presiding judge and two assistant judges (dadyars). Defense lawyers and the plaintiffs (private attorneys) were seated on the right side of the hall facing the Prosecutor-General and his assistants. The defendants were seated in the middle of the hall facing the panel of judges. Bahá’í lawyers were defending the Bahá’ís, including the members of the Spiritual Assembly of Yazd, trying to prove their innocence while plaintiffs were attempting to refute the arguments of the Bahá’í lawyers. On the whole it was a very grand and impressive environment, if it had not been for the presence, interference, and agitations of the hired ruffians and a group of old and young mullahs.

It was, indeed, a frightening experience. The Bahá’í lawyers made their statements in a very brave, logical, well-documented, and polite manner. But each time they started to make their statement a crowd of several hundreds rogues and ruffians began to shout “Khafeh Shu” (Shut up) and “Salavat” (God’s blessing, a tribute to Muhammad and His decedents). In this way they were constantly interrupting the statements of the Bahá’í lawyers. We were afraid to enter or exit the court room and the building of the Ministry of Justice alone and moved together as a group while the hired ruffians shouted abuse at us. All these things took place inside the building of the Ministry of Justice where policemen and other security officers were [Page 18] standing around but would not dare to stop those who were shouting abuse and slander at us and were disgracing the Founders of the Bahá’í Faith, Bahá’u’lláh and the Báb. We could see how the Bahá’í lawyers were courageously putting their own lives at great risk. All the time I was marveling at their courage, and I was extremely afraid for their safety. I testify that there is no exaggeration in what Kazem Kazemzadeh has written. As a matter of fact, he has written it in a very mild language that does not fully pictures the great ordeal that he and others experienced. I vividly remember those situations. The speeches of Aziz Navidi and Kazem Kazemzadeh are still ringing in my ears as if I were sitting in that courtroom. I hope that the text of those speeches could one day be found.

[Page 19]

Vahid

When the gate swings open to allow perceiving

The pen wants lines enough to write—if it may dare

And would nineteen suffice for the living

Ones who were drawn by light craving

The One—of Whom their souls became aware

When the Gate swung open to allow perceiving

Of a new world which His holy Words were weaving

For which to sacrifice their lives would be the share

of the nineteen Letters of the Living

God who sent them on their way reviving

A parched land all barren dry and bare

When the Gate swung open to allow perceiving

Giving to a world that slumbers—still unconceiving

In a nightmare of division heaving—that rare

Thing unity—which would suffice the living

And is worth hard pursuit—constant—unwavering

Braving against despair until the world is fair

Then the gate will open to allow perceiving

That God suffices all—He is the Living

—JOHN BRYDEN

Copyright © 2008 by John Bryden.

JOHN BRYDEN grew up in Samoa, the child of Christian missionary parents from New Zealand. He has lived in Australia and Singapore, from where his Chinese wife hales. At university he studied Asian history, which continues to be a lifelong interest. He began writing poetry as a way of dealing creatively with a period of personal crisis. Above all, he strives to express accurately the struggle and joy of his faith as a Bahá’í. Bryden now lives in New Zealand.

[Page 20]

[Page 21]

Alain Locke: Four Talks Redefining Democracy,
Education, and World Citizenship

EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY CHRISTOPHER BUCK AND BETTY J. FISHER

Copyright © 2008 by Christopher Buck and Betty J. Fisher.

CHRISTOPHER BUCK
is an attorney and Independent scholar, who has taught at Michigan State University, Quincy University, Millikin University, and Carleton University. His publications include Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy; Paradise and Paradigm: Key Symbols in Persian Christianity and the Bahá’í Faith; Symbol and Secret: Qur’an Commentary in Bahá’u’lláh’s Kitáb-i-Íqán; and a lead chapter in The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an. His “Religious Myths and Visions of America: How Minority Faiths Redefined America’s World Role” is slated for publication in 2009 by Praeger. Dr. Buck holds a law degree in constitutional law and civil rights from The Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan, and a Ph.D. in the academic study of religion from the University of Toronto.

BETTY J. FISHER
holds a Ph.D. in medieval English literature from The University of Wisconsin, Madison, and has taught at several universities. She was The General Editor of The U.S. Bahá’í Publishing Trust from 1971 through 1995, has served on The Board of The Bahá’í Encyclopedia Project since its inception in 1984, and has been a member of the World Order Editorial Board since 1968.

Alain Locke (1885-1954) was an extraordinary individual who, in his almost seven decades, made an unforgettable mark on the African American community in the United States and who still has much to say to the world at large about prejudice, racism, democracy, and world citizenship—and the importance of being not behind or on the curve, but ahead of it. Locke lived what he wrote, for he was ahead of the curve in just about everything he did for most of his sixty-nine years. In 1907 he became the first African American Rhodes Scholar. With the publication in 1925 of The New Negro: An Interpretation of Negro Life, an anthology showcasing African American artists, he became known as the Dean of the Harlem Renaissance, which sought to advance African Americans through race relations, the arts, and social thought, leaving behind European and white American styles and celebrating the black experience. Professionally, Locke was a philosopher. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in an unpublished speech given on 19 March 1968, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, compared Locke to Plato and Aristotle, saying that “We’re going to let our children know that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe.

[Page 22] Locke “redefined” democracy through his evolving conceptions of the philosophy of democracy, widening its scope to include at least nine dimensions: local democracy, moral democracy, political democracy, economic democracy, cultural democracy, racial democracy, social democracy, spiritual democracy, and world democracy.

In the field of education, Locke was first and foremost a teacher, both in the classroom and in his books, his many essays, and his talks. He became a leader in the adult-education movement, serving one term (1946-47) as the first African American president of the predominantly white American Association for Adult Education. In the aftermath of World War II he urged educators to foster “international-mindedness,” which, he said, “can only be created through some definite collective effort at mutual understanding and by developing a sense of common purpose among educators throughout the world.”

As a corollary to his interest in world-mindedness, Locke championed world citizenship, perhaps most eloquently in a 1944 essay entitled “Stretching Our Social Mind” (reprinted below).

Locke’s academic training included undergraduate studies at Harvard University, where he was one of a handful of African Americans; graduate work at Hertford College at Oxford and at the University of Berlin; and, finally, a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1918. His distinguished teaching career began at Howard University, a premier African American university in Washington, D.C., and included a number of visiting and exchange professorships at universities in the United States and Haiti. Locke, whom W. E. B. Du Bois described in 1927 as being “by long odds the best trained man among younger American Negroes,” became, during the 1930s and until his death in 1954, a well-known national figure with honors and appearances too numerous to list.

In 1918, the year in which Locke was awarded a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard, he declared himself to be a Bahá’í. Initial research has already begun to reveal the nature of his commitment and contributions to the Bahá’í [Page 23] Faith, particularly in the area of race relations and intercultural understanding. Because Locke did not leave diaries or records showing exactly how the tenets of the Bahá’í Faith helped to shape his thinking, much remains to be done to clarify the exact nature of various influences on his work. However, many themes in his writings resonate with the teachings of the Bahá’í Faith: the progressive nature of unfolding truths, the elimination of all kinds of prejudices (religious, racial, national, cultural, and so on), the role of education in enlarging mind-sets, seeing and treating all peoples as spiritual beings, attaining a sense of world citizenship. In the four talks that follow one will find these themes and more.

Below we have transcribed four of Locke’s essays from typewritten copies, edited them conservatively, and are publishing them for the first time. We have preserved Locke’s spelling, adding clarifications in brackets in several places. We have also preserved Locke’s punctuation, adding punctuation marks in brackets only where the text becomes hard to read. We have deleted the commas and semicolons Locke often used before em-dashes and have used house style to make ending quotations marks consistent throughout. Words and phrases that Locke added by hand we have set in italics and have noted his additions in footnotes.

ALAIN LOCKE: THE PRESERVATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC IDEAL

Archival records do not reveal when Alain Locke gave the talk he called “The Preservation of the Democratic Ideal,” but internal evidence (his reference to something he wrote in “1935, three and a half years ago”) suggests that it can be dated to 1938 or 1939. The audience, according to references in the talk, is social workers plying their profession in the tradition of settlement houses providing services directly to the poor in urban areas. Locke’s assignment, he states at the end of his talk, was to “emphasize the pivotal place of the minority situation on the present-day battle front of democracy and the critical need for social and cultural democracy as the bulwark of as much democracy as we have or even realistically can hope to attain.”

Two themes animate the presentation—redefining democracy and the need for education aimed at changing hearts. The responsibility for education, Locke says, belongs to the press, the schools, the pulpit, and radio (then a fairly recent innovation) but also to the social workers who have a “particularly intimate exposure” to the problems of minorities.

In redefining democracy, Locke advocates pressing “forward more vigorously and more rapidly toward” attaining “social democracy in actual practice,” the “test touchstone” being [Page 24] “minority status, minority protection, minority rights.” The minorities he cites include Slavs, Southern Europeans, Jews, Orientals, Native Americans, Mexicans, and Negros—an “ominous rainbow” subjected to “social bias and prejudice.” Keeping “political democracy,” he asserts, requires “more social democracy and more economic democracy.” For Locke, redefining democracy and educating to change hearts includes the Americanization of Americans in their “social attitudes and behavior,” the goal being to “establish democracy in the heart of our social relations.” Many of Locke’s insights resonate in the twenty-first century as they did in the late 1930s in the years before the United States entered World War II.

There is only one really effective way to preserve the democratic ideal, it seems to me, and that is to press forward more vigorously and more rapidly toward the attainment of social democracy in actual practice [sic]. As far as theory goes[,] we have a fairly adequate tradition and conception of democracy, even though it could stand broad extension on the economic front, but it is in the general practice of even what is traditional in our democracy that the present danger to democracy lies. We all sense the immanent [sic] danger of a lapsing democratic practice—you and I especially perhaps, you as social workers on the yet undemocratic and unliquidated frontier of underprivilege, of social and economic discrimination, I, as a Negro, on that insidious and dangerous flank frontier of race discrimination and prejudice. So here we are together to discuss[,] at a strategic point and a critical hour[,] What can be done and what must be done to safeguard or even save democracy.

Now it isn[’]t easy to be or live a social problem and it is far from pleasant to be an alarming symptom. And it may not seem modest to put one’s own case forward or flaunt one[’]s own cause first. However[,] these are no times for polite complacencies and pleasant proprieties. Most Negroes know what’s wrong with American democracy, and in times like these it is false modesty as well as bad policy not to speak and speak frankly. Democracy just can[’]t stand too much exceptions and too flagrant contradiction in practice. Surely ours isn[’]t the only case; but it is the oldest and most chronic case. It has its lessons and its warnings particularly now when even democratic theory is being seriously and powerfully challenged, and to press these matters now is not merely the pleading of a special case but the sounding of a general warning and call to a vital general cause and issue.

Constitutional guarantees, legal and civil rights, political machinery of democratic action and control are, of course, the skeleton foundation of democracy, but you and I know that attitudes are the flesh and blood of democracy, and that without their vital reenforcement [sic] democracy is really moribund or dead. That is my reason for thinking that in any democracy, ours included, the crucial issue, the test touchstone of democracy is minority status, minority protection, minority rights. It isn[’]t the sum total of democracy, but it is a crucial and critical factor. Ce[r]tainly of all groups[,] settlement workers should know this, being in a sense special guardians of this, democracy’s most critical and dangerous frontier. This has been [Page 25] so since the early days of settlement pioneering when the settlement house was the democratic citadel outpost in the economic and cultural Ghettos of our land. However the situation has changed, with the vast changes both in the character of settlement work itself and in the character of the typical settlement area or neighborhood, this core problem remains; you are still[,] all in all, missioners and custodians of democratic attitudes, combat troups [sic] of one of the most vital fronts of democracy in action. And in the present crisis, this role becomes even more critical and important, for it is just here on this front that the reaction against democracy is lunging [sic, launching?] its most violent offensive, threatening both minorities and the basic attitudes and princ1ples of democracy itself.

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ALAIN LOCKE
An undated studio portrait by James Allen, similar,
to one published in Ebony magazine in 1952.
Courtesy, Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research
Center, Howard University.

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Lest I seem too alarmist, or too panicky about this issue, allow me to read a few paragraphs I wrote in 1935, three and a half years ago. Except for the Negro’s case, the situation was surely not so critical then. But even then, it was perfectly true and accurate to say that we were too complacent about our way of democracy, too supine and inconsistent, too unaware of the fact that democracy’s house was not in good order. I am quoting now: “America has a curiously laissez-faire tradition on the subject of minorities. It has been our naive and pious belief that[,] in her atmosphere of freedom and opportunity[,] minority differences would fade out. This belief did not extend to the field of religion[,] but religious sects were supposed to live in mutual tolerance even if they could not fraternize. But separatism and migration, I think, account for much of the earlier historical manifestations of tolerance in America and indifference for much of the later phases. Our orthodox tradition, [sic] has been that[,] by ignoring these differences[,] they would automatically disappear,[.] Most of them (but here note the Negro exception) are glossed over by a thin veneer of conformity to help keep up the majority illusion; (the most contrary to fact myth in our American social thinking, need I point out to social and settlement workers.)”

[Page 26] “But the close observer scarcely needs the vagaries of 100 percent Americanism or the recurrent rampancy of Ku-Kluxism to convince him that we in fact have only a precarious truce. These minority traditions carry on beneath the surface of our superficially composite life, ready for volcanic explosions of social fear, persecution and prejudice[,] or for milder eruptions of social snobbishness and factionalism. Without belittling the amount of real tolerance that America has achieved in these matters, it can still be said that America is full of minority groups, some repressed, some suppressed, all of them in varying degree dangers and challenges, but, if rightly handled, opportunities to [for] the attainment of sound social democracy.”

“I may be in error, I should like to be, but I cannot believe that the American situation is so very exceptional (as compared to Europe) and that the Atlantic and Pacific ocenas [sic, oceans] have thrwon [sic, thrown] around us an effective psychological quara[n]tine. If the American social mind were not so particularly peculiarly subject to racial prejudice[,] one might have some ground for such belief. As a matter of fact, whatever else they prove, those questionnaires that the professors of sociology are tabulating show a wide and very typical spectrum of American social antipathies[,] running a gamut from Slavs and Southern Europeans to Jews, Orientals, Indians, Mexicans and Negroes. This ominous rainbow, with a few local but not significant variations, shows a wide dif[f]usion of social bias and prejudice in our social atmosphere and unfortunately presages not the passing but the coming of a storm.[”]

“It does not seem, then, that America is as much of an exception in these matters as is commonly thought[,] and unless America solves these minority issues constructively and achieves minority peace or minority tolerance, in less than half a generation she will be in the flaming predicament of Europe. Her plight may perhaps be even worse because of the closer justaposition [sic] of these elements in the context of American life and culture. . . . We must realize that active forces in the world today are preaching, practising and propagating dominant factionalisms and hatreds, and by evoking counter-factionalisms, are spreading minority antagonisms in their path. At this point, we should note in passing that rarely is the so-called majority an actual majority. It is usually a particularly belligerent or a strategically situated minority itself, a minority in the saddle, booted and spurred, riding for an immediate dominance—and often for an eventual fall. Few indeed are the forces today that are working for mutual understanding and tolerance among groups.” And thus it is that I repeat that attitudes are the crux of the problem of democracy today.

To be more specific;[:] there are flagrant inconsistencies and contradictions involved in our dominant present-day American social attitudes. The mass mind, for example, finds it quite possible[,] and does not sense it as at all inconsistent[,] to [Page 27] revel in the Negro’s spiritual products, and on the popular level to wallow in his emotional atmosphere and yet despise his person and exclude his normal society. We have the paradox of a whole section of the country professing that it “loves the Negro”—indeed thinking that it does, but in fact oppressing, terrorizing and lynching him. This same body of opinion includes those who have profited for generations from the Negro’s unpaid and underpaid toil and labor, but who, without recognition of their social responsibility, can complacantly [sic] regard him as a great social menace and liability. Or again, a whole nation has found it possible to romanticize the Indian[,] while pursuing a policy of ostracism and extermination, with barely a thought of the wrong involved in setting its children to playing bad imitations of the real Indians whom they have banished. Finally we have a nation, a whole group of nations, appropriating and reverencing the Jew’s [sic, Jews’] spiritual products while despising and ostracizing the human Jew.”

No; if we are going to have effective democracy in America[,] we must have the democartic [sic] spirit as well as the democratic tradition,[;] we must have more social democracy and more economic democracy in order to have or keep political democracy. It is a mistake under such circumstances to regard fascism as the danger of a foreign blight, as altogether an alien psychology. Very soberly and very sadly I must point out that there are seeds of fascism in the native soil, deep down in the heart of the reactionary economy of the sharecropping South, deep down too in the sub-marginal slum and the residential city Ghettoes [sic] that settlement workers have discovered long since, and have made their special field of work and responsibility. But in view of the special crisis, have we not the obligation to re-think these situations somewhat? Aren[’]t they, if our analysis is correct, of more concern and importance to majority interests and welfare than even to minority interests and claims? I think they are the stakes of democracy in the practical sense, and that they need to be presented to the community at large in that challenging and none too patronizing aspect. Is it not wise to stress the majority peril and the common stake rather than merely the minority calim [sic, claim] and the possible minority gain? We have dispensed with the old formula of “Americanizing the foreign-born,” and somewhat outmoded the problem issue of “assimilating the Negro,” and are beginning to see over the horizon even of the campaign for raising the submerged and promoting the “secondary Americans,” as they have been called; but now, it seems to me, the soundest, wisest and most appropriate slogan—if we must have a slogan, [Page 28] is to [A]mericanize Americans in their social attitudes and behavior. [sic] to establish democracy in the heart of our social relations.

We certainly have not done our full share, either as social workers or as educators, in working toward this goal. We have not promoted unity and tolerance by the educational policy of minimizing cultural difference and stressing conformity. By this process we have merely appeased the sense of difference and enfeebled our capacity to stand and understand difference. A few particularly disparaged “problem minorities” have thus had to bear the brunt of this easy compromise and become the scapegoats of a breakdown or default of an adequate educational program of practical social democracy. So stereotyped has the situation become that it takes a crisis to shake us out of this false optimism and sense of democratic security. However[,] such is the situation today, and much depends on whether we can confront it cool[l]y and clear-headedly as a challenge and opportunity or only in timid and panicky fashion as an unexpected crisis.

I by no means want to suggest that this is the social worker’s particular burden. In the first place it is far too general and critical for that. The press, the school, the pulpit, the miracle institution of radio must all take it up, and fortunately are beginning to do so. But still the settlement worker has a particularly intimate exposure, a particualrly [sic, particularly] rich experience, and I think a rather seasoned tradition of liberalism of personal living and attitude which on the one hand makes him vital in any such crusade and on the other makes the settlement house very strategic still in the situation. Only quite new emphases must be found in the traditional programs of the settlement, new techniques of approach and publicity no doubt, and certainly new and enlarged justifications; all of which I wish I wer[e] more professionally competent to suggest and discuss. However, it [is] to some of these more specific and professional problems that you will be turning your attention in subsequent sessions of this very conference. My task, I take it, has been mainly to emphasize the pivotal place of the minority situation on the present-day battle front of democracy and the critical need for social and cultural democracy as the bulwark of as much democracy as we have or ever realistically can hope to attain.

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ALAIN LOCKE: STRETCHING OUR SOCIAL MIND

Alain Locke delivered “Stretching Our Social Mind” on 18 August 1944, as the commencement address at Hampton Institute, in Hampton, Virginia. Founded by Brigadier General Samuel Chapman Armstrong in 1868, Hampton Normal and Agriculture Institute (subsequently [Page 29] Hampton Institute; now Hampton University) was one of the first colleges for African Americans and a pioneer in educating Native Americans. Both Armstrang and Booker T. Washington, a Hampton alumnus and later head of Tuskegee Institute, believed in educating African Americans in moral virtues and in crafts and trades that would assure them gainful employment. By the early years of the twentieth century a new approach to black-white relations had challenged the accommodation associated with Washington and with Hampton’s original missian.

The original mandate of Hampton Institute makes Locke’s commencement address all the more remarkable, for he took as his thesis that the time has come “to stretch our social minds and achieve thereby a new dynamic as well as new alliances in the common fight for human justice and freedom of which our minority cause [that of African Americans] is a vital but nonetheless only a fractional part.” As in “The Preservation of Democracy,” Locke pursued two themes: reeducating the citizens of the United States and redefining democracy. He assigned responsibility for reeducation to “our schools,” to “all intelligent leadership,” “progressive educators,” and, by implication, to the students in Hampton Institute’s graduating class.

Perhaps shocking to some of the Hampton faculty and to some of the elders in the commencement audience was the gauntlet for change that he threw dawn. The proponents of two older views of black-white relations, he said, “must he told that they are hopeless reactionaries and not true friend[s] of progress or of the Negro.” Such people, Locke asserted, must be “repudiated publicly, and shamed or forced out of what was once a progressive but what is now a retrogressive attitude and point of view.” The two retrogressive views included, first, interracialism, an “intrenched” point of view in the African American community characterized by moralism, missionary zeal, “paternalistic nature” and by its working to resolve racial relations (the very soil from which Hampton Institute and most of the nineteenth-century African American colleges sprang) and, second, racialism, the more recent “militant and chauvinistic racialism” advocating civil rights and full equality, a position that, to Locke, had “dangerous limitations” and that fostered isolationism.

Both racialism and interracialism with its militant penchant must he replaced, Locke said, with a third stage—that of a common cause, a “newer, more progressive social mindedness” that will replace “nation-mindedness” with “world-mindedness” and “race-mindedness” with “human-mindedness”—both concepts reflecting important tenets in the sacred scriptures of the Bahá’í Faith. By expanding the African American cause to include peoples of different races and cultures Locke believed that a “sounder and broader” interculturalism for “all minority problems and situations”—religious, cultural, and racial—could be achieved. Thus, Locke asserted, the democracy for which African Americans should work is political, [Page 30] economic, and cultural—a “broad social mindedness” linking the “racial cause” to “progressive trends and movements.”

In the first decade of the twenty-first century many of Locke’s ideas seem self-evident. But he was delivering his message in 1944, before the end of World War II and before the establishment of the United Nations, both in 1945; before the integration of the U.S. Armed Forces in 1948; before Brown v. Board of Education prohibited segregated schools in 1954. Locke was, indeed, ahead of his time.

Part of the lot of any oppressed or persecuted minority is an acute and sometimes morbid social consciousness. To this the Negro is no exception. One of the most important issues before us as a racial group today is to broaden our deep but often too narrow group consciousness and channel it toward the progressive goals and movements of these modern times. Neither reactionary, subservient inter-racialism of the traditional sort nor narrow chauvinistic racialism are a proper and adequate base for our present-day thinking or our present-day group planning and action. It is high time, therefore, to stretch our social minds and achieve thereby a new dynamic as well as new alliances in the common fight for human justice and freedom of which our minority cause is a vital but nonetheless only a fractional part.

It is especially incumbent upon our schools and all intelligent leadership to assist in this re-orienting of the Negro mind; for only in this way can our group cause be kept abreast of the progressive trends of our time. So intrenched [sic], traditionally, are some of the older viewpoints and attitudes that this may require the pioneers of such broader social vision to become social martyrs. The old paternalistic interracialism still has its advocates[,] and considerable vested interests are staked and rooted in this philosophy of racial work and race relations. Its exponents will have to be challenged and converted or overcome. On the other hand, militant and chauvinistic racialism, paternalistic inter-racialism’s inevitable sequel and antidote, is also today a dangerous limitation on a sound and progressive social outlook. To the extent that it distorts and narrows the broad and basic democratic and humanitarian point of view, it, too, must be fought and reconstructed. But for a considerable while, its advocates will also oppose the newer, more progressive social mindedness. Eventually, however, just as world-mindedness must dominate and remould [sic] nation-mindedness, so we must transform eventually race-mindedness into human-mindedness. Today it is possible and necessary for Negroes to conceive their special disabilities as flaws in the general democratic structure. The intelligent and effective righting of our racial wrongs and handicaps involves pleading and righting the cause of any and all oppressed minorities. In making common cause with all such broader issues, we shall find that we strengthen, both morally and practically, our own. Indeed, we must learn and use this new strategy and further regard such new motivations as a contribution we have it in our power to make to the the [sic] general welfare and social democracy at large.

Really to grasp this new perspective, we must look back at the three stages through which the development of inter-racial relations have historically passed in this country. The first stage was moralistic and missionary, and necessarily of a paternalistic nature. Not merely Hampton Institute, but all or most of our colleges sprang [Page 31] from such soil, and many have not yet outgrown this tradition. No one with any fair realization of the historical record would dare be ungrateful of the accomplishments of this great missionary effort or repudiate its motives in its healthy prime. However, that tradition and all it implies is already outmoded, though unfortunately it is only slowly being outgrown. Those on both sides of the race line who continue this tradition today are not only doing more harm than good, but are helping to undo in the minds of the younger generation the proper respect and gratitude for what this epoch of inter-racial effort had previously done for us. Its exponents today, however, must be told that they are hopeless reactionaries and not true friend[s] of progress or of the Negro. They must be repudiated publicly, and shamed or forced out of what was once a progressive but what is now a retrogressive attitude and point of view.

But narrow and selfish racialism, more characteristic and current among us today[,] has its dangerous limitations too. Great as the temptation is to counter-assert, racialism has its taint of the original racism to which it is the pardonable but not warrantable sequel and reaction. Inevitable and even necessary as a stage of development, it now, in its turn[,] is a handicapping basis for a healthy and progressive group platform and program. Negroes today must not allow any insidious form of racialism, no matter how emotionally tempting or satisfying, to isolate them from the common cause movements to which the racial cause is logically tied. Only by broadening our social minds in this respect can we hope to become an integral part of the progressive movements of the world at large working for political, economic and cultural democracy. I can best illustrate what this means perhaps by repeating a suggestion I made sometime ago that I thought the time had come for an organization like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, vital and useful as it had been as a militant Negro defense organization, to shift its emphasis, and in an inspiring renewal of insight into what the movement really meant, to change its name to the National Association for the Advancement of American Democracy.

There was a time, and that was the time when the NAACP and other similar organizations were founded, when our group effort necessarily pivoted on racial assertiveness. Such organizations even when inter-racially manned, were primarily race defense organizations. A certain amount of such effort is still necessary, but the focus of our new effort must reflect the third stage of this historical development. [Page 32] That stage is represented by the emergence of the “common-cause” type of movement. In these the racial cause is taken up into the substance of a general program and struggle for common human advance. These new and increasingly powerful causes are interracial and intercultural movements in which the full significance and force of interracialism for the first time comes to full flower. They are such movements where people of different race and cultural groups work together not as representatives of particular groups but as co-workers and collaborators in a common cause in which, however, their special group interests are soundly and usefully incorporated. We might cite as current and significant instances, each of them incorporating effectively the fight for Negro rights and full privilegds [sic], the recent programs of the National Maritime Union, the CIO labor movement as today officially committed to the principle of equal labor rights for the Negro, the Southern Farm Tenant’s [sic] Association, and the like; [sic] all of them expressing effectively common denominators of specific aspects of the Negro’s problems.

More and more the intelligent younger generation will come to see in such movements the best working base for Negro work and social effort. They will find in such movements the right and only final way of being soundly and modernly inter-racial. This applies, I think, to many other provinces which we have not time to illustrate, including professional, intellectual, cultural and religious organization[s]. Indeed in the intellectual and cultural field there is already a trend—and a healthy one, to replace the “racial” concept with a sounder and broader term—intercultural. This includes all minority problems and situations, the religious and cultural as well as the strictly racial; and it will be the basis in the near future of most of the efforts of progressive educators to teach understanding, tolerance and cultural democracy between all groups in our national and world society. We need, to repeat, a broad social mindedness which will link our racial cause to the progressive trends and movements of our time, that will offset on the one hand the damage of “ghetto-mindedness[”] and on the other, the other the [sic] pitfalls of counter-racialism.

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ALAIN LOCKE: ON BECOMING WORLD CITIZENS

Two years after delivering a commencement address at Hampton Institute in Virginia, Alain Locke delivered another such address to the University of Wisconsin High School’s thirty-fifth [Page 33] graduating class. Locke had been a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison during the 1945-46 academic year, which had been immensely rewarding both personally and philosophically. But much had changed between the August 1944 address on the East Coast and the 28 May 1946, address in the Midwest. In 1945 World War II had ended, and the United Nations, of which Locke was an early and vocal champion, had been formed. The watershed changes provided Locke with the thesis of his talk—the need for world citizenship.

In addressing the need for a new kind of education, Locke apologized for the “messy world” the graduating students were inheriting from their elders, with its “indifference, intolerance, narrow heartedness, and closed mindedness.” Instead of asking educators to take up the matter of education for worldmindedness, Locke spoke directly to the students, urging them (and their generation) to find “answers to the problems of world citizenship.” He asked them to take up the “battle for world peace, world order, world understanding” by rejecting the outmoded beliefs in our country right or wrong, in our civilization and institutions being appropriate for the entire world, and in our one-way relationships with the peoples and nations that diminish confidence and respect—attitudes that, unfortunately, still are prevalent in the twenty-first century. To illustrate his point, Locke drew on two personality types: first, the “blatant, cocksure[,] narrow-minded patriot” returning from war with a mind-set that would lead to a “domineering, cocksure world of a formula,” and, second, the returning soldier who had been “sobered” and who was not so sure of “what it is all about.” The second type of person, Locke said, had a mind-set open to the “educative life of live and learn, the helpful life of give and take, the inner spirit of humane democracy”—Locke’s only reference to democracy in the address. A more “flexible” and “higher” patriotism, he asserted, would be found when the generation of the graduating class sought “other yardsticks for civilization and culture, another attitude toward human differences of all kinds—social, religious, racial, and cultural.” By so doing, Locke concluded, the students would he making an effort “toward extending the geography” of their minds and “enlarging the diameters” of their hearts.

What Locke calls “world citizenship”—a familiar term in Bahá’í religious discourse— represents the individual’s role in building what Locke called in other of his writings “world democracy” and in the address to the University of Wisconsin High School “humane democracy.” Locke’s vision is both secular and religious and may well represent, in part, a secular articulation of his religious values as an adherent of the Bahá’í Faith.

[Page 34] Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your kind and generous introduction, and you, Ladies and Gentlemen, for your very cordial welcome. It heightens with keen pleasure the honor of participating in this occasion. But we are all here, you and I together, to honor and encourage these young graduates: it is their occasion, their hour of accomplishment and satisfaction. So I feel I can presume upon your even deeper bond of connection with them as their devoted teachers, parents, relatives and friends, by assuming that I have your consent and approval to address my remarks this evening directly to them.

My dear Young Friends of the Class of ‘46:

When you asked me to be your commencement speaker, I felt both delighted and honored, and still do. Indeed, the first thing to be done is to thank you for this compliment, so full of the eager curiosity, the kindly confidence, the gallant natural democracy of youth. My best return is a graduation wish that you may have a life and a world in which these native qualities of youth can live and expand, instead of having to be cramped, confined and eventually extinguished by their cold dead opposites of indifference, intolerance, narrow heartedness, closed mindedness. And somehow, although in these critical days I cannot be a prophet of sentimental, all-is-well optimism, I do hope and believe it will be so, and this wish may come true. Though I am forced to confess that the odds are barely even, and that it will not easily become so. It is because I have regard for your respect and confidence that I cannot regale you, even on this happy occasion, with easy, hollow platitudes, which even your young but alert minds would know not really to be true. But on the other hand, I am glad that, since I cannot swing incense to Pollyanna, I do not find it necessary on the other hand, to be a gloomy Jeremiah or even too much of a Doubting Thomas. I hope, therefore, even though I have chosen a serious theme, not to take too much off the keen edge of the youthful pleasure to which you, and by proxy, your teachers, friends and parents are rightfully entitled tonight.

When your spokesman, Miss Becker, conveyed your invitation, I knew what I wanted to talk about, and gave her this subject—On Becoming World Citizens. I thought I knew what I was going to say, but as it turned out, I gave myself more homework than I anticipated; for there are no ready answers on this subject. Indeed, it is your generation that will have to find the exact answers to the problems of world citizenship. We elders can only give hints from our own not too successful experience, and then, if we are quite honest, apologize to you for the messy world that in time we must hand over to you, for better or worse, for losing or keeping. Yet even so, you are to be congratulated, I think, on finishing the most critical stage of your preparation for life at a similarly critical and significant stage of the world’s life. Your adolescence happens to coincide with the early adolescence of a new sort of world. In terms of the old calendar, you are the human crop of 1946; in the new calendar, you date A.A. 1—year one of the atomic age. And that means something—how much and how significant, none of us can yet tell or say.

[Page 35] This much we do know—that you just escaped having to risk your lives directly in the World War which was the critical climax of this great change. But you are nevertheless, along with your contemporaries, boys and girls alike, picked to be the shock troops of the next phase of the struggle—the not easy and not too certain battle for world peace, world order, world understanding. Some of you will probably serve in distant lands as part of an army of occupation, others of you will be even luckier to serve in efforts toward internationalism more constructive than armies of occupation. The life careers of many of you will have international scope and purpose, even while remaining national enterprises; all of you will have new dimensions added to your work and living, no matter how local and domestic they may be. In short, you will have to acquire world citizenship as our present age works out its specifications, its duties, its privileges. It is cowardly and reactionary in the presence of youth to contemplate any other alternative, although you all know and can meditate at will on the pithiest maxim of our time, the phrase—One World or None.

Assuming the better and saner choice—One World, it becomes our most important common task to give practical body and substance to an age-old dream of human brotherhood, now become a crying need, a modern necessity. And the nub of that task, as I see it, lies in an enlightenment of mind and heart capable of making us effective world citizens. World organization, the skeletal framework of all this, is the problem of the experts, our statesmen—God grant them more wisdom and much more grace! But world citizenship is the vital flesh and blood the rest of us must add to this framework, through which alone it can live and move and have some real effective being. For the moment this is a baffling task, but as it moves in your lifetimes further along toward solution, it may also appear not as just a strange new duty and responsibility but as a thrilling challenge and opportunity.

But let us be more specific about all this, which is the only way to become practical. World citizenship, in addition to calling for better citizenship at home and [Page 36] in terms of the old specifications, calls for new outlooks, new values, and more importantly even, the re-casting of some of our old outlooks and values. Many of our present ways of acting and thinking are too narrow, too provincial, too selfish to provide a sound basis for world citizenship. Following common, present-day practice will never permit us to achieve it.

Let us, for example, ask ourselves a few concrete questions about world citizenship. Will acting on the basis of our country, right or wrong, or even our country first and last, ever develop a true and vital internationalism? Can the idea of our form of civilization and our particular pet institutions, not as just best for us, but as arbitrarily best for everyone, everywhere ever lead us to the proper appreciation of other cultures and nations or to smooth-working collaboration with them? Will any one-way relations, rather than give-and-take ones, ever develop the confidence and respect of nations and peoples different from us in their ways and traditions? To me, it seems the answer to all three of these questions is—No. That type of thought and behavior will not promote world understanding and therefore is not the proper path for those who would become world citizens.

If this is so, what does it mean? Well, as I said at the beginning, some decided enlargement of our customary viewpoints, some definite reform of our traditional attitudes. It means a more flexible patriotism, if not indeed a higher patriotism, other yardsticks for civilization and culture, another attitude toward human differences of all kinds—social, religious, racial, cultural. It means more civility in our civilization; and more fair-play and good sportsmanship in our diplomacy and our politics. That means, to put it both pointedly and briefly, better group manners. These, my young friends, are not things that have to wait on juster peace treaties, perfected United Nations organization, better world government. In some respects, only their cultivation in a larger part of our population will lead us to these other desirable ends. Indeed, these are the real ends of world citizenship, and they grow in individuals, and should, I think, be somehow rooted in education. For nowadays, it is important that the majority of us have such outlooks, standards and attitudes, and not just the few exceptional individuals of outstanding importance. We all need these enlarged perspectives, not just those who travel in clipper planes or who are hauled overseas in transports, but also those who, while they stay at home in city, town or farm, must read, listen, argue, vote, contribute, and understand intelligently this growing inter-dependence and collaboration of our widening world-life.

Let us be even more concrete about all this: I think I can bring some of these qualities of world Citizenship within testing range of your own experiences, young though they are. Each of you within your own circle of friends and acquaintances, and in terms of personalities only four or five years older than yourselves[,] has, in all likelihood, evidence of the difference, at least in basic attitude, between the old and the new style citizen. A thumb-nail sketch of the two opposite types of personality will give us suggestive clues that you can check on for yourselves. You all know some acquaintance back from overseas who, despite his widened and potentially broadening experience, has come back the hardened image of his same old self, still a provincial[,] only fortified with a chestful of war ribbons. He is your [Page 37] super-patriot, full of “we won the war,” and “we showed them how,” “all Frenchmen are this,” “all Germans that,” and as to the Italians—well, you can imagine. Surely you recognize him. Of course, according to him, “we could have straightened up Europe in a jiffy, if they would only let us do it,” only “now that we have shown them how, they ought to be able to do it for themselves,” or possibly, “They aren’t worth it, anyhow,” and of course, “everything is alright [sic] at home” or would be “if only[”]—and here for “if only” fill in the fellow’s pet peeve, which he assumes without asking, you should share with him; otherwise, “there is something wrong with you.”

I hope you recognize also the opposite to this blatant, cocksure[,] narrow-minded professional patriot, the type that returns neither so sure of himself nor of what it is all about, but sobered and sometimes silent, whom it takes a good while to discover has come back transformed in intelligence and in human sympathy and understanding. I admit, he doesn’t fit in just right with the village or small-town mentality, or with the gang psychology or the latest slogans. This chap isn’t that sure about things, or that hasty to accept ready-made answers. He is far from sure that “all Frenchmen are like that” or “all Germans are this and that”; he may even be disposed to admit that Americans have some faults and made some mistakes. He is no professional patriot and may not be an immediately impressive fellow, but most promising of all, his opinions can grow and change. Potentially he is a better American; he is ripe for maturing world citizenship.

Of course, I do not mean that the issue between good and bad citizenship rests on these two personality types, but the attitudes they typify are an important contrast and teach a great lesson. The one leads to the domineering, cocksure world of a formula and a blinkered and profitless experience, no matter how otherwise wide and educative. The other leads to the educative life of live and learn, the helpful life of give and take, the inner spirit of humane democracy. I hope, on second thought, you find the latter the more attractive, the more promising, the kernel, let us say, of the good world citizen.

Now, finally, let us not look at types but at real historical persons, two outstanding world citizens who were and are the better Americans by virtue of being elastic, progressive and courageous enough to become world citizens and crusaders for world citizenship. They need no thumb-nail sketches; so well-known are they that their mere names will suffice. But before I tell you these, let us notice what they teach us about the finest possibilities of world citizenship. I think you will agree with me when you hear their names that the best world citizenship also makes the best type of national citizenship, much as many say it doesn’t. They teach us further that this type of citizenship is the monopoly of no political party, sex or class: one was politically a Democrat, the other a Republican, one a man, the other a woman, one, an American aristocrat, the other, a man of the people. One was from the sophisticated [E]ast, the other, essentially a mid-Westerner. Both grew, by obvious and gradual learning stages to the stature of world citizenship, one from a retiring, secluded housewife and mother; the other, from another narrow cocoon—the hard-minded, profit-making life of a typical American industrialist. Perhaps, by now, like [Page 38] the radio identification game, you have guessed them. But I am sure none of you can contest the statement that Eleanor Roosevelt and the late Wendell Willkie are among the best American exponents of world citizenship.

Notice, if you please, how these personalities spell out a brief definition of world citizenship—the same moral yardstick for ourselves as for others, and the courage to make its two plus two equals four apply[,] whether for or against us, whether for democracy abroad or at home. And yet, with it all[,] no insistence on uniformity in order to achieve unity. Very simple, my young friends, but awfully difficult. Both Mr. Willkie and Mrs. Roosevelt were courageous enough to speak out against the lacks and incompletenesses of our own democracy, and they each thought that one of our best ways of helping the world toward democracy was to put our own house in order. But they opened also both their hearts and minds to the whole world as well and tried to practice what we have been talking about tonight—world citizenship.

In some respects all really great personalities transcend the limits of their particular groups and break through to the world plane of living. But we cannot much longer trust to the occasional happy exception; at least with respect to world outlook, the exception must in our day become the rule. Instead of leaving world citizenship to chance and inclination, we must through education make the average citizen world-minded, world-hearted, as loyal to humanity as to his country[,] as eager about world welfare as about that of himself and his nation.

The audience has heard with joy that ninety percent of your class are planning to go to college. By all means complete your education, and Godspeed to you in the doing. But your education will not be modernly complete if it doesn’t prepare you or rather enable you to prepare yourselves for world citizenship. May I suggest a small beginning; be sure to read, if you haven’t the pamphlet put out by the Association of Atomic Scientists, called One World or None—you might be interested [Page 39] in the text for this speech, or I shall call it this sermon. Whatever you decide to call it, it has at least given me the greatest pleasure to talk with you on an occasion you cannot forget even should you forget what has been said. And even with a little forgetting, maybe some thought or notion will have done just a little toward extending the geography of your minds or contributed somewhat toward enlarging the diameters of your hearts. Remember: world-mindedness is the cue for the world of tomorrow—the world of your generation. May you be safe, happy and successful in it. Congratulations on what you have achieved thus far. All of us wish you well.

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ALAIN LOCKE: CREATIVE DEMOCRACY

The certain facts about Alain Locke’s “Creative Democracy” are that he delivered the talk in the evening in May in Minnesota. In his “Literary” agenda for “1946-47” Locke wrote in his own hand “Creative Democracy for Minnesota May 1 & 2.” But, since Locke’s schedule revolved around the fall-to-spring academic year, he could have given the talk in 1946 or 1947, May 1947 being more likely. Nothing in the text of the talk reveals the place in Minnesota, the occasion, or the nature of the audience. The pithy nature of the talk, echoing in some ways Locke’s “The Preservation of the Democratic Ideal,” suggests that it may have been a “seed” talk meant to prompt the audience to consider the concept of democracy in a larger context than the term is often considered.

Just as Locke had much to say about race during the span of his academic life, he also devoted a great deal of philosophical thought to democracy over many decades, constantly refining and adding to his conception of the many facets of the term. In “Creative Democracy” he challenged his audience to see democracy as a “dynamic, changing and developing concept,” as something always to be considered in an “expanding context”—a theme on which he touched briefly in the third paragraph of “The Preservation of the Democratic Ideal.” He noted that democracy in the United States began with a contradiction that approved slavery and denied into the twentieth century the right of women to vote. At the outset it also lacked the “adult principle of abstract freedom of conscience.” Unfair taxes by the British added “political freedom and the liberty of self-government.” The industrial experience brought the gradually acquired sense of collective responsibility.” In “Stretching [Page 40] Our Social Mind” Locke challenged outdated African American conceptions of black/white relationships, advocating replacing them with worldmindedness. In “Creative Democracy” he again advocated replacing the outmoded with new understandings: democracy, he asserted, is like a living organism that “must grow” and mature with each generation to be kept “alive.”

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ALAIN LOCKE
An undated photograph made late in Locke’s life.
Courtesy, Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research
Center, Howard University.

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Let us admit at the very outset that “democracy” is an overworked term, and to make matters worse, has always been a vague one, meaning many and not always consistent things to different people. But threadbare, vague and equivocal as it is, we have no choice but to use it, and endeavor on the one hand to sharpen and clarify the meaning and on the other hand to see to it that we do not confound the mere word with the ideas it stands and has stood for. Neither can be done if we use democracy as a flag-word, for to do that is to place it immediately beyond both reason and common-sense. Regarded as sacrosanct, it is all set to be used as a stalking-horse for our own pet dogmas and special interpretations. In this respect, we may not ourselves be successful this evening, but there is virtue in trying.

One most effective way of assuring that we are both rational and realistic in any consideration of democracy, and thus free from the dogmatism and cant of professional patriotism and word-worship, is to keep constantly in mind how indisputably democracy has historically changed and enlarged its meaning, acquiring from generation to generation new scope, added objectives, fresh sanctions. We can scarcely make a fetish of our own or even our generation’s version of democracy if we recall that once in the minds of all but a few radical democrats like Jefferson, democracy was compatible with such obvious contradictions as slavery and has even much later seemed adequate in spite of such limitations equally obvious to us now as the disfranchis[e]ment of women, complete disregard of public responsibility for education, no provision for social security and the like. Such sobering facts forestall, or should, any tendency, however traditional and popular, to put democracy above realistic analysis or beyond objective and constructive criticism. If democracy [Page 41] hasn’t always meant the same thing, how can we be so sure that its present compass of meaning is so permanent or so fully adequate? It seems absolutely essential, then, to treat democracy as a dynamic, changing and developing concept, to consider it always in terms of an expanding context, and to realize that like any embodiment of human values, it must grow in order to keep alive. Except as progressive and creative, democracy both institutionally and ideologically stagnates. For the little time that we have for considering democracy together this evening, let us try to construe it in this living, dynamic way.

Our American tradition of democracy, let us remember, began merely as a passionate rationalization of religious non-conformism, the conscientious demand of a convinced minority about freedom of worship and the moral liberty of conscience. And at that time, it had not even matured to the adult principle of abstract freedom of conscience as the religious intolerances of the colonial settlers proved; migrating non-conformists themselves, they still could not stand the presence of non-conformity in their midst. Then later came that political and secular strand of colonial experience which out of the fight against tyranny and taxation grew into the issue of political freedom and the liberty of self-government. But even then, when these developments had been fought for and won, and were being institutionalized, it took another strain of radical thinking imported from Revolutionary France to consolidate this into a formally democratic doctrine, the fundamental historical creed of American democracy that we know so well and rightly treasure so highly. But do we really understand it? Hardly, because it has been taught us for the most part, and we still teach it for the most part, in terms of abstract formulas, which means that knowing little realistically about its development, we know it, like most catechisms, by taking it for granted.

Little wonder, then, that through considering democratic principles so nonhistorically, we know and advocate them in such a chronicly [sic] dogmatic and doctrinnaire [sic] way. And another consequence even worse, [sic] than this, we do not expect democracy to change and do not fully realize the necessity for its constant growth.

Here is not the place, perhaps, to trace in any considerable detail other steps in the successive maturing of the democratic tradition in America;[:] the personal initiative and personal responsibility motifs born of the frontier, the gradually acquired sense of collective social responsibility stemming from industrial experience and organization, the hard-won sense of the dignity and rights of labor based on labor’s own gradual self-assertion, and the like. All of these enlargements of democratic thought and practise [sic] in the perspective of one trained to expect democracy to evolve are viewed and accepted in a natural and meaningful way as part of a necessary process.

[Page 42]

Matters of Opinion
Reviews

BOOK REVIEW BY DERIK SMITH

ALAIN LOCKE: FAITH AND PHILOSOPHY
BY CHRISTOPHER BUCK
(LOS ANGELES: KALIMÁT PRESS, 2005): XIV + 302

Copyright © 2008 by Derik Smith.

DERIK SMITH
is an assistant professor in The Department of English at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. He received his Ph.D. in English literature from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. With research interests in African American literature and culture, Smith is working on a study of Robert Hayden’s poetry called “Love’s Lonely Offices.” His essay about Hayden’s anthology Heart-Shape in the Dust appeared in World Order, Vol. 37, No. 2.

Alain Leroy Locke was a principal operator at the switchboard of American culture in the early twentieth century. By most accounts he was a master of arrangement, a slight-bodied man with an exceptional mind who carried out much of his work behind the scenes of history. Although he was among the most meticulously educated African Americans of his era, Locke is most often associated with his role as a supporter of the arts—as a literary aesthete and intellectual patron who promoted the work of black writers and artists of the 1920s. Remembered as a facilitator rather than a leading performer, Locke has been overshadowed by those—such as poet Langston Hughes—whom he guided toward fame. As the reputations of those around him have become increasingly important to the narrative of American culture, Locke’s legacy as philosopher, social activist, and private citizen has been somewhat obscured. He is best known for compiling and editing The New Negro (1925), a groundbreaking anthology of African American letters, but his considerable work as a philosopher and social theorist is rarely acknowledged.

Scholarship similarly has ignored the details of Locke’s personal life. For these reasons, Christopher Buck’s recent book, Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy, is a welcome addition to the literature on early twentieth-century American and African American culture. But, perhaps more important, Buck’s study is a significant contribution to scholarship on [Page 43] the history of the Bahá’í Faith in the United States. While Faith and Philosophy represents one of the most detailed explorations of Locke’s life and work, it is primarily an investigation of Locke’s relationship to the Bahá’í Faith that the philosopher adopted as a young man. Buck’s painstakingly researched text portrays Locke as an intellectual reflexively drawn to Bahá’í principles of egalitarianism and social justice. But it also reveals an African American of notoriety and prominence who was challenged by his relationship to an emerging American Bahá’í community. The story of Locke’s achievements and struggles as a Bahá’í and a black man, who significantly shaped national discourses on culture, race, and religion, are instructive to those who seek a nuanced and catholic understanding of the modern United States.

In the early twentieth century The Crisis magazine was one of the nation’s most widely read black periodicals. Founded by W. E. B. Du Bois as the literary organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the magazine delivered to its audience a varied fare of news reportage, opinion, poetry, and fiction that documented the trials and triumphs of a national African American community coming of age in the new century. In its “Men of the Month” section for May 1912, The Crisis featured a full-page image of an aged man whose olive-hued features hovered in the white frame of a modest turban and long beard. The photograph’s caption read: “Abdul Baha, the Persian teacher of Brotherhood.” Not quite a month earlier, this teacher had arrived by steamer in New York City. The article accompanying the photo explained that “His coming is of particular interest to those of us who believe in the brotherhood of man, for that is the doctrine Bahais emphasize above all other things.” During an eight-month stay in the United States, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá would deliver this Bahá’í message of brotherhood in dozens of formal gatherings and exemplify it, perhaps most tellingly, through His interaction with the African American community. He spoke at the historically black Howard University and at African American churches. Two weeks after His arrival in the country He addressed the fourth annual conference of the NAACP.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá alighted in the heart of the African American intelligentsia at a pregnant moment. The early decades of the twentieth century were a time of movement, rupture, and reformation in black America. The Great Migration of Southern blacks into urban centers of the North produced an invigorated American culture that was alive with creativity and exploration, even as it was marked by racial tension and violence. In a rich marketplace of urgent ideas, charismatic leaders like Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Marcus Garvey— to name only the most prominent— vied for the hearts and minds of black Americans. They constructed and preached sociopolitical ideologies that attempted to address what Du Bois called “the problem of the color line.”

When ‘Abdu’l-Bahá appeared from what were then remote Eastern lands with an unsolicited call for the abolition of all prejudice and discrimination, the [Page 44] black intellectual class noted His entrance in the racially charged American scene with a degree of wonderment. The “Men of the Month” section in The Crisis is evidence of that. However, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s attention to the color line was also a distinctive model for instructing the young American Bahá’í community. His explicit attention to the issue of race eventually led the early American Bahá’í community to form relationships with black activist organizations including the NAACP and the National Urban League. As its commitment to ideals of racial solidarity became evident, the young Bahá’í community drew greater attention in the black community.

Among those educated African Americans who were drawn to the Bahá’í Faith during the early decades of the twentieth century was Alain Locke. Buck’s study Alain Locke: Fairly and Philosophy is the first book-length effort to uncover systematically Locke’s affiliation with the Bahá’í Faith and take stock of his public career in light of his private religiousness. According to the author, his exploration of Locke’s faith complements extant writing on the philosopher, which has ignored the religious aspect of Locke’s life, and thus rounds out the biographical sketch produced in earlier scholarship.

Buck also justifies his work with the assertion that “Alain Locke is certainly the most important Western Bahá’í to date in terms of his impact on American history and thought.” This categorical claim is somewhat fraught for several reasons, not the least of which is Locke’s complicated relationship to the Bahá’í Faith. The greater part of Buck’s admirably researched book is devoted to documenting the evolution of Locke’s status as a Bahá’í from the time of his enrollment in the Faith in 1918 through periods of religious estrangement until his death in 1954. This difficult task supports Buck’s primary endeavor to demonstrate the “synergy between Locke’s profession as a philosopher and his confession as a Bahá’í.” However, it is the supportive argument seeking to uncover the quality and degree of Locke’s involvement in the Bahá’í Faith that motivates Buck’s extensive exploration of often-virgin archival materials in the Alain Locke Papers at Howard University and elsewhere.

Throughout the study the archival materials are close at hand. Its early chapters trace a dutiful chronological path through Locke’s life as they emerge from the record, the surprisingly sparse body of Locke’s published writings, and a selection of contextual sources. In revealing the resonance between the social teachings of the Bahá’í Faith and Locke’s pragmatic relativist philosophy, Buck’s reader intermittently glimpses the volatile American scene of the Jim Crow era. Although Locke played a prominent role on this charged national stage, Buck mainly confines the scope of his study to the limited sphere of the U.S. Bahá’í community in which Locke was a noteworthy, but enigmatic, figure.

The scattered traces of Locke’s activities as a Bahá’í make difficult the construction of an authoritative “spiritual [Page 45] biography.” For example, in spite of extensive research, Buck is unable to isolate definitively the context in which Locke was introduced to the young religion. One subheading is given the suggestive heading “Locke’s First Encounter with the Bahá’í Faith? (1915).” The punctuation mark recasting the declarative title as a question hovers above much of Locke’s personal experience of faith. He almost never identified himself as a Bahá’í in public forums, and he wrote very little about his intellectual or spiritual feeling toward the religion. This reserve forces Buck to speculate about aspects of Locke’s Bahá’í life—such as his investigation and declaration in the Faith—based on little more than sterile and ambiguous administrative records.

However, the archives yield a trove of correspondence that enlivens the narrative. Piecing together a mosaic of personal letters, Buck situates Locke in a small constellation of early U.S. Bahá’ís whose communications reveal a valiant and at times dogged effort to transcend the insidious power of the color line. In these letters Locke appears as an often-ailing, over-scheduied public figure who would lend his voice to the Bahá’í cause on occasion but not as often or as forthrightly as many of his coreligionists would have hoped.

Some of the most poignant, telling correspondence documented by Buck comes from the pen of black lawyer Louis Gregory, a tireless worker in the Bahá’í Faith. Gregory’s letters to Locke suggest that he held a respectful affection for a fellow-Bahá’í and African American of unparalleled potential. The two worked together on several occasions and were partners during a 1925 journey through Southern states in which both spoke in service of their Faith. However, late in life Gregory expressed to Locke a sentiment —both a hope and a lament—that may have been shared by many American Bahá’ís: “‘Although your Bahá’í spirit has been admirably shown by so many traits and activities, yet I have the deepest longing that you will see the wisdom of wholly identifying yourself with the Faith, thereby increasing both your joys and usefulness, perhaps twenty-fold.’” In its qualified praise and implied admonition, Gregory’s entreaty suggests questions that run throughout Buck’s study: What was Locke’s attraction to the Faith? What was it that prevented him from embracing it—from giving himself fully and publicly to its cause? While the latter is a sticky question that can lead to guesswork about the most private spaces of the believer’s psyche, the answer to the first question is evident in any perusal of Locke’s philosophical writings. In his final chapters Buck provides an insightful analysis of Locke’s pragmatic cultural relativism that plainly reveals the resonance between the philosopher’s thinking and the social principles of the Bahá’í Faith.

As an advocate for racial equality in the early, roiling decades of twentieth-century America, Locke’s concern was for a social praxis suited to multicultural society, “‘for promoting respect for difference, for safeguarding respect for the individual . . . and for the promotion of commonality over and above such differences.’” His philosophy demonstrates [Page 46] a deep distrust of all forms of absolutism as it works toward the development of a relativism suited to pluralist societies.

As Locke understood it, absolutism in personal worldview grows into group-related absolutisms, the unassailable nature of which inevitably leads to social conflict. He saw these conflicts and their resultant oppressions as functions of claims to absolute interpretive authority in the realm of values, and he advocated relativism as a method of peacefully mediating these conflicts. Thus he argued that “‘there should be only relative and functional rightness, with no throne or absolute sovereignty in dispute.’” His belief was that social conflict could be overcome without requiring individuals or groups to jettison values, traditions, and loyalties; indeed, he felt that such a program would be undesirable. Instead, it was necessary to allow cultural values to coexist without hierarchy:

Through this we may arrive at some clearer recognition of the basic unity or correspondence of our values with those of other men, however dissimilar they may appear on the surface or however differently they may be systematized and sanctioned. . . . We can then take on our particular value systems with temperate and enlightened attachment, and can be sectarian without provincialism and loyal without intolerance.

Locke desired a pragmatic openness that would lead toward the awareness of “common-denominator values” that finally affirm the fundamental unity of humanity. A belief in the possibility, indeed, the necessity of “unity in diversity” is, without doubt, the force that propelled Locke toward the Bahá’í Faith. This principle, which ambitiously moves through cultural toleration and toward identification with the Other, was in Locke’s mind a practical means by which African Americans could advance socially. If whites would begin to recognize their commonality with African Americans rather than concentrating on their differences, parity, and eventually unity, between the races might be achieved.

The same message was emphasized by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during His sojourn in America just a few years before Locke began to articulate his philosophical commitment to cultural pluralism and relativism. Though it is difficult to identify the degree to which Bahá’í teachings may have influenced Locke’s thinking, the resonance is unmistakable. In a talk at Chicago’s Hull House given on the same day that He addressed the 1912 NAACP annual conference, the “Persian teacher of Brotherhood” framed His discussion of the principle of “unity in diversity” within the context of American race relations:

In the human kingdom itself there are points of contact, properties common to all mankind; likewise, there are points of distinction which separate race from race, individual from individual. If the points of contact, which are the common properties of humanity, overcome the peculiar points of distinction, unity is assured. . . . One of the important questions which affect the unity and the solidarity of mankind is the fellowship [Page 47] and equality of the white and colored races. Between these two races certain points of agreement and points of distinction exist which warrant just and mutual consideration. . . . [N]umerous points of partnership and agreement exist between the two races; whereas the one point of distinction is that of 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.

The full-page prominence of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s inclusion in The Crisis suggests the excited reception of this theologically cast sentiment of racial equality among the African American intelligentsia of the era. Its underlying thesis of unqualified egalitarianism mirrored the opinions of most black thinkers. Yet Locke’s philosophical ideas seem to do more than simply echo the spirit of the message; ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s pluralist framework in which difference is admitted but is surmounted by commonality resonates powerfully with Locke’s secular philosophy.

It must be emphasized that Locke’s thinking emerged from a school of philosophical pragmatism that placed great value on the practicality of philosophical ideas. For pragmatists, philosophy must not remain confined to the world of the mind. It should manifest itself tangibly in human society. That a black philosopher of the early twentieth century rooted himself in pragmatism is not surprising; neither is it surprising that Locke was intrigued by the social principles and practice of the Bahá’í Faith. Locke must have looked upon the Faith as an actually existing attempt to realize the program of pluralism and relativism that he had come to intellectually. Although Buck does not explore fully this possible attraction, Locke may have viewed the Bahá’í Faith as a viable, practical vehicle for the dissemination of secular ideas to which he was devoted in abstract philosophy.

Indeed, Locke’s willingness to participate in and identify with the Bahá’í community was mostly a function of that community’s ability to manifest its principles of unqualified egalitarianism in American society. For the most part, the Bahá’í activities that Locke supported were concentrated upon the cause of racial justice and reconciliation. In Buck’s narrative, Locke’s multiple years of service on Bahá’í committees focused on the development of “race amity” emerge as the philosopher’s central path of service to the Faith. His eventual estrangement from the Bahá’í community appears to have been the direct result of his perception that the Bahá’ís were not moving satisfactorily toward those ideals of racial equality expressed in the words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and central to Locke’s secular philosophy. In a 1941 letter expressing his wish to withdraw formally from the Washington D.C. Bahá’í community —if not the Faith itself—Locke cites the “‘seeming impossibility of any real crusading attack on the practices of racial prejudice in spite of the good will and fair principles of the local believers.’”

[Page 48] Because it so attentively focuses on the philosopher’s relation to the Bahá’í Faith, Buck’s study does not explore the range and intensity of Locke’s work as a national figure in the struggle for racial equality during the inter-war years. It was in his role as an advocate for African American cultural production who acted as midwife to the Harlem Renaissance— recognized as the first major efflorescence of black art in the United States—that won Locke a prominent place in American cultural history. As the so-called “Dean” of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke promoted art as an instrument in the effort to win blacks greater inclusion within American democracy. It is possible that he also viewed the Bahá’í Faith in similar, instrumental terms. That Locke’s frustration With the Bahá’í “attack” on racial prejudice may have led him to distance himself from the Faith suggests that the philosopher understood himself as a champion of racial justice before all else. So far as the Bahá’í community did not live up to its social principles, Locke was willing to walk away from it. While a believer like Louis Gregory held the advancement of the Bahá’í Faith as his life’s goal, Locke seems to have viewed his religion as one among several forces that could be marshaled in opposition to the prejudice that he felt to be a fundamental problem in America.

Any future study of Locke must necessarily make its way through Christopher Buck’s Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy. The scholar forcefully proves his thesis that, in Locke’s thinking, philosophy and religious belief operated as synergistic terms. He has shown that the Bahá’í Faith was integral to Locke’s life and ideology. However, Buck’s text is never able to allay fully its discernable anxiety about the quality and the degree of Locke’s faith. In his meticulous survey of the archival record, Buck appears to be in search of an ever-retreating Rosetta Stone that might reveal the precise texture of Locke’s religious belief or of some document showing that Locke unabashedly proclaimed himself a Bahá’í before a national audience—as Gregory hoped he would. But, because such definitive materials are not uncovered, Locke’s relationship to the Bahá’í Faith can be described empirically only as a clear intellectual affinity.

At times, Buck’s cataloguing of Locke’s religious life seems like a frustrated response to this looming conclusion. His exhaustive compilation of Locke’s Bahá’í activities may be interpreted as an accumulation of circumstantial evidence implicitly attempting to convince the reader that Locke’s relationship to the Faith was not “secular”—or merely intellectual. Yet, after reading Buck’s work, it is difficult to imagine Locke the philosopher rapt in prayer. Of course, this is not a shortcoming of the book. Rather it is an indication that, while he may have wanted to portray a more pious figure, Buck maintains the vow he made in his introduction to Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy “to constrain any grandiose claims on Locke as a Bahá’í.” Finally, it might be said that the cerebral character that emerges from Buck’s text conceals the spirit of his faith with the same guarded circumspection as did the historical Alain Locke.

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CALL FOR PAPERS

WANTED—SHORT ARTICLES ON THE DESTINY OF AMERICA
AND ACHIEVING WORLD PEACE
ABSTRACT DEADLINE: DECEMBER 1, 2008

World Order is seeking short articles (circa 1,000-1,500 words) on the topics of the destiny of America and achieving world peace. This is your chance to write on a topic close to your heart without writing a long article that seems like a chapter for a book. Think short, tight, and focused. The topic could be poverty, education, global warming. Or terrorism, religious tolerance, health issues, freedom from prejudice, some aspect of the advancement of women, the maturation of humankind.

To get your juices flowing, you may want to revisit Shoghi Effendi’s Advent of Divine Justice. The sections on the acquisition of qualities North American Bahá’ís need for fulfilling their destiny (pp. 16-43 in the 1990 pocket-size edition) and on “The Destiny of America” (pp. 85-90 in the same edition) are bound to give you ideas. For issues related to world peace, you may want to reread The Promise of World Peace.

In short, we invite you to write about an issue that you feel needs urgent attention—and that will contribute to the health of the nation and of the world.

Manuscript Submission Information:
For a copy of the World Order style sheet for preparing a manuscript (and other tips), send an e-mail to <worldorder@usbnc.org>, or write to the address below.

Submissions to the journal will be subject to external blind peer review if they fall outside the expertise of the Editorial Board or upon request by the author.

Manuscripts (in Word or WordPerfect) should be sent to World Order, Dr. Betty J. Fisher, Managing Editor, 7311 Quail Springs Place NE, Albuquerque, NM 87113-1780, USA or to <worldorder@usbnc.org>.

World Order has been published quarterly since 1966 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

[Page 50]

Forthcoming...

William G. Huitt reviews Equity and Excellence in Higher
Education by William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene
M. Tobin.

Mike McMullen reviews Lights of the Spirit: Historical Portraits of
Black Bahá’ís in North America, 1898-2000, edited by
Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis and Richard Thomas.

Anne Gordon Perry reviews The Russo-Japanese War in
Cultural Perspective, 1904-05, edited by David Wells and
Sandra Wilson.

Melanie Smith reviews Taking Social Action in a Changing
World by Aaron Emmel.