A Brief Primer on the Bahá’í Faith

The Bahá’í Faith was founded in 1844 in Persia by Siyyid ʻAlí-Muḥammad Shírází (1819–1850) or “the Báb” (translated from the Arabic as “the Gate”). He announced in 1844 that He was the fulfilment of the Islamic prophecy of the appearance of the Mahdi or al-Qá’im who would appear shortly before the return of ‘Ísá (Jesus).Footnote ³ The Báb’s ministry lasted six years before He was martyred in Tabríz, Persia in 1850. Before His death, the Báb acknowledged that He was the forerunner to “He whom God shall make manifest” (cf. Smith Reference Smith2000, pp. 180-181), later recognized as Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʻAlí Núrí (1817–1892) or “Bahá’u’lláh” (translated from the Arabic as “Glory of God”).Footnote ⁴

Baháʼu’lláh was imprisoned in Tehran as a heretic and enemy of Islám. While imprisoned in 1852, Baháʼu’lláh announced He was visited by an angelic-like figure or “Hûríyyih” (the “Maid of Heaven”) who revealed that He was the one to Whom the Báb referred (Hatcher Reference Hatcher2019; Hughey Reference Hughey2024). In 1863 in Baghdad, Baháʼu’lláh made the first public declaration of His claim. Those that followed Him were called “Bahá’ís.” Leadership of the Baháʼí Faith passed from Bahá’u’lláh (1817–1892) to His eldest son ‘Abbás (1844–1921), known as ʻAbdu’l-Bahá (translated from the Arabic as “Servant of Glory”). After ʻAbdu’l-Bahá’s death, leadership passed to Bahá’u’lláh’s great-grandson Shoghi Effendi (1897–1957) (known as the “Guardian”). Shoghi Effendi left no heir, and in congruence with Baháʼu’lláh’s Book of Laws (Kitáb-i-Aqdas), upon Effendi’s death in 1957, leadership shortly passed to the Universal House of Justice (1963–present), a council democratically elected by the members of the national Bahá’í councils of the different countries of the world, which are also elected by delegates from local Bahá’í communities. That succession of leadership is, Bahá’í scripture outlines, protected by a divinely-ordained “Lesser Covenant”—a version of the Abrahamic or “Greater Covenant” that refers to a chain of successive, infallible, and Divinely-appointed governance.

The central Bahá’í theological principles are often referred to as the “Three Onenesses,” as articulated by scholar of Bahá’í theology Moojan Momen (Reference Momen, Long and Long2017, pp. 137-138):

Accordingly, Bahá’í theology puts great emphasis on the harmony of science and religion, the equality of all people, and the abolition of racial prejudice. But with the latter principle of the oneness of humanity, situated as it is in a religious faith wedded to scientific investigation, there exist both mystical and materialist exegeses. Bahá’í orthopraxy generally oscillates between literal and allegorical hermeneutics (Fananapazir et al., Reference Fananapazir, Fazel and McGlinn2008; Scharbrodt Reference Scharbrodt2008). Given this background, Bahá’í theological interpretations of pertinent social issues and concepts—especially on such important topics like race and racism—are polysemic and novel.

Race and the Bahá’í Faith in the United States

Despite Scriptural acknowledgment of the Divine validity of many Eastern faiths, such as Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, the “distinctive Abrahamic cluster” of expression in the Bahá’í Faith often resembles modernized Western Christianity, particularly among American Bahá’í practitioners. American Bahá’í hermeneutics are influenced by a belief in the country’s unique, but not superior, spiritual destiny (Bahá’ís of the United States 2025). Such understandings are informed by no less than Shoghi Effendi’s 1938 letter to the American Bahá’ís, in which he emphatically stated that Bahá’u’lláh would one day,

Accordingly, the historian Robert Stockman (Reference Stockman1990) writes that American Bahá’ís often articulate a “sacred history” about the U.S.:

Relatedly, Christopher Buck (Reference Buck2009) argues that such Bahá’í sacralization of the United States pertains generally to the principle of the “oneness of humanity” and particularly to racial unity:

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the American Bahá’í community was only a couple thousand people, mostly White Americans (Hatcher and Martin, Reference Hatcher and Martin1984). The first African Americans to become Bahá’ís, such as Robert Chaittle Turner and Olive Jackson, converted just before the twentieth century, and Black Americans would soon enter the Faith in increasing numbers (Etter-Lewis and Thomas Reference Etter-Lewis and Thomas2006; Gail Reference Gail1991; Gregory Reference Gregory1946). In fact, Louis Gregory became a Bahá’í in 1909 and was the first African American elected to the national coordinating body of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada. The election occurred in late April 1912, only weeks after ‘Abdu’l-Bahá arrived in the United States to repeatedly address race and racial inequality. One such instance was delivered on April 23, 1912, only days before Gregory’s election, at the historically Black college Howard University in Washington, DC. There ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Reference Abdu’l-Bahá1982) stated:

Buck (Reference Buck and Mottahedeh2013) reiterated ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s focus on race during his visit to the United States, writing:

Relatedly, Stockman (Reference Stockman and Miller1995) wrote, “Abdu’l-Bahá also spoke extensively about the dangers facing the United States if it did not overcome its racial divide; he set the tone for future Bahá’í concern about the issue” (p. 244). In fact, during His visit to the United States, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá asked Agnes S. Parsons, a prominent White woman in Washington, DC, “to arrange in Washington a convention for unity between the white and colored people” (Buck Reference Buck2021). Over May 19–21, 1921, hosted at the old First Congregational Church at 10th and G Streets NW, American Bahá’ís held the first of many “Race Amity” conferences with the aim, as was stated then, to be “a practical effort to influence public discourse on race in the United States” (Buck Reference Buck and Mottahedeh2013, p. 111).Footnote ⁵ Accordingly, American Bahá’ís put on twenty-nine such conferences between 1921 and 1935 (Buck Reference Buck2011). But as the historian Gayle Morrison (Reference Morrison1982) noted, by 1935 there had been a “gradual decline in race amity activity over the previous two years” (p. 203) and that the “dangers of racial injustice in America competed with an array of other problems for the attention of the American Bahá’ís” (p. 210).

American Bahá’í attention to race did not disappear but carried on in print media. The two extant American Bahá’í publications, World Unity (1927–1935) and Star of the West (1920–1935) were already vocal about race. These two publications had varied directions, with the former being an outwardly focused publication that attempted to promote Bahá’í-inspired perspectives on the “inter-dependence of religion, science and sociology,” (World Unity 1935, p. 383) while the latter was more inwardly focused, publishing scripture and news most relevant to Bahá’í community-life. In 1934, these two outlets were merged to become World Order, which was first published in March of 1935 (Bahá’í News 1935). A focus on social issues, particularly about race, quickly emerged. Bahá’í scholar Seena Fazel (Reference Fazel2023) wrote that, “World Order’s considerable number of articles and editorials on social issues, such as racial justice, women’s rights and environmentalism, was one indication that the Bahā’ī community was at the forefront of thinking about social action” (p. 497). Moreover, while the preceding periodicals were Bahá’í-inspired and its editors supplied with a high degree of latitude, World Order came under full American Bahá’í administrative control.Footnote ⁶

Re-presenting “Race”: Caste and Culture

In the 1930s, varied understandings of race were as common within American Bahá’í circles as outside of them. Such ambiguity was not new. As early as 1871 in The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin noted the great difficulty of cataloguing race:

By the 1920s, the rise of scientific racism in the name of eugenics, reached its heyday. To separate the biologically “fit” from the “unfit” from the gene pool, and toward the goal of eliminating the latter, “race” was reified as a salient biological marker. Accordingly, Henry F. Osborn, then president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, stated in the opening address to the 1923 Second International Congress of Eugenics:

The dominant definition of “race” came to evoke both essentialism and determinism: any “race” supposedly possessed a set of essential traits and characteristics inherent and exclusive to them which, determined a host of physical, intellectual, and/or moral outcomes (cf. Byrd and Hughey, Reference Byrd and Hughey2015). By the 1930s, the dominant understanding of “race” was as a fixed and static corporeal reference marshalled to justify a caste-like segregation of races—what would be later be called an “American Apartheid” (cf. Massey and Denton, Reference Massey and Denton1998; Wilkerson Reference Wilkerson2020).

But counter-hegemonic definitions abounded. Detractors argued that “race” was largely a fictional concept that supplied a patina of scientific objectivity in order to justify segregation and subjugation. The anthropologist Franz Boas (Reference Boas and Spiller1912) argued, for example, at the First Universal Races Congress in 1911 that when “we try to judge the ability of races of man, we make the silent assumption that ability is something permanent and stationary, that it depends upon heredity” (p. 99). He then continued to state that “investigation of this problem will show that the assumption of an absolute stability of human types is not plausible” (Boas Reference Boas and Spiller1912, p. 100; cf. Locke Reference Locke and Stewart1992).Footnote ⁷ Additionally, in 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois opined in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science:

And just as World Order began in 1935, Jilian Huxley and Alfred Cort Haddon published We Europeans: A Survey of “Racial” Problems (Reference Huxley and Haddon1935) which used population genetics to demonstrate the frailty of the “race” concept.

On top of the debate over racial facts and fictions, the “race” concept also connoted ancestral origin, ethnicity, language, nationality, religion, or any recognizable shared culture. Footnote ⁹ For example, the U.S. Census Bureau attempted to count race, using varied definitions that changed each decade, such as national origins (e.g., “Japanese” or “Mexican”), religious background (e.g., “Hindu” or “Jew”), and color categories that broadly and arbitrarily referenced continental land mass (e.g., “White” or “Black”).Footnote ¹⁰ By the 1930s, one might refer to a “race” via these varied “cultural” terms (Anderson and Fienberg, Reference Anderson and Fienberg2000; Snipp Reference Snipp2003).

The appeal of culture qua race was enabled by several factors: The rise of American sociology and cultural anthropology as distinct disciplines with a theoretical bent toward relativism coupled with empirical foci on ethnic immigration and urban inequalities that seized upon “culture” as a potentially powerful explanatory variable for inequality (in what would soon calcify as the “culture of poverty” in the 1950s).Footnote ¹¹ Additionally, well within the anti-Black grip of Jim Crow and the revival of White terrorism in the Ku Klux Klan, together the “Great Migration” (1916–1965), “Harlem Renaissance” (1918–1937), and “New Deal” (1933–1938) functioned to demonstrate first, the cultural/regional heterogeneity alongside the “linked fate” of Black America; second, the artistic and intellectual contributions of the “New Negro”, and; third, Black cultural responses to employment discrimination and socio-economic assimilation (Carroll Reference Carroll2005; Dawson Reference Dawson1994; Locke Reference Locke1925; Moreno Reference Moreno2002). But perhaps most salient, U.S. intellectual race theory was adapted into rassenhygiene (racial hygiene) genocide by the Nazi Party in the 1930s, which led some to recoil against biological definitions of race (Chin et al., Reference Chin, Fehrenbach, Eley and Grossmann2010; Stein Reference Stein1988). Instead, some proposed “culture” as a less deterministic—even a politically and morally progressive—way of debating both human diversity and inequality.

Given the simultaneous treatments of race as both flexible culture and reified caste, American Bahá’í periodicals were caught in their confluence; the lingua franca of race was contradictory and indefinite even as the concept was known to hold scientific, political, legal, and theological import. Itself facing orientalist racialization as an exotic, Eastern, non-White faith, American Bahá’í discourse was faced with the difficult task of relating their emergent theology and orthopraxy to the racial problems of an American society dominated by White Protestant Christianity, resulting in their coinciding counterpublic and assimilative racial discourse.

Race as Culture: Barrier and Bond

World Order did not concentrate exclusively on racial matters. But when articles broached the subject, avid and heterogenous approaches were frequently employed to demonstrate the biological and spiritual unity of mankind and especially the vacuousness of the “race” concept. For many writers, “race” failed to meet the criteria for differentiated species or variegated biological type. While many authors confidently opined on what race was not, few could positively define what exactly race was. Moreover, many writers seemed uneasy with taking a stand on either racial definitions or the precise methodologies for studying racial inequality. Instead, World Order authors regularly turned to implicit connotations that circulated in the normative understandings of the day. This resulted in a bifurcated discursive framework in which “culture” became a loose synonym for “race.”

In this worldview, race was discussed as an ideological and institutionalized system of barriers that sorted people into stratified groups by virtue of their divergent norms, worldviews, habits, and attitudes. Racial groups were different, not because of biology, but because of culture. While this understanding allowed writers to critique racially essentialist determinism, it generated a second issue. Race was rendered a bond that brought people together through a shared sense of interests relative to their interpretation of their collective treatment in an already stratified social order. “Culture” qua race could be a unifying force that could function with very real, material, political, and economic consequences to identify and address inequities.

Consider World Order’s 1935 reprint of remarks delivered to the Chinese Social and Political Association by the sociologist Herbert A. Miller. Miller stated that race should be defined as “habits which a culture group imposes on those who are born and reared within it. There are race culture groups … subject to the same social environment” (Miller Reference Miller1935, p. 245).Footnote ¹² Miller’s stance also reflected a growing public anxiety over the Nazi party’s advocacy of racial nationalism, in which new forms of psychological theorizing made “culture” à la “race” into a powerful political tool to mislead people:

Miller’s answer to the problem was a simple, color-blind conclusion: “A successful solution means the complete elimination of racial consciousness” (Reference Miller1935, p. 246). The cessation of race-based thinking or viewing the world through a racial lens meant the complete jettison of racial supremacist theory and bunk appeals to essentialist and reified forms of static racial “cultures.” Easier said than done. Left unsaid were the precise ways one could abandon such epistemology, especially given that many ostensibly non-racial “cultural” mores, habits, and customs were now becoming deceptively reframed as “racial” barriers.

In that vein, the tacit conflation of race with culture opened a door to explore how a shared spiritual belief and religious communal environment could form a racialized identity and collective bond. These interpretations of race-as-culture often appealed to scientific authorities and historical evidence, but were occasionally strained. For example, in 1936 the renowned African American Bahá’í Louis Gregory wrote a glowing review of Du Bois’s then-recently published Black Reconstruction (Reference Du Bois1935). Doling out lavish praise on Du Bois, Gregory (Reference Gregory1936) wrote:

It is certainly a testament to Gregory and World Order to publish a positive review of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, as many historical and social scientific journals refused to review Du Bois’s publications, perceiving him as too radical on questions of race (Hughey Reference Hughey2020). But this was also Du Bois’s foremost expression of Marxism, in which he viewed the post-bellum U.S. through a historical materialist lens. For instance, Du Bois argued that race functioned to disunify workers and pit them against one another. White workers received, in Du Bois’s evaluation, instead of money, a “public and psychological wage” which took the shape of “public deference and titles of courtesy … [which] had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1935, pp. 700-701). Du Bois also emphasized labor agency among the enslaved population, showing that enslaved Black people in the Confederate states engaged in a “General Strike” which significantly weakened Southern resources and facilitated the Union victory. Gregory did not engage those points made in Black Reconstruction. Rather, he emphasized that Blackness and religion were culturally entangled: “The Negro is inseparable from his religion. It colors all of his stations, from the Georgia chain gang to the United States Senate …. How would the black man against American competition support existence or even attain it, without a hold upon God?” (Gregory Reference Gregory1936, p. 39). For Gregory, “culture” (in the expression of religious belief and lived experience) was at least partially constitutive of Blackness.

But Gregory’s positive take on this association is a stretch, if not a full departure, from Du Bois’s evaluation of religion in Black Reconstruction. In his magnum opus, Du Bois wrote, “to most of the four million black folk emancipated by civil war, God was real …. His plan for them was clear; they were to suffer and be degraded, and then afterwards by Divine edict, raised to manhood and power; and so on January 1, 1863, He made them free” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1935, p. 124). But in the very next line, Du Bois evaluated such theodicy and exegesis as “foolish, bizarre, and tawdry. Gangs of dirty Negroes howling and dancing; poverty-stricken ignorant laborers mistaking war, destruction and revolution for the mystery of the free human soul” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1935, p. 124). Such nuance was not communicated by Gregory. Rather, Gregory emphasized the overlap of race, religion, and culture neither as the Du Boisian “foolish” or “bizarre” nor as a “myth” as Miller had argued the year before, but as a life-saving buoy in the storm of oppressive conditions.

Still, the use of race as culture was a potent tool to confront or sidestep biologically determinist arguments about race. For instance, in his 1938 essay, “The Adaptable Indian”, Willard W. Beatty attempted to dislodge racist views of Native American people as possessive of essentially distinct biological characteristics by reframing questions of racial difference and inequality as problems of resource attainment and cultural adaptation. Beatty argued that “race” did not exist within people as a set of traits but rather was an illusory concept that manifested in the culture of a people who experienced inter-generational stratification of resources along the color-line. Beatty’s view was undoubtedly shaped by the watershed changes of Roosevelt’s “New Deal”—which took shape between 1933 and 1940 as a series of programs, public work projects, and financial reform and regulation—and how they were increasingly scrutinized for what effect they would have on racial inequality. In particular, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (sometimes called the “Indian New Deal”) was engineered by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, an appointee of Roosevelt. The law protected and restored some land to indigenous Americans, encouraged self-government, increased educational opportunities, and made available federal credit for small farm agricultural production (Taylor Reference Taylor1980). Additionally, the New Deal program “Civilian Conservation Corps” (CCC) employed over 85,000 American Indigenous men between 1933 and 1942 to work on erosion control, forest management, roadwork, and more (Merrill Reference Merrill1981). Such sweeping policy changes on matters of race and resources were far from perfect but did inject increased attention on matters of racial colonialism into popular culture. Still, there was enduring racism in public discourse, and Beatty’s article reiterated the dominant racial paternalism toward the “American Indian,” assuming a non-Indigenous readership that would desire to “teach” Indians how to use resources beneficial to them:

Despite these missteps, Beatty argued that “Indians” were neither backwards nor essentially different from people of other racial groups, especially White people. Rather, Beatty made the point to accentuate Native culture and autonomy, which was a major legislative talking point emerging in the wake of New Deal policy changes.

In another instance of conceptualizing race as both an external barrier and set of bonding interests, James A. Scott published a two-part essay entitled “The Negro in America” (Scott Reference Scott1938a, Reference Scottb). Scott, an African American Bahá’í and principal of the Banneker School in St. Louis (then “Colored School #5”), emphasized, like Beatty before him, that racial barriers due to segregation and discrimination were at the heart of any empirical differences attributed to race: “The mutations and graduations of America’s discriminatory practices based on race would furnish material for a diverting doctor’s dissertation in social psychology” (Scott Reference Scott1938a, p. 131). Again, these “discriminatory practices” were increasingly discussed throughout the 1930s, due in part to New Deal legislation. But in the public sphere the New Deal was hardly romanticized or understood as the solution for racial inequality. Rather, the “legislative record of the New Deal was consistently racialized and discriminatory”, wrote social movement scholar John Brueggemann (Reference Brueggemann2002), while “the enduring racism of the public writ large and the rigidity of influential southern congressmen prohibited any chance of substantive civil rights legislation (p. 140).

Scott’s article addressed this “ambivalence” through a discussion of both the “wealth of material” resources that existed in the United States which could be brought to bear in remediating racial inequality, while at the same time he spoke to the enduring legacy of anti-Black “distorted stereotypes.” “Race,” for Scott, existed as a particularly double-edged creation. In concluding the first part of his essay, Scott drove home the point that the categorization of race in general, and “the Negro” in particular, were America’s “fiction of its own creation”:

Regardless of intent, the editorial choice to allow for a multiplicity of interpretations, arguments, and commentary on race and racial prejudice may have served as a counterpublic destabilization of racial essentialism and biological determinism. That is, by depicting “race” as a contested concept—and by equating it with another concept (“culture”) that was just as, if not more, slippery—readers might have escaped its firm taxonomic grip. Yet, World Order vacillated between race as a useful bond or barrier to overcome. As a consequence, the discursive construction of race in its pages was at times confusing and contradictory, leaving no clear definition as to what “race” really was or how or why prejudice and racism functioned as it did. Perhaps due to such ambivalence, and with the second world war increasingly seen as inevitable, American Bahá’í discourse would appeal to the divinity of Bahá’u’lláh and Bahá’í theology as a form of metaphysical education that would supersede materialist and scientific debates about the nature of race and racial prejudice. The spiritual transformation of the individual to abandon their personal racial prejudices would be increasingly highlighted as a key remedy to racial conflict.

Standing up to Segregation and Struggling through Stages

The confusing enigma of constructing race as both a cultural bond and barrier was not the only dilemma within World Order. By the time World Order was formed in 1935, American Bahá’ís had been regularly hosting a series of annual “Race Amity” conferences (beginning in May 1921). Such efforts resulted in both increased conversion of African Americans to the Faith as well as greater cooperation between Black organizations and varied Bahá’í communities. Here the American Bahá’í community appeared to experience growing pains. Attempting to practice the principle of the oneness of mankind in relation to race in the midst of Jim Crow was a delicate and challenging issue. For instance, the New York City Bahá’í community had dedicated itself to regularly disrupting the Black/White color line, inclusive of inter-racial teaching efforts in Harlem. Toward that end, there was a marked increase between New York area Bahá’ís and groups like the NAACP and Urban League (Buck Reference Buck2012; Hogenson Reference Hogenson2022). Yet, intra-Black issues and unintentional slights proved weighty matters. While “the Bahá’ís naturally associated with all kinds of people, including immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa,” wrote historian Kathryn Hogenson, “… these groups of Blacks were not welcomed by Blacks from the United States—an issue within Harlem that spilled over into the Bahá’í community. It also had to deal with reports of incidents at Bahá’í gatherings which were perceived by community members to be racist” (Hogenson Reference Hogenson2022, pp. 175–176).

Given the varied Bahá’í teaching and cooperative initiatives across the color-line, as well as some of the controversies resulting from (mis)interpretations of those endeavors, World Order functioned to clarify and condone a direct Bahá’í stance on racial matters. This was emphasized via two central yet incongruous theses: First, individual and personal commitments to racial equality could, if practiced honestly and thoroughly by Bahá’ís, win the war against Jim Crow and unite the races. Buoyed by the belief that such intent would be guided and purified by divine intercession, World Order discourse frequently anointed the individual’s commitment to virtuous behavior, with an eye toward the “oneness of humanity,” as the key to racial utopia. “The Baha’is of the world…” wrote co-editor Horace Holley (Reference Holley1935), “… solved the race problem which outside this community poisons the very springs of human emotion” (p. 322).

But second, and in contradiction to the former, theological pronouncements and prophecy concerning the slow and uneven march toward achieving racial equality and unity served to counter-balance individual agency and intent. Racialized debate, conflict, and antagonism were reframed as necessary stages through which humanity must endure. “How could the brotherhood of man come about until humanity wearied of the cruelties and confusions due to racial and national hatreds?” wrote co-editor Stanwood Cobb in the April 1937 issue (Cobb Reference Cobb1937, p. 21). Race unity was simultaneously a direct dilemma of discipline that would slowly transform into a protracted problem of prophecy. For instance, the same April 1937 issue of World Order contained an interview by noted Bahá’í Martha Root of the sociologist Herbert A. Miller:

But in emphasizing the danger of disunity and how self-interest could masquerade as virtuous behavior, Horace Holley used his June 1937 editorial to state: “Society becomes dominated by powerful institutions which employ the terms of love but are inwardly motivated by its antithesis, self-love” (Holley Reference Holley1937a, p. 81). Holley went on to write, “The same issue is rending the churches and racial faiths, separating the elements seeking partisan victory from those who can realize truth as progressive and mankind as one” (Holley Reference Holley1937a, p. 82). To fight racial prejudice and segregation, individuals had to virtuous—both loving to others and courageous in the fight against Jim Crow.

Holley’s words would prove oracular. While American Bahá’ís labored to address racial divisions in multiracial and diverse Northern cities, Southern cities under the yoke of Jim Crow presented different challenges to Bahá’í integrated communities that sometimes resulted in misunderstood and misreported news. For instance, in 1937, the Bahá’ís in Nashville, TN were under threat of White supremacist violence. This was a particular dilemma, as Bahá’ís are under theological instruction to obey the laws where they live, but also to pursue racial equality, integration, and amity. As a result of this dilemma, the interracial Nashville Bahá’í community was allowed by Bahá’í administrative authorities to hold racially homogenous public meetings about the Bahá’í Faith if necessary. No official Bahá’í meetings were ever allowed to be racially segregated. Rather, public informational meetings about the Faith were advertised in advance and were held at Fisk University, a reception at the home of Fisk president Thomas Jones and his wife Ester Jones, at the homes of some individual Bahá’ís, and at the Hermitage Hotel—with the meetings at Fisk and the hotel being racially-integrated in practice. Bahá’í historian Christopher Buck (Reference Buck2012) wrote:

However, such a strategy was misreported. Gossip spread that Nashville Bahá’ís were holding separate “White” and “Colored” official meetings and were sending separate invitations only to specific racial groups. Perhaps with the greatest consequence, that erroneous news was sent to W. E. B. Du Bois, who had been a stanch supporter of Bahá’í activities and whose wife Nina Du Bois (née Gomer) had converted to the Bahá’í Faith when living in New York City. Due to the misinformation, in his October 30, 1937 column in the Pittsburgh Courier, Du Bois wrote an essay entitled “The Fall of the Baha’i” in which he chastised American Bahá’ís for having “succumbed” to segregation: “For the first time they held a public meeting in the Hermitage Hotel to which no Negroes, not even members, were invited; and they voted for color segregation at future meetings” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1937).Footnote ¹⁴

Despite being mistaken, such a public appraisal from an authority like Du Bois was damaging. Co-editor of World Order, Horace Holley, who had been in attendance at the Nashville meetings in question, wrote a rebuttal in the Pittsburgh Courier, stating in part:

Perhaps with this dust-up in mind, and as a subtle reference to those Bahá’í Nashville meetings, Louis Gregory soon there-after published an article in World Order in which he emphasized the power of spirituality to reorient people’s attitudes and moral worldviews toward racial amity during an integrated meeting in the “deep South”:

But with the continued resistance to stalwart if not retrenched Jim Crow institutions, discriminatory interactions, and racial ideologies, and with the second great war on the horizon, the covenanted optimism over individual Bahá’í endeavors to achieve racial equality and amity that had marked much of World Order discourse on race became a bit more tempered. Case in point, Emeric Sala’s January 1938 World Order essay, “The Next Thirty Years” began by identifying a prophecy from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:

But even with such moderate language, the charting of the future was made with soteriological confidence: the world’s conflicts, including racial turmoil, were but stages through which the world had to pass in order to reach the promised land. This point was against emphasized in another article of the same issue:

Mentions of race in World Order would increasingly find mention in relation to Bahá’u’lláh’s divinely inspired dispensation that was rolling out in progressive stages. “The cycle has arrived when racial prejudice will be abandoned by tribes and peoples of the world”, read the 1939 article “Saviors on Mt. Zion” (Cox Reference Cox1939, p. 374).

Even before Germany officially invaded Poland in September of 1939, many knew the world was already at war and immersed in a conflict driven by racial ideologies. This point had been made increasingly so in the latter half of the 1930s in World Order. Ironically, it was not a Bahá’í, but the Indian spiritual leader and philosopher T. L. Vaswani who published an essay extolling the Bahá’í answer to Nazi “racialism” in a February 1939 issue of World Order. In “The Bahá’í Faith and the Modern World”, Vaswani (Reference Vaswani1939) wrote:

Vaswani was rather cosmopolitan in his spiritual practices. He both praised and drew from the tenants of Hinduism, Sikhism, Christianity, and the Bahá’í Faith to create a broad and inclusive ecumenical school of thought. Vaswani (Reference Vaswani1939) thus concluded his essay by writing:

Such a line, from a non-Bahá’í, helped to both normalize the Bahá’í teaching of “progressive revelation” and gave the Faith’s stance on racial unity—even as it directly stood opposed to the “racialism” of both the German state and U.S. Jim Crow—a multifaceted and accommodationist stance. That is, Vaswani essay in that February 1939 issue of World Order (alongside articles on “Religion as the Music of Life”, “The Oneness of Religion”, “Islam”, and a poem entitled “New Sons of Zion”) likewise lent credibility and resonance to the Bahá’í Faith as being not only a legitimate descendent of both the Abrahamic religions of the “Middle East” and the religious traditions endemic to South Asia (e.g., Buddhism or Hinduism), but also as a belonging part of the growing racial progressivism that was becoming a central plank in American Christian religious sects such as Protestant Unitarianism, the Catholic Worker Movement, and social gospel movements more generally. Moreover, even as his essay lumped together Bahá’í approaches to race with other progressive American religionists of the day, the article’s emphasis on a slow, measured, and progressive movement toward the ideal of race unity that had already been underway for millennia, gave the Faith a gradualist tenor in the time of political and social anxieties both in the U.S. and in just a matter of months from then, in Europe.