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Join conversation, for Social Transformation. Society Builder
Society Builders with your host, Duane Varan.
Welcome to Society Builders and thank you for joining the conversation
for social transformation.
Okay.
Our last four episodes explored how the early Persian Baha'i community engaged
in society building in their time.
First, by engaging with the discourse on governance reform in Iran,
helping to give rise to Iran's first democratic institutions,
and its
first Constitution, and then by pivoting and shifting their attention
to transforming education in Iran
through the promulgation of a network of over 60 schools, spread out across the
entire Iranian nation, providing education to boys and girls alike in a country
that was almost entirely illiterate.
Today we're gonna zip across to another side of the planet to see
how the early Western Baha'is were similarly engaged in society building,
responding to the issues of their day.
It's a truly inspiring history that continues to have an impact on the
shape of the Civil Rights movement even today, over a century later.
Specifically, across these next three episodes, we're gonna
explore how Abdul-Baha, and the generation He inspired, contributed
to the race discourse in America.
Undoubtedly, this was America's most vital and challenging issue at the
time, and perhaps remains so even today.
Now if you listen to episode 6 of this podcast series, and if you
haven't listened to it, I would highly recommend this particular episode.
I think it's our best episode yet. But if you listen to episode 6, you got a bit
of an overview of just how transformative.
Abdul-Baha's travels to the West really was.
And how dramatic it ultimately proved to be in both awakening the Western
believers to their role in society building and in influencing leaders of
thought in wider society, leaving an influence in most modern social discourse.
But perhaps the most enduring impact, in terms of the social discourses of
the day, was the impact which Abdul- Baha, and the generation He inspired,
had on the race discourse in America.
As you'll recall from that episode, the impact of the Baha'i
community on Black thought in this period is incredibly profound.
Most Black leaders of thought at the time were deeply aware of the Baha'i teachings.
In fact, Black America was actively talking about it.
Some of the most influential Black thinkers of the time actually
embraced the faith and many more were deeply influenced by it.
So today you're going to hear about how it was that Abdul-Baha, and the generation He
inspired, promoted race amity, and you'll discover how influential this became to
the larger race discourse in America, leaving an enduring impact that still
shapes the race discourse even today.
Now before we can really explore these profound contributions, we
need to understand the background and context associated with the race
discourse in America at the time. We need to understand the America
that was when Abdul-Baha arrived there in 1912.
So, much of today's episode will focus on providing us with this background and
historical context. In our next episode,
the second in the sequence, we'll then explore Abdul-Baha's message and situate
it within the larger race discourse of its day, and we'll discover why
there was so much interest in Abdul- Baha and in His message at the time.
And then in the third episode of this sequence, we'll explore the impact
that these early Baha'i believers in America had in interacting with the
race discourse during the genesis of the modern civil rights movement.
And that's when our real fireworks begin.
I think you're gonna be blown away by what we discover in this third
episode of our sequence here.
So be patient with me today.
Let's together work our way through this context so we can together
appreciate the contribution of these early American Baha'is in this arena.
Now, as you know, the whole issue of slavery was highly divisive in America.
The abolition of slavery was probably the main social discourse
of the day in America throughout most of the 19th century.
It was the issue, above all, that shaped social discourse in 19th century America.
Now the British abolished slavery in 1833 giving further salience
to this issue in America.
On one hand, slavery was increasingly seen as an immoral act, giving rise to a
growing number of religious communities,
most notably the Quakers, taking a stand on this.
But on the other hand, there were others who viewed it as an economic necessity,
particularly in the agrarian South. So America was deeply divided on the issue.
In fact, slavery was the dividing line in America.
Far more important than party affiliation was where a state
stood on the slavery issue.
And as new states joined the union, a compromise was reached.
The compromise of 1850. For every state joining the union that wanted
to be Free, there also had to be a state that allowed slavery.
This way, no one side of the issue could outvote the other.
And in many ways this was an uncomfortable balancing act.
New issues demanded solutions, which didn't easily accommodate compromise.
For example, part of the compromise of 1850 was the Slave Fugitive Act, which
required Northern states to return slaves who had escaped back to the South.
Well, for many in the North, this violated their moral standards.
And so the issues festered.
But the election of Abraham Lincoln tipped this scale.
Lincoln was the first candidate elected to the presidency on a
platform that opposed slavery.
He didn't advocate for full abolition, but his opposition to slavery was enough
to convince Southerners that he would allow the new Western territories to join
as Free states, tipping the Free-Slave state balance, giving Free states the
numbers to impose change on the South.
It was that FEAR rather than any specific action
that was the spark that ignited the Civil War.
And the Civil War was truly devastating.
I mean, more American lives were lost during the Civil War than were
lost in World War I, World War II,
the Spanish American War and the Vietnam War combined. The South
was almost entirely destroyed.
Entire cities went up in flames and had to be completely rebuilt.
An entire generation was nearly lost.
Many soldiers returned, maimed and incapacitated.
I mean, it was truly horrific.
And as you know, during the Civil War, president Lincoln
issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation freeing Black slaves.
But just a little footnote here, he didn't really free all slaves.
He only freed them in the Confederate states.
In fact, there were still union states that allowed slavery.
But of course, the Emancipation Proclamation marked a turning point
ushering in the end of slavery, particularly with the passage of the
13th Amendment that soon followed, which permanently ended slavery as
a formal institution in America.
And for a very short time, African-Americans enjoyed the full
rights of American citizenship.
We call this period the Reconstruction.
The foundations for the Reconstruction were found in three new amendments
to the Constitution, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.
Collectively, we call these the Reconstruction Amendments and in federal
legislation that followed new state constitutions and laws were also enacted
throughout the South that also reflected these new values, and these were the
price of admission by the Southern states to be allowed back into the Union.
But these were largely imposed on the South, and it was Northern troops that
enforced the new laws in the South.
So the South was largely occupied by the North, which
enforced this new Reconstruction.
Naturally, this caused its own share of resentment among white Southerners, but at
the same time, it ushered in unimaginable new opportunities for the Black South.
The result was a dramatic change, a sudden flourishing of rights
for what were now former slaves.
Of course, Black America was still economically disadvantaged,
but Black Americans were getting elected to political office, getting,
paying jobs, getting an education.
In fact, the Reconstruction played a dramatic role nationally in
introducing public education to America.
It was still an uneasy time in many ways.
Groups like the Ku Klux Klan terrorized Black America, but federal
troops intervened to protect African Americans, hunting, and for a time
almost completely eliminating the Klan Transformative change was truly underway.
But this new wave of opportunity came to a grinding halt within a decade.
By the late 1870s, many, if not most of these gains in the South evaporated.
Almost overnight, this new Golden Age for Black America suddenly derailed
with the presidential election of 1876,
one of the most controversial in US history,
the pro-freedom Republican candidate won by only one electoral college vote - still
enough to get the presidency - but there were 20 votes which were contested, and
without these votes, he could not win.
Southern Democrats agreed to concede the election, but for a price:
The North would have to leave
the South. Federal troops could no longer enforce their laws.
This compromise of 1877 brought Reconstruction to a screeching halt.
In return, for giving the Northern Republicans the presidency, the Southern
Democrats got an end to Reconstruction. And this unwinding of Reconstruction
wasn't just a function of the political and legislative changes that followed.
It was also reinforced by decisions of the Supreme Court.
Decision after decision whittled away at the rights of African-Americans.
The new constitutional amendments, which were originally introduced to
bring about equality were suddenly seen as imposing limits only on government,
but not on private enterprise.
So there was nothing wrong, under the court's interpretation, with individuals
or businesses discriminating.
Eventually this led to the 'Separate but Equal' principle in the Plessy
vs Ferguson case where the Court essentially sanctioned a policy of
apartheid where Black Americans could be sent to separate schools, riding
separate train cars and carriages.
Basically, this was a license to discriminate, and this remained
the new law of the land for a good part of the next century.
And it also meant that there was now no one in the South to uphold
the rights of African-Americans.
The Ku Klux Klan suddenly rose from its ashes and persecuted Black Americans
without consequence. You could hang Black Americans without any
repercussions. And the political system was gamed to prevent the Black vote
by introducing new requirements to vote, like literacy tests or civic knowledge
questions that were deliberately easy for white voters, but almost impossible
to answer for Black ones. Or requirements that your grandfather had to have
voted for you to be able to vote.
These are what we call the Jim Crow laws.
They were laws designed to prevent the Black vote.
But in addition to the political and judicial changes whittling away at Black
Rights, there were also intellectual discourses cultivating racism.
And this is a really important point, because the Jim Crow laws
were largely limited to the South, but this kind of intellectual
racism became a national discourse.
It shaped attitudes.
Most important was the emergence among historians of what became known as
the 'Dunning' School of Thought, named after the historian William Dunning.
Basically, the Dunning School argued that Blacks had been given the opportunity to
participate in political life following the Civil War during the Reconstruction,
but that they had failed, proving that they were not intellectually and
morally fit to participate in government.
The facts supporting this were entirely bogus.
It was selective and hardly objective, but it emerged as the
convention in the academic literature.
And there were supposedly scientific studies - later disproven - that supposedly
proved that African-Americans were intellectually inferior. Studies,
for example, that counted the number of marbles a deceased Black skull
could contain while comparing it to White skulls to argue that Black
skulls could hold less marbles.
So White brains must be bigger.
By the way, read Gould's, 'Mismeasure of Man', to see how these experiments
were later replicated, using exactly the same skulls that had been used in
these original studies, to prove that the reported results were entirely
false. And there was all kind of racist propaganda like postcards conveying
Black moral inferiority, preying on people's fears and prejudices.
So there was an active intellectual discourse driving this new
wave of scientific racism.
It was filled with, what we call today, fake news, selective
statistics from the situation in the defeated post-war civil South.
New scientific studies, press reports, distorting the news.
And as is the tradition in intellectual discourse, each new
publication built on the last further reinforcing this discourse.
And again, this kind of scientific racism prevailed in the North
as much as in the South.
So the racism grew like a cancer.
Because of this, racism was not just a problem of the American South.
It was an American problem prevailant everywhere.
It was a discourse that further poisoned America's views on race.
It was prevailant in intellectual circles in the North as much as in the South.
And, in fact, it wasn't just an American problem.
It gave rise to a whole new perspective popularly called the 'White Man's Burden'.
That became the justification for apartheid policies worldwide, in
South Africa, in India, just about everywhere, justifying colonial rule.
This new paradigm asserted that it was only the White man that was intellectually
and morally properly fit to govern, so it was the White man's burden.
Now the church played a big role here as well in further
cultivating this new form of racism.
Now, remember earlier I spoke about how it was largely the churches that
led to this discourse opposing slavery throughout the early 19th century.
It was this moral indignation that drove the abolition of slavery.
But suddenly, once abolition was achieved, churches went silent.
I mean, thousands of Black Americans were being lynched every year.
African-Americans suffered every form of discrimination, and there was
not a peep from America's churches.
Where was their outrage?
Race was no longer a moral issue.
And so the new breed of intellectual racism went unchecked
without any moral resistance.
There was a despiritualization of the African-American. So where once
the discussion in social circles centered on the immorality of slavery,
now these same circles sought to keep the Black man in his place.
And there's one more strand to the story that I have to share with you
so that you get the full picture here.
For the most part, the African-American response to this new oppression was
not to challenge and fight the system.
Understandable, perhaps, because of the terrors they faced.
But the African-American response was largely to exercise patience
and focus on incremental gains, an 'accommodationist' approach to change.
Perhaps the most important Black leader of the post Reconstruction
19th century was Booker T Washington.
Now, Booker Washington did great things for Black America, particularly in
promoting vocational education, education centered around a trade, and he was
instrumental in getting white America to financially contribute to these endeavors.
But at the same time, he was also instrumental in reinforcing this
approach of seeking only incremental change and perhaps more detrimentally,
he bought into the whole 'separate but equal' paradigm, and he promoted it.
Washington, for example, spoke at the International
Exposition in Atlanta in 1895.
This was the first time a Black speaker addressed a largely White
public audience in the American South.
And his speech is seen as one of the most influential speeches in American history,
and it was incredibly well received.
In fact, he got a standing ovation. A standing ovation by a Black man addressing
a white audience in the American South!
I mean, this was unheard of.
But in his famous 'Atlanta Compromise' speech, Washington argued that African
Americans should not agitate for social equality because this was clearly a folly.
Instead, Blacks should work hard, get an education, and improve their own
lot. And white America should help by helping to fund vocational initiatives.
So this was his compromise.
White America: 'help fund our vocational education and we won't agitate for change.
Instead, we will work hard to improve our own lot.' And this approach
ultimately fed in to the kind of scientific racism prevailant in the day.
If African-Americans had failed to improve their lot, it was their own fault.
After all, White America had showed it charity by helping
fund its vocational schools.
White America had kept their side of the bargain. And on the question of
social integration, while Washington bought into the whole 'separate but equal'
principle, in fact, he argued during his speech, 'In all things that are purely
social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all
things essential to mutual progress.'
Now, White America loved Booker T Washington.
This was the kind of discourse they were happy for Black America to engage in.
It was really only slightly before Abdul-Baha arrived in America that
an alternative discourse had emerged in the Black American community,
with views on social justice that contrasted entirely with this
kind of Accommodationist approach.
We'll talk more about that later in this and in our next podcast.
And it was led by people like W.E.B. Du Bois and the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, which at the time was viewed
largely as a fairly radical organization.
And we'll discover this later in our story, how Abdul-Baha addressed
the NAACP at their 4th annual conference, introducing a new
strand to the race discourse.
And what emerges is a deep interaction between the Baha'i community and the
NAACP that runs for many decades.
And Abdul-Baha spoke to predominantly Black audiences on a number of
occasions throughout his travels, including a major address at
Howard University, the predominant Black intellectual institution.
And Abdul-Baha's speeches, particularly to these predominantly Black
audiences, proved to be monumental.
They stimulate new ideas in the nascent Civil Rights movement in America, and it
becomes hugely influential in shaping the, the worldview of the Black intelligentsia.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.
That's all ground we're gonna cover
in our next two episodes.
Now, I know that was a lot to take in in our first episode of this sequence
on race unity, but I wanted you to understand the America that Abdul-Baha
spoke to when he arrived here in 1912.
Yes, slavery had been abolished, but it would take the better part of the
next century before African-Americans had anything like, real rights. Racism
was rampant and Black America was truly disempowered. And it's in this climate
that Abdul-Baha arrives and begins engaging with the race discourse in America.
Okay, now in our next episode, we'll explore why there was such interest to
hear Abdul-Baha speak in the first place, and we'll briefly explore what He talked
about concerning race in His talks and in His presentations throughout America.
And then in the third episode of the sequence will explore
the impact this all had.
So I want to thank you once again for joining us today on Society Builders,
and remember to tune in next time when we continue our discussion by exploring
Abdul-Baha's message on race unity.
That's next time on Society Builders
Society Builders pave the way, to a better world, to a
better day. A united approach to building a new society.
There's a crisis facing in humanity.
People suffer from a lack of unity.
It's time for a brand new path to a new society. Join the conversation, for social transformation. Society Builders.
So engage with your local communities and explore all the exciting possibilities.
We can elevate the atmosphere in which we move. The paradigm is shifting.
It's so very uplifting.
It's a new beat, a new song, a brand new groove.
Join the conversation, for social transformation.
Society Builders.
The Baha'i Faith has a lot to say,
helping people discover a better way, with discourse and social action framed by unity.
Now the time has come to lift our game, and apply the teachings of
the Greatest Name, and rise to meet the glory of our destiny. Join the conversation, for social transformation. Society Builders