Episode 11: Championing Race Unity (Part One)

Society builders pave the way, to a better world to a better day. A united approach to building new society. 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.