The Place of Honor: Louis Gregory at the Persian Legation Luncheon

On the morning of Tuesday, April 23, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá addressed the student body of Howard University — a Black university in segregated Washington, D.C. — and called the racial integration of His audience the most beautiful thing in the room.

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That afternoon He was the principal guest at a luncheon in His honour given by Ali-Kuli Khan, the Persian chargé d’affaires. The guest list was diplomatic and Washingtonian: dignitaries, embassy staff, prominent Bahá’ís of the city, all of them white. Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání records that Louis Gregory, the most distinguished African-American Bahá’í of his generation, was not on the guest list. The conventions of the city did not contemplate his being there.

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One hour before the hour, the Master sent word to the Khan home. He asked that Mr. Gregory be sent for at once for an interview. Gregory came. The Master spoke with him at length. When the luncheon was about to begin, the Master rose and asked that the seating arrangements be adjusted. Mr. Gregory would dine with them. Mr. Gregory would dine, in fact, in the place of honour beside the Master Himself.

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Ali-Kuli Khan, by every account, made room with grace. The other guests, however startled, took their seats. Maḥmúd records the luncheon as proceeding with no overt difficulty. The shock of the Master’s arrangement passed into the meal itself, and what followed was, as is so often true of His interventions, simply ordinary hospitality among ordinary equals.

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Maḥmúd writes one of his most quoted lines as a marginal note on that luncheon and the kindred episodes that punctuated the American journey:

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> Here, as elsewhere, when both white and colored people were > present, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá seemed happiest.

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The luncheon, in retrospect, is recognised as one of the most quietly radical acts of the Master’s American tour. The country had been scandalised, only a decade earlier, when President Theodore Roosevelt had invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House. The Master, in His own house in Washington that afternoon, simply did the thing the country was still arguing about — and did it not as protest but as the natural arrangement of a properly ordered table.

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Louis Gregory would later be appointed a Hand of the Cause of God. The seat at that luncheon, he often said in later years, had been the moment when his life’s vocation was confirmed.

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*Paraphrased from Mahmúd's Diary: The Diary of Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald, 1998), entry for April 23, 1912; see original for full text.*

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