The First Convention for Amity Between the Races

A retelling based on the published accounts of the first Convention for Amity Between the White and Colored Races, as preserved by the Bahá'ís of the United States and in the early Bahá'í record of inter-racial amity. Phrases in quotation marks are words actually recorded as 'Abdu'l-Bahá's, or documented facts of the account.

By the last year of His life, 'Abdu'l-Bahá was old and worn. He had spent the whole of that life in exile, imprisonment, and labour for His Father's Cause, and the long journeys to Europe and America that had carried His message across the Western world were behind Him. He was in Haifa now, in the Holy Land, His health failing. And it was in this season, near the end, that He fixed His heart on a single thing He wished to see done in America before He died.

In 1920 an American believer named Agnes Parsons came on pilgrimage to the Master. Mrs. Parsons was a woman of Washington society — refined, well-placed, accustomed to the comfortable certainties of her class and her city. Washington in those years was a rigidly segregated capital, where Black and white Americans lived under laws and customs that kept them carefully apart, in separate cars and separate schools and separate lives. It would not naturally have occurred to a woman of her position to disturb that order. But 'Abdu'l-Bahá laid upon her a charge she had not sought. "I want you to arrange in Washington a convention for unity between the white and the colored people," He told her. And, knowing how large the task was, He added simply that of course she must have people to help her.

She returned to America carrying those words like a commission she could not set down. She was, by her own measure, ill-suited to it — she had no experience of such work, and the very idea ran against the grain of everything her world took for granted. But the Master had asked, and she set out to obey. She called to her aid those who could carry the burden with her, and chief among them was Louis Gregory.

Louis Gregory was himself the answer to the very prejudice the convention meant to heal — a Black attorney, the grandson of slaves, who had given his life to the Bahá'í teaching that humankind is one family. He knew, as Mrs. Parsons could not fully know, exactly what such a gathering would be up against: the suspicion, the discomfort, the social cost on both sides of the colour line. He also knew, better than anyone, why it had to be done. Around these two gathered others, among them the brilliant young scholar Alain Locke — a Black professor of philosophy at Howard University, soon to become one of the leading thinkers of his generation — who agreed to take part and to help shape the programme.

What they were attempting had never been done. So far as anyone knew, no convention had ever been called in America, or anywhere in the world, for the express purpose of bringing the white and the coloured races together in amity. There were meetings for charity, and meetings for reform, and meetings of one race about the other. There had not been a meeting of the two races, as equals, to sit together under one roof and look for the oneness between them. That was the thing the Master had asked for, and that was the thing they set out to build.

They secured a large hall — the old First Congregational Church, at Tenth and G Streets in the heart of Washington — and announced the gathering for the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first of May, 1921. As the days approached, the planners must have wondered whether anyone would come, and who. The answer, when it came, was its own small miracle. On the appointed evenings the hall filled — and it filled with both races together. Some fifteen hundred people, by the accounts, white and coloured Americans side by side in a single audience, in a segregated city, for a purpose the city had no category for. There were addresses and music and poetry; there were speakers of both races; and on the Friday evening it was Alain Locke who took the chair. People who had been taught their whole lives to keep apart sat that night in the same pews, listening to the same words, lifted by the same hope.

Into the midst of it came the voice of the Master Himself. He could not be present — He was an ailing old man half a world away — but He had sent His message ahead, and it was delivered to the convention through Mountfort Mills, a believer newly returned from pilgrimage to Haifa. The words 'Abdu'l-Bahá sent across the ocean to that assembly were not cautious or small. "Say to this convention," His message ran, "that never since the beginning of time has one more important been held. This convention stands for the oneness of humanity. It will become the cause of the removal of hostilities between the races. It will be the cause of the enlightenment of America."

Consider what it meant to say such a thing. Here was a gathering that the wider world, had it noticed at all, would have dismissed as a curiosity — a few hundred idealists in a church hall. And here was 'Abdu'l-Bahá declaring that never, since the beginning of time, had a more important meeting been held. He was not flattering them. He was telling them the truth of what they had begun. For the oneness of humankind was, in His teaching, not one cause among many but the very pivot of the age — the truth on which the peace of the whole world would finally turn. And here, in one room, in defiance of the law and custom of a divided land, that truth had been made visible: two estranged branches of the human family, sitting together as one.

The convention did not, of course, undo in three evenings the deep wrong of generations. The walls did not all fall at once; they have not all fallen yet. But a beginning had been made that could not be unmade. The Convention for Amity Between the White and Colored Races became the first of many; the work of race amity spread to other cities and grew into one of the abiding labours of the American Bahá'í community. And it had begun not in a strategy session but in a sickroom in Haifa, with an old man's request to a society lady who thought herself unequal to it — a request she obeyed, and that obedience changed the air of a city.

This is the beauty the Feast of Jamál holds before us: not beauty of feature, but the beauty of the human family when its false partitions come down. The Master had taught, across continents and to the end of His strength, that the peoples of the earth are the leaves of one tree and the children of one God. In Washington, in May of 1921, He asked that the teaching be made flesh — that black and white Americans simply be gathered, and seated, and allowed to discover that they were kin. Fifteen hundred of them came. And the Master, from far away, called it the most important gathering since the beginning of time.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see the published histories of the first Convention for Amity Between the White and Colored Races, preserved by the Bahá'ís of the United States.

editors, B. O. T. U. S.. *Bahá'ís of the United States*. https://www.bahai.us/integrating-meetings/