One Family: The Marriage of Louis and Louisa Gregory

A retelling based on the life of Hand of the Cause Louis G. Gregory as recorded in Bahá'í Chronicles and corroborated in published Bahá'í histories. Short phrases in quotation marks are words actually recorded as 'Abdu'l-Bahá's, or are documented facts of the account.

Louis Gregory was born in Charleston in 1874, less than a decade after his parents were freed from slavery. He climbed, against every obstacle his country placed before a Black man of his generation, through the best schools open to him and at last through the law school of Howard University, and became an attorney in Washington. When he found the Bahá'í teaching of the oneness of humankind, he embraced it with his whole soul — and in 1911 he set out across the sea to attain the presence of 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

It was in Ramleh, near Alexandria in Egypt, that he first came before the Master, on his way to the Holy Land. And it was there, among the pilgrims gathered around 'Abdu'l-Bahá, that he first met an Englishwoman named Louisa Mathew, who had come on the same pilgrimage. They were, on the face of it, as far apart as two people could be: a Black American lawyer, the grandson of slaves, and a white Englishwoman of comfortable background. The world they were returning to had a hundred names for the gulf between them and a thousand laws to keep it open.

The Master saw something else. To Louis Gregory, who carried in his heart the wound of his country's prejudice, He spoke words that have been preserved: "If you have any influence to get the races to intermarry, it will be very valuable." It was not an idle remark. 'Abdu'l-Bahá had come to teach, by word and by deed, that humanity is one family — not in sentiment only, but in fact, in blood, in marriage, in the shared table and the shared cradle. On another occasion He gave the longing of His heart plainly: "If it be possible, gather together these two races, black and white, into one assembly, and put such love into their hearts that they shall not only unite but even intermarry."

Louisa Mathew sailed back toward America on the same ship that carried 'Abdu'l-Bahá Himself — the S.S. Cedric — when the Master crossed the Atlantic in 1912 to bring His message to the New World. By then the friendship between Louis and Louisa had deepened, but both of them hesitated, and well they might. In 1912, thirty of the forty-eight states of the Union forbade marriage between the races by law. A union such as theirs would expose them to scorn, to danger, to the loss of friends and standing in both of the worlds they belonged to. To marry would be to make their own quiet, private lives into a public sign.

It was 'Abdu'l-Bahá who gently encouraged them past their hesitation. He did not compel; that was never His way. He set the truth before them and trusted them to choose it freely. And they chose it. On 27 September 1912, in New York, Louis Gregory and Louisa Mathew were married. Theirs was the first interracial marriage among the Bahá'ís of America — entered into not in defiance, not as a gesture, but as an act of faith, a small household raised up as a witness that the children of men are one.

The marriage was not easy, and they never pretended it would be. They lived for decades under the weight of a society that had no place for them, and they bore it with dignity, giving their lives to the work of drawing the races together. Louis Gregory travelled forty-six states teaching the oneness of humanity, and was in time named a Hand of the Cause of God — the first person of African descent to be so honoured. But the marriage itself remained one of the most luminous things he ever did. The Bahá'ís came to remember it as one of the most significant acts the Master carried out during His entire visit to the United States: an "exemplary act," a deed in which a great teaching was made flesh in two ordinary, courageous human beings.

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 fall. 'Abdu'l-Bahá did not merely preach the oneness of mankind. Where two hearts were willing, He helped them build it, one home at a time.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see the biography of Louis G. Gregory in Bahá'í Chronicles and in published Bahá'í histories of the Master's American journey.

editors, B. C.. *Bahá'í Chronicles*. https://bahaichronicles.org/louis-george-gregory/