The Bowery Boys and the Black Rose

*A retelling based on **Portals to Freedom** by Howard Colby Ives (George Ronald, 1937), chapter 4. The lines in quotation marks are Ives's own words.*

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In the spring of 1912 Howard Colby Ives, then a minister, had fallen into the habit of hurrying into New York after his Sunday service and spending the rest of the day at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Kinney, where 'Abdu'l-Bahá passed many hours with the friends.

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Late one Sunday afternoon toward the end of April, Ives was standing alone at a window when a large group of boys came rushing up the steps, twenty or thirty of them, noisy and poorly dressed but scrubbed clean as if for an occasion. Mrs. Kinney explained.

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A few days earlier 'Abdu'l-Bahá had walked through the East Side to speak at the Bowery Mission, and a number of boys had followed His party, calling names and, as Ives remembered, throwing sticks. She had dropped back, told them Who He was, and invited them to her home the next Sunday so that they could see Him. Now they had come.

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Ives followed them upstairs to 'Abdu'l-Bahá's room. The Master stood at the door and greeted each boy as he entered, with a handclasp or an arm around the shoulder, and with so much laughter that, Ives wrote, it almost seemed He was a boy with them.

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Among the last to enter was a Black boy of about thirteen, the only boy of his race in the group, who evidently feared he might not be welcome. When 'Abdu'l-Bahá saw him, His face lit up with a smile. In Ives's words, "He raised His hand with a gesture of princely welcome and exclaimed in a loud voice so that none could fail to hear; that here was a black rose."

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The room fell silent. The boy's face shone with happiness, and the other boys looked at him with new eyes. Ives caught them glancing at him again and again with thoughtful eyes.

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Watching them, Ives wondered what would happen in New York if these boys remembered the afternoon all their lives, and whenever they met people of the city's many races thought of them as "different colored flowers in the Garden of God."

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*A retelling based on **Portals to Freedom** (Howard Colby Ives, George Ronald, 1937), chapter 4. For Ives's full account, see the [original](https://bahai-library.com/ives_portals_freedom).*

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