The Station of Man: 'Abdu'l-Bahá at Howard University

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s American tour was deliberate in its choices. On the afternoon of the 22nd of April, 1912 — only days after His arrival in Washington, D.C. — He went to Howard University, the historically Black institution at the centre of African American higher education in the capital. He had not come to Washington to address only the parlours of the city’s wealthy. He had come to address everyone, and He intended His presence in that hall to be itself a teaching.

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The lecture room filled. Black students, white faculty, visitors who had come specifically to see Him assembled in the same space. The Master rose and chose, deliberately, the highest possible subject.

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> The station of man is great, very great. God has created man > after His own image and likeness.

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He went on to draw the contrast that ran through so many of His addresses on the journey. The animal kingdom, however magnificent, is bounded by its instincts. The human being is the only creature who can inquire beyond what its senses report — who can investigate the mysteries of nature, who can know the laws of the heavens, who can recognize, however dimly, the *divine spark* placed within it.

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This was not abstract teaching for that audience. The room held many who had been told, every day of their lives by the racial ideology of the country, that they were not made in any image worth honouring. The Master’s sentence — that man is created in the image of God — was set down in front of them as a principle that did not admit of subtraction.

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He encouraged the students to seek not only material knowledge but spiritual advancement; to use the disciplines they were studying in service to humanity; and, by the conduct of their own lives, to prove the dignity of every human soul.

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The talk was brief. The witness, in 1912, was not. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had walked into a Black university and said, in the plainest language available, the sentence the country had been refusing to say.

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