Color Is Accidental: 'Abdu'l-Bahá at the NAACP, Chicago
'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, (1922), Bahá'í Publishing Trust · Read original
When in Bahá'í history
Chicago (today: Chicago, Illinois, USA)
On the afternoon of April 30, 1912, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá climbed to the platform of Handel Hall in Chicago to address the Fourth Annual Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He had arrived in America only weeks earlier; this was one of the first times an Eastern teacher had been invited to speak before the young civil-rights organisation.
The talk recorded in The Promulgation of Universal Peace is short and unadorned. The Master begins from the metaphysics, not the politics:
The perfections of God, the divine virtues, are reflected or revealed in the human reality.
Whatever is true of any human soul — its capacity to love, to reason, to know God — is true of every human soul, because the source is the same in all. From that single statement He moves quickly to its consequence in the room before Him:
Color is accidental in nature. The spirit and intelligence of man is essential, and that is the manifestation of divine virtues.
Race, in other words, is accidental — incidental, peripheral, not of the essence. The essence is what reflects God: the mind, the heart, the moral life. The Master is not minimising the historical injuries of colour; He is, more radically, denying it the dignity it has stolen.
He continues with a sentence the audience would carry out of the hall:
A man’s heart may be pure and white though his outer skin be black; or his heart be dark and sinful though his racial color is white.
The hierarchy that the country had taken for granted was, in the Master’s telling, simply inverted by the actual measure of the soul. Whiteness of skin says nothing about whiteness of heart; the dark-skinned man may be the more luminous of the two. Worth lies, He insists, where God has put it: the character and purity of the heart is of all importance.
That afternoon at Handel Hall, in a country still half a century from any meaningful federal civil-rights legislation, the Master publicly placed the criterion of human worth where the country’s laws and customs would not put it for generations.
Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, talk of April 30, 1912, before the Fourth Annual Conference of the NAACP at Handel Hall, Chicago. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.
Cite this story
'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1922). *The Promulgation of Universal Peace*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/promulgation-universal-peace/
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