Bahá’í Faith and African American Studies

Loni Bramson teaches at Clark College.Layli Maparyan is the Katherine Stone Kaufmann ’67 executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Women and chair of Africana studies at Wellesley College.

This inter-disciplinary, genre-bending collection offers an indispensable introduction to the Bahá’í Faith and its multi-varied approaches to racial justice and African American Studies. Spanning the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this volume’s contributors have situated Bahá'í community action within the heart of the Black freedom struggle—from the Civil Rights Movement to the Movement for Black Lives. For those currently grappling with the age-old question of “what is to be done?” this volume examines a series of possibilities from a religious community committed to doing what it can in a world that desperately needs to transform.

• List of FiguresIntroduction by Layli MaparyanChapter 1: The Spread of the Bahá’í Faith among African Americans, 1898-1925 by Richard HollingerChapter 2: Reconsidering the Civil Rights Era by June ThomasChapter 3: How the Bahá’í Teachings on Racial Unity Influenced My Academic Focus on Race Relations in the United States by Richard W. ThomasChapter 4: The Ruhi Training Institute Program: One Method for Creating Racial Harmony by Loni Bramson Chapter 5: Bahá’í Efforts to Transform Society: Using FACT Data to Measure Race Unity Activity by Michael McMullenChapter 6: Anti-Black Racism: A Bahá’í Response by Gwen Etter-LewisConclusion by Layli MaparyanAppendixIndexAbout the Contributors