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“MOST GREAT RECONSTRUCTION”: THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH IN JIM CROW SOUTH CAROLINA, 1898-1965 by Louis E. Venters, III Bachelor of Arts Winthrop University, 1998 Master of Arts University of South Carolina, 2004 ______________________________________ Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Colleges of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2010 Accepted by: Patricia Sullivan, Major Professor Walter Conser, Committee Member Bobby J. Donaldson, Committee Member Robert Weyeneth, Committee Member James Buggy, Dean of the Graduate School UMI Number: 3402846 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI 3402846 Copyright 2010 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 © Copyright Louis E. Venters, III, 2010 All Rights Reserved. ii DEDICATION To future generations of South Carolinians, with love and confidence iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I could not have asked for a better constellation of professors and classmates from whom to learn than those I found in the History Department of the University of South Carolina. Special thanks to the members of my committee, whose thoughtful readings and probing questions have improved this work beyond measure, and to Stephanie Mitchem in the Department of Religious Studies, who did not step down before making decisive contributions. Likewise, the President and Provost and my colleagues in the History Department of Francis Marion University have been unstinting in their support. I am indebted to a host of librarians and archivists—particularly at the National Bahá’í Archives, the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, and, during the final stages of the project, Rogers Library at Francis Marion University—and to Bahá’ís and friends in South Carolina and beyond who shared of their time and treasures. Thanks as well to several mentors who either helped mould my thinking or provided guidance and encouragement at critical moments (or both): Farzam and Sona Arbab, Betty Fisher, Behrooz Sabet, Nader Saeidi, Gayle Morrison, and Michael Penn. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my family, especially my parents, my sister, my spiritual parents, my in-laws, and my paternal grandmother, Rebecca Glymph Venters, who did not quite live to see the end of the project she did so much to nurture. Oak Ritchie, Carlos Serrano, and Aaron Yates were each there at the right time. Above all, I thank my wife, Melissa Smith-Venters, who always had more confidence in me than I did in myself. Her love, encouragement, and example have made this work possible. iv ABSTRACT By the end of the twentieth century, the Bahá’í Faith was the largest non-Christian religion in South Carolina, and it was well known for its longstanding commitment to promoting racial harmony, interfaith dialogue, and the moral education of children and youth. Its message was simple and powerful: in the Orient in the middle of the nineteenth century, Christ had returned. His new name was Bahá’u’lláh, the “Glory of the Father,” and the transforming power of his Word would excise the cancers of prejudice and injustice from the broken body of humanity. The religion owed much of its strength in the state to a series of campaigns from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, in which some twenty thousand people from all walks of life—from young white college students to elderly black former sharecroppers—had become Bahá’ís. However, the origins of South Carolina’s robust Bahá’í movement lay not in the social upheavals of the 1960s, but in painstaking efforts to build an interracial faith community during the long decades of segregation and disfranchisement. In contrast to nearly every other religious organization in early-twentieth century South Carolina, the Bahá’ís developed an explicit policy of promoting racial integration at the local level. Facing ostracism, slander, and violence, they succeeded in attracting an astonishingly diverse membership. Focusing on the period from South Carolinians’ first contacts with the faith in the late 1890s to the formal dissolution of the Jim Crow regime in the mid-1960s, this study posits the Bahá’í movement in South Carolina as a v significant, sustained, and deceptively subtle attack on the oppressive racial ideologies of the twentieth-century South and on the Protestant orthodoxy with which they were inextricably linked. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION …………………………………………………………………………….. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………………………………... iv ABSTRACT ……………………………………...………………………………………... v INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………...……………….… 1 1. FIRST CONTACTS, 1898-1916 …...…………….....……….….………….…………... 20 2. THE DIVINE PLAN, THE GREAT WAR, AND PROGRESSIVE-ERA RACIAL POLITICS, 1914-1921 ...……….………...………… 73 3. BUILDING BAHÁ’Í COMMUNITY IN THE AUGUSTA AREA, 1913-1917…………….…138 4. THE GREAT DEPRESSION, THE SECOND WORLD WAR, AND THE FIRST SEVEN YEAR PLAN, 1935-1945 …………………………........…… 200 5. POST-WAR OPPORTUNITIES AND COLD WAR CHALLENGES, 1944-1953 ……...…… 268 6. BROADENING THE BASE STATEWIDE, 1950-1965 …………..…..………………….. 312 EPILOGUE: THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH AS MASS MOVEMENT ……….……………….………... 374 vii Introduction “Some movements appear, manifest a brief period of activity, then discontinue. Others show forth a greater measure of growth and strength, but before attaining mature development, weaken, disintegrate and are lost in oblivion…. “There is still another kind of movement or cause which from a very small, inconspicuous beginning goes forward with sure and steady progress, gradually broadening and widening until it has assumed universal dimensions. The Bahá’í Movement is of this nature.” —‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Washington, D.C., April 22, 1912 I I started to hear the stories shortly after I encountered the Bahá’í Faith.1 During a series of growth campaigns from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, thousands of my fellow South Carolinians from all walks of life—from young white college students to elderly black former sharecroppers, from the foothills to the coast—had become Bahá’ís. Interracial teams of Bahá’í youth had fanned out across the state, talking with people on street corners and front porches, singing in folk and gospel styles, distributing literature, and conducting evening mass meetings in tents and rented halls. Their message was as simple as it was radical, and it was the same one that had attracted me: in the Orient in the middle of the nineteenth century, Christ had returned. His new name was 1 Among general introductions to Bahá’í history, theology, and community, two of the best are William S. Hatcher and J. Douglas Martin, The Bahá’í Faith: The Emerging Global Religion, rev. ed. (Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 2003) and Peter Smith, An Introduction to the Bahá’í Faith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Bahá’u’lláh, the “Glory of the Father,” and the transforming power of his Word would excise the cancers of prejudice and injustice from the broken body of humanity. They had found ready listeners, with the largest number of new believers among African Americans in rural areas. Old people and young, I heard from those who had been there, had dreamed dreams telling them that the Bahá’ís would come with a new message from God. Almost overnight, the South Carolina Bahá’í community had grown from some two hundred members in a handful of cities and towns to some twenty thousand in hundreds of localities. It was a modern-day Pentecost, a phenomenon the Bahá’ís in my Upstate city of Greenville called “entry by troops.” I was fascinated. As I met more Bahá’ís, particularly at the Louis Gregory Institute, a retreat center near the Lowcountry town of Hemingway, my father’s family home, I asked everyone I could about the heady days of the 1970s. The more I learned, the more I realized that the origins of South Carolina’s Bahá’í community lay not in the 1960s or 1970s, or even in the 1950s, as some of the older Bahá’ís told me, but far earlier, at the turn of the twentieth century. The interracial fellowship that I saw in every Bahá’í gathering was not simply a by-product of the civil rights movement; it had been built, painstakingly, during the long decades of segregation and disfranchisement. Black and white South Carolina expatriates, I found, had first encountered the Bahá’í Faith in urban areas of the Northeast, Midwest, and Upper South in the late 1890s, shortly after the religion’s arrival in the United States. The first Bahá’í traveling teachers and settlers had come to South Carolina beginning in 1910, as the new Jim Crow legal regime was tightening its grip on the social, economic, and political life of cities and states throughout the region. Over the course of more than half a century— 2 decades that witnessed two world wars, the Great Depression, the emergence of the Cold War, and an intensification of the black freedom movement—the Bahá’ís in South Carolina had struggled to create an interracial faith community within a racially segregated and religiously orthodox society. Decades before Martin Luther King, Jr. articulated the ideal of the “beloved community,” the Bahá’ís in South Carolina had gone farther than most of their Christian and Jewish fellows could contemplate towards interracial fellowship and social action. Here was a story, I thought, that needed to be told. Little did I know as a young high school student that I was not only exploring the heritage of my native state and my newfound faith, but setting the course of my career as an historian.

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