Louis Venters. No Jim Crow Church

The Bahá’í Faith, intended by its founder Bahá’u’lláh and his successors to reach all peoples and to bind them into “an organic, interdependent global commonwealth” (2), confronted an enormous structural barrier of racism in the U.S. This book, while centered on the story of South Carolina’s Bahá’í community, analyzes the many constructive avenues that Bahá’ís in the U.S. undertook to address the challenges posed by racism. This is the story of the transformation of the Bahá’í Faith into an interracial community. The author, Louis Venters, defines interracialism as “maintaining a commitment to racial equality, both ideologically and structurally” (xiii). In 1910, there were 1,200 Bahá’ís in the U.S., mostly white former evangelical Protestants living in cities such as Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. By 1975, there would be about 20,000 Bahá’ís in South Carolina alone, and most were African Americans living in rural areas or small towns. This book does not tell the entire story of this transformation—it ends with 1968, before a Carolinian Pentecostal outpouring in 1970 and 1971, one that brought in thousands of new members—but it provides a fascinating account that greatly increases our understanding of American Bahá’ís.

Commonwealth · Environmental ethics · Faith · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · South carolina · Theology · White (mutation) · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Public Administration · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies