American Fiction

» RonPrice - Exploration of Harlem Renaissance & Baha'i in the 20s & 30s.

When the Harlem Renaissance began in 1917, the Baha’i Faith in America had begun to go through a transition from a loosely connected, informal network of groups to a well- organized religion with a national consciousness.1 During the Harlem Renaissance this process, this transition, could be said to have taken place. The philosopher Alain Locke, the first Negro Rhodes scholar, was both a Baha’i and a prominent participant in this Renaissance. Robert Bone in his The Negro Novel in America2 wrote that the dominant tendencies of an era are to be found in its little magazines. This was true of the literary and artistic community in Negro dominated Harlem and the Baha’i community of the USA. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Peter Smith, “The American Baha’i Community: 1894-1917,” Studies in Babi & Baha’i History, Vol. 1, editor, M. Momen, Kalimat Press, Los Angeles, 1982, p. 135 and 2Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America, Yale UP, New Haven, 1965.

We had our little magazines, then,
and we have them now and they
tell a story of these and those epochs,
of the birth and rebirth of art, literature
and the growth of a new religion.

There was an optimism back then
after the Great War and being black
was fashionable, in certain circles,
and being a Baha’i was still a little
strange, then and now, but you came
to accept that, it was part of the deal.

As the Harlem Renaissance began
to take shape, this new Order began
to take shape, form and stability
around a theory that had already
been put on paper for more than
three-quarters of a century.

This was no epistemological,
doctrinal, individualism with
its liberal anti-authoritarian
stance—this was a union of
opposites around a structured
religious entity with mechanisms
for orthodoxy which devout
religionists accomplished
as far back as 1917 and which
remains with us today as part
of our very raison d’etre and
the renaissance goes on and on.

Ron Price
September 17th 2006

-- posted by RonPrice