Members of a small class of highly trained Black public intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Leroy Locke, and Louis G. Gregory were linked by public engagement in the struggle against American racism, as well as by formative encounters with the Bahá’í Faith. Their public careers followed different trajectories, and their relationships to the Bahá’í teachings and the American Bahá’í community likewise developed along different lines. Nonetheless, they remained longtime friends and collaborators, having been trained at some of the same institutions of higher learning, belonging to overlapping social networks, and responding to the same American social context. This presentation explores the relationship between the shared elements of their experience, on the one hand, and the points of divergence in their respective analyses of the race problem and the practical approaches they adopted to combat racism, on the other.
Aaron Yates uses primarily historical and archival methods to explore questions at the intersection of science, religion, and the role of knowledge in the advancement of civilization. His work considers the connections between social scientific theories of progress and movements for social change that disrupt or reproduce entrenched systems of racial, colonial, and gendered domination. He draws inspiration from W. E. B. Du Bois’s conviction that knowledge is necessary for emancipation, and seeks to explore the conditions under which scientific knowledge production is a means of liberation rather than oppression. He is currently an assistant professor of Black Studies at Denison University.