No less serious is the stress and strain imposed on the
fabric of American society through the fundamental and persistent neglect, by
the governed and governors alike, of the supreme, the inescapable and urgent
duty—so repeatedly and graphically represented and stressed by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in
His arraignment of the basic weaknesses in the social fabric of the nation—of
remedying, while there is yet time, through a revolutionary change in the
concept and attitude of the average white American toward his Negro fellow
citizen, a situation which, if allowed to drift, will, in the words of
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, cause the streets of American cities to run with blood,
aggravating thereby the havoc which the fearful weapons of destruction, raining
from the air, and amassed by a ruthless, a vigilant, a powerful and inveterate
enemy, will wreak upon those same cities. - Shoghi Effendi (From a message dated
July 28, 1954; ‘Citadel of Faith’)
