Abdu'l Baha, head of the Baha'i Faith from 1892 to 1921, visited North America for the first and only time in 1912. He addressed audiences large and small during a nine month whirlwind tour which would take him across the continent from Montreal to Los Angeles and back. Few other Iranian figures during this period could have 'translated' as well as Abdu'l Baha did, especially among African American communities. His message of equality, unity, and spiritual transformation seemed almost tailor made for African Americans still under the heavy yoke of legal segregation, disenfranchisement, and violent racist attacks. By refusing to speak to segregated audiences and directly addressing the concerns of African Americans both at Howard University and at the 4th Annual NAACP Convention, Abdu'l Baha offered a sweeping transnational vision of racial justice that resonated profoundly within African American intellectual circles. Alain Locke, the "Father of the Harlem Renaissance", and Robert Abbott, the founder of the Chicago Defender, were both directly influenced by Abdu'l Baha's visit. Both men eventually embraced the Baha'i Faith as their own and called upon its teachings to aid in the ongoing struggle for African American freedom. This paper will explore the various African American accounts of Abdu'l Baha's visit as recorded in the popular black press while attempting to map Abdu'l Baha's ideological impact as it worked its way into the later writings of Locke and Abbott. Underlying this study is the important question of what direct role, if any, did Abdu'l Baha have upon the evolution of the American Civil Rights Movement during first half of the 20th Century. If a direct correlation can be traced and his influence is found to be significant, then the Baha'i Faith should be viewed as having preceded the Nation of Islam as the first "Eastern" religious tradition to have directly contributed to the advancement of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Following R. Laurence Moore's concept of religious outsiders as central to the shaping of American religious debates, this study should help expose the various ways in which the African American 'church' would continue to advance as a site of progressive 'grassroots' political activism while developing a liberation discourse that accelerated though the first half of the 20th Century while largely under the influence of a borrowed Middle Eastern religious tradition.