The Silent Warrior

Abstract George Wendell Goodman (1901–1981) was an African American racial equality and civil rights activist and member of the Bahá’í Faith. Goodman held positions in the Urban League, Fisk University, the Red Cross during wwii , and across varied Black newspapers and radio stations, as well as being elected and appointed to positions across the American Bahá’í religious community. Despite these realities, little extant scholarship examines Goodman’s life, largess, and legacy, or, for the focus of this paper, how his racial and religious commitments were co-constitutive. Pulling from a diverse array of media accounts, archives, published material, and interviews, we thus aim to rescue an important figure in both Black civil rights and American religious history from relative obscurity and in so doing demonstrate how Goodman was, as the editors of the Washington Afro-American described him in 1941, a “Silent Warrior …. Because he has fought a consistent up-hill battle against great odds, and has succeeded, without fanfare.”