Senior Researcher & Producer: Saleem Vaillancourt

Associate Producers: Wynton St. Clair, Leila Yavari

Camera/Sound: Kamran Doolat

Assistants: Dominique De Villiers, Sophia Fozdar, Myah Popat

Editor: Ricardo Marcelino

Executive Producer: Maziar Bahari

Produced by Journalism for Change, Inc

Special thanks to the United States Baha'i Office of Public Affairs and all the interviewees.

The RaceUnity.us oral history project was established in September 2019 thanks to the financial support of Marjan and Navid Yavari.


Race Unity in America: an Oral History is produced by Journalism for Change, Inc, a US-based non-profit media organization, which was founded by the filmmaker and human rights campaigner Maziar Bahari.

The goal of this project is to tell the century-long story of the American Baha'i community and its efforts – as well as its tests and challenges – in promoting race unity.

Bahari is not a Baha'i – but as a filmmaker he has covered the persecution of Baha'is in Iran since his 2014 film To Light a Candle. He was a reporter for Newsweek from 1998 to 2011, largely working in Tehran; in 2009, after reporting on the Iran presidential election crisis, Bahari was jailed for 118 days in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin Prison. He was released after a successful international campaign. His book Then They Came for Me told the story of his incarceration and in 2014 was adapted as the feature film Rosewater by Jon Stewart.

Journalism for Change supports freedom of expression for journalists, artists and authors. We promote citizen and professional journalism that engages, informs and inspires communities. We support filmmakers, artists, and civic activists who engage their communities to seek positive change.

Journalism for Change is registered in the United States as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization – it was launched in 2014 as the non-profit partner of the UK-based Off-Centre Productions.