from the early 1920s, with the leadership of Shoghi Effendi, membership in the religion was further delineated and its institutions more specifically defined both in methods of election and in jurisdiction. On the one hand it defined local assemblies as nine people elected by people who had formally declared their affiliation and distinct from membership in churches and that the boundaries of jurisdiction were the civil boundaries of the city or town, with jurisdiction at the regional and national level beyond that of local assemblies assigned more clearly to the national organs which were more firm by 1940. In the 1930s Shoghi Effendi also increased the standardization of avoiding political party affiliations which were progressively applied. And since the 1900s and on beyond the 1940s minorities grew in the community - African Americans grew from single digit percentages to the teens, over-represented compared to the states Bahá'ís were present in at the time and rose to higher percentages across the decades, and were integrated into communities successively with an increasing national normative process that may have had an increased sense of hierarchical loyalty instead of community bonds. Bahá'í Historical Record Survey The Bahá'í Historical Record Survey was an early demographic review of the Bahá'í Faith in the United States and Canada done circa 1934-1936. The backgrounds of Bahá'ís were later studied in a number of ways - racial and ethnic heritage, previous religious background, geographical spread and sometimes how these have changed over the years. Complimentary data sources have also been used to add to some of the reviews including US Census publications and Bahá'í directories published in periodicals of Bahá'í literature. A couple of these studies look specifically at the burgeoning black population of Bahá'ís amidst the wider society practice of continuing era of social segregation in the American society of the time which was against the Bahá'í teaching of the unity of all humanity. The vast majority of the Bahá'ís were white and mostly elder women, but the black segment of those states Bahá'ís were in responded more to the religion than the white population of those states did. The religion was also initially attracting Protestants, especially Unitarian Universalists and also among other more mainstream liberal denominations, but as history approached 1936 and beyond it attracted a greater diversity of religious backgrounds as it continued to grow more by conversion than by migration or birth. First Seven Year