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Friends United Meeting |
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March 1999
And Your Neighbor as Yourself
By Gordon Browne
The early introduction of slavery into all the American colonies made it hard for Christians to be obedient to the second half of Jesus's statement of the law. When people are classified, as slaves were, as "property" or even as "livestock," it becomes hard to recognize them as "your neighbor," whom you are charged to love as you love yourself. How else to explain that there were Quakers who owned slaves in all colonies where there were Quakers?
Modern Friends take pride in the fact that Friends were quicker than many other Americans to recognize the injustice of slavery and to end it among their members. Among our heroes are anti-slavery activists like John Woolman, Levi Coffin, Lucretia Mott, and other valiant though, perhaps, less well known Friends, like Paul Cuffe, Prudence Crandall, Charles Osborn, Benjamin Lundy, and many others. The testimony on equality illuminated Friends' awareness of gross injustice and has motivated much Quaker activity in race relations ever since.
That the testimony on community was not always so powerfully summoned is reflected in Quaker failures to see individual human beings rather than racial stereotypes. The acceptance in Quaker institutions of racial segregation long after the abolition of slavery is illustrative. Black worshippers in some meetings were assigned to seats in the galleries. There are instances of mixed race marriages which were recorded in the public records but not in the recorder's books of the meetings the participants attended. And, though Friends had a long history of supporting the education of freed slaves through Freedmen's Funds and Quaker-supported schools in the South for blacks, when the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 ordered the end of racial segregation in America's public schools, many Quaker schools and colleges still did not admit black students. The mix of valiant efforts for racial justice and bafflingly inconsistent moves towards and away from human community seems still to describe Quaker response to Jesus' second statement of the law.
As the Civil War was winding down, for example, slave owners in the Mississippi Valley fled their farms, taking their able-bodied slaves with them and abandoning others, mostly women and children. Indiana Yearly Meeting sent relief supplies and workers to these refugees in Helena, Arkansas, fed them, clothed them, and started a school for them, which became Southland Institute. A Friends meeting under the care of Whitewater Monthly Meeting was established, and, as Daisy Newman records in A Procession of Friends, many of its members, born in slavery, became valuable traveling ministers in the Society of Friends. Southland Institute persisted in its work for more than sixty years. Again in 1957, when the Governor of Arkansas called out the National Guard to prevent the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School, the Friends meeting there wrote to the Arkansas Gazette: "As part of the Christian brotherhood, we feel that Christ's message comes to us today bidding us love our neighbors whatever color they are. He bids us put trust in our fellow men in place of fear, and supplant proud antagonism with humble, helpful friendliness." The American Friends Service Committee kept staff in Little Rock throughout the entire struggle there, to work for peace and community in the midst of fear and hatred.
On the other hand, when Friends World Committee for Consultation, at its 1961 Triennial held in Kenya, discussed plans for its Fourth World Conference of Friends to be held in 1967 and received an invitation from North Carolina Yearly Meeting to come to Greensboro, North Carolina, and Guilford College, European and African Friends were skeptical. How could Friends hold an international conference at a Quaker institution that had been racially segregated since its founding in 1837? Thomas Lung'aho, a Kenyan Friend active in the Quaker Mission there and later the first Superintendent of East Africa Yearly Meeting, suggested that accepting the invitation might strengthen those in the U.S. who were committed to racial equality. FWCC gave an ambiguous answer, accepting the invitation, "if way should open." Clyde Milner, President of Guilford, carried that message back to the October 1961 meeting of the Board of Guilford College. After intense discussion, the Trustees announced that the integration of the College would begin at once.
Earlier, at a meeting in 1954, the Executive Secretaries of the AFSC national and regional offices, had commented that AFSC's work to improve race relations was hindered by the poor example many Friends provided. They wished for a national conference on the subject but recognized that such a conference should be called by Friends themselves. In 1955, a regional conference in eastern North Carolina, arranged by the Social Order Committees of the two Baltimore Yearly Meetings and by North Carolina Yearly Meeting, opened the way for such a call from David Scull of Baltimore's Joint Social Order Committee. All yearly meetings were invited to send representatives to the first National Conference of Friends on Race Relations, held in Wilmington, Ohio, August 31 to September 3, 1956. One hundred and twenty Friends, more than 10% of whom were African-American, representing "pastoral and nonpastoral, urban and rural" Quaker groups, reported they had "prayed together and spoken to one another honestly and in a spirit of love and have gained insight into one another's problems and have seen...barriers fall." As a part of the conference report, they addressed eight Queries "to each Friends Meeting and Church and to every individual Friend in America...." They named a continuing committee with David Scull as chairman to arrange a Second National Conference of Friends on Race Relations at Westtown School in 1958.
The Second Conference asked FWCC, Section of the Americas, to sponsor future conferences, to be held every two years. The Section named a continuing committee, and conferences were held in 1961 at Earlham College and in 1963 at Oakwood School in Poughkeepsie, NY. By 1965, when the next conference was held at Earlham, the national scene was dramatically changed by the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Friends had felt in the vanguard of the movement for justice at earlier conferences, national events had now passed them by. At this conference Friends asked if they had anything uniquely Quaker to contribute to the movement. Colin Bell, Executive Secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, urged Friends to do what they were good at and suggested that that was education. Once more, the sorry story of segregated Quaker educational institutions was before Friends. As one deeply moved attender, I went home to New England Yearly Meeting and urged that we raise funds for scholarships for minority students in any of the five Quaker schools in New England who would welcome them. Four of the schools responded eagerly, and the so-called Minute 74 Committee (named for the minute recording its creation) came into being. Thomas Bodine, the Yearly Meeting clerk, applied successfully for a grant of $20,000 from a Quaker trust to serve as seed money, and a standing committee of the yearly meeting was created to carry forward the concern.
National events had moved to yet another stage by the time of the next National Conference, held in Black Mountain, North Carolina, in July 1967. There had been racial riots in a number of American cities. Slogans like "Black is beautiful" and "Black power" had given more confident assertiveness to some black Friends and frightened some white Friends. The conference planning committee observed that many Friends suffered from "middle class bias," which it defined as willingness to work for change in individuals but not in societal structures, fear of conflict, and distrust of power. It titled the conference "Black Power-White Power-Shared Power." Its concluding message said, "future action must be based on a willingness to work for social changes much more far-reaching than we had supposed.... We must be prepared to discover how much we ourselves...are contributing to the power which maintains the very practices we are fighting against." The idea of white Friends leading the fight for black rights seemed to some Quakers, black and white, paternalistic and stifling of black leadership. The vision of our working together, serving each other, because we were neighbors who loved each other as ourselves seemed still beyond our grasp.
The final National Conference of Friends on Race Relations, held with a different format in Washington, D.C., in 1970, had smaller attendance than expected. Some committed Friends sought to continue the work through a new organization called Friends for Human Justice. George Sawyer, a black Quaker lawyer from Indiana, and Caroline Estes, a white Friend from the West Coast but on the AFSC staff in Philadelphia, were named co-chairmen. Again, the American Section of FWCC provided sponsorship. At the Section's Executive Committee meeting in Atlanta in February 1971, George Sawyer said firmly that "problems exclusively black must be solved by blacks. White America must concern itself with the total eradication of racism in America. The burden is now on white America to purge itself." But broad support from the Society of Friends did not materialize. Despite the dedicated efforts of its core group of committed Quakers, Friends for Human Justice was laid down in 1977.
Other kinds of work on issues of social justice, however, continued. Black labor, both involuntary and voluntary, had helped to build the wealth of America, yet vast numbers of American blacks had been denied the fruits of that labor and lived in poverty. In 1969, New York Yearly Meeting, prodded by a gentle black Friend named Barrington Dunbar, created a $50,000 Development Fund to provide housing, education, job training, community organization, and legal aid to black people in the Yearly Meeting area. Barrington Dunbar said, "Black people living in the ghettos of American cities...cannot hear Friends who profess the way of love and nonviolence, but yet maintain a destructive silence in obvious situations of social injustice."
That same year, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was confronted by the demand of the Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC) for half a million dollars in "reparations" for four centuries of exploitation of black people. For a time, representatives of the BEDC took over the floor of the Yearly Meeting to press their demands. Debate among Friends was emotional and divisive, with some advocating turning over all the Yearly Meeting's assets to the BEDC, others citing fiduciary responsibilities, and still others recalling the historic service of Friends to people of color. One Friend noted that the only thing omitted from the discussion was a period of quiet seeking for the guidance of God.
Daisy Newman, the Quaker author and a member of New England Yearly Meeting, was present. She writes of this event, "It seemed to some of the Friends present that the wrong issues had been raised, that neither a confession of guilt nor payment of the large sum demanded would materially improve the sad lives of most of their Black brothers (sic). An entirely new, imaginative approach was called for, a kind of partnership had to be created which had never existed, one which conferred dignity on Blacks. Nothing else would absolve whites of their continuing guilt. It could only be accomplished when Friends were ready to put themselves in their brothers' place."
At the 1970 session of New England Yearly Meeting, therefore, Daisy insisted, "We must not wait to do what is right until it is demanded of us." Extra business sessions were called to respond to her wise advice. New England Friends wrestled with what their comparatively small Yearly Meeting could do. By Yearly Meeting's end, they had committed themselves to raise $100,000 over the next five years for "the victims of prejudice and poverty." Money raised for the ongoing work of the Minute 74 Committee would be counted in the $100,000. A new committee would raise the rest and identify community-based, self-help projects to receive the small grants possible. At its 1975 sessions, New England Yearly Meeting rejoiced that the $100,000 goal had been reached. The new Committee for the Victims of Prejudice and Poverty would be continued. It continues still, though often it has very limited funds to distribute.
In 1996, Friends General Conference held its annual gathering in Hamilton, Ontario. One day members of the FGC Center for People of Color made the long trip from Hamilton to Windsor to visit the museum of the Underground Railroad there and the town of North Buxton, settled by escaped slaves. They visited a patch of preserved forest and pictured the terror of people desperate for freedom who pushed at night without lights through miles and miles of such inhospitable wilderness with dangers, both natural and man-made, on every side. Shaken, humbled, proud, they returned to Hamilton to find the daily newsletter inviting one and all to have fun in an intergenerational game about the Underground Railroad the next day. To see the grim, heroic experience they had just had a glimpse of made frivolous as a "fun" game was intolerable. The workshop for Friends of African Descent wrote a letter of protest to the FGC Central Committee, and the game was cancelled. Protests from its proponents insisted that it had been originally developed at a Quaker school, and was widely used, not as a game but as an educational program for young children. Anger and hurt feelings abounded on all sides. Vanessa Julye of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the workshop leader, still meets occasional criticisms of the workshop's response. But she had been to Windsor and knew what she and other Friends of color had experienced there.
The July-August 1998 issue of Fellowship, the magazine of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, has a report on the FOR Bosnian Student Project, a program which has found sponsors in the U.S. to bring young Bosnians, cut off from educational opportunities by the long war in Bosnia, to this country to complete their studies. There are pictures of several June graduates with their proud American sponsors. One beaming, blonde graduate is Ajla Dzudza, who graduated from Montclair (NJ) State College with honors. With her, also beaming, is Betty Nash, her American sponsor, a handsome, African-American woman, who loves her neighbor, no matter how distant or different, as herself. So Jesus told us Friends to do.
Gordon Browne is a retired teacher and former executive secretary of Friends World Committee for ConsultationSection of the Americas.
Copyright (c) 1999 Friends United Meeting