Quaker Brotherhood: Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee, 1917-1950, by Allan W. Austin

Abstract

Quaker Brotherhood: Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee, 1917-1950, by Allan W. Austin. Chicago, Illinois, University of Illinois Press, 2012. xii. 257 pp. $55.00 US (cloth). American Quakers are understandably proud of their Society's long history of work on behalf of their black fellow citizens. From the abolitionist movement to educational reform and the civil rights struggle, Friends can claim to have been in the forefront of endeavours on behalf of African-Americans. However, as Allan Austin's book makes clear, the story is more complicated and uneven than often depicted. As anyone who has read Jean Soderland's Quakers and Slavery (Princeton, 1985) is aware, the Society of Friends' record with regard to African Americans is not without flaws. Most people would be stunned to learn that during the 1920s over twenty per cent of adult male Quakers in Wayne County Indiana joined the Ku Klux Klan. Austin rightly begins with a discussion of Rufus Jones' influence in founding the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) as a body dedicated to his vision of the Society of Friends as a mystical religion demanding Quakers embrace a new form of social gospel and actively engage in efforts to overcome evil and injustice in seeking a better world. The author examines Quaker racial and peace activism in the early twentieth century with a view to broadening the understanding of the implications of Quaker thought for AFSC projects as well as evolving American ideas ... concerning race and ethnicity (p. 5). Austin emphasizes the importance of the Peace Testimony in the development of Quaker racial activism. After WWI there was for the first time widespread pacifist recognition of the relationship between the horrors of war, the injustices of the economic system and the baleful influence of these evils on racial and ethnic minorities. The AFSC worked diligently, if not always successfully, to end violence, advance racial harmony, and mitigate economic exploitation. It so doing it opened possibilities for Quaker social activism, especially for women. In attempting to carry out its admirable goals, the AFSC faced three serious problems. The first was lack of experience, a difficulty addressed and at least partially solved as the Service Committee evolved and matured with an increasingly large majority of non-Quaker workers. Lack of sufficient funding, especially but not only during the Depression, hampered the AFSC's programs if not its dedication. Finally, and perhaps most troubling, was the absence of consensus within the Society of Friends about the need for, or even the efficacy of, bringing blacks and other minorities into the mainstream of American society. Many American Quakers of the period sustained the racist views of majority white society. For example, vaunted Quaker schools and colleges for a long time stubbornly refused to accept black or other minority students. AFSC efforts to transform the views of recalcitrant Friends were, alas, not always successful. Thus, members of the religious faith from which the Service Committee emerged were one of its greatest problems. …