Quaker Brotherhood: Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee, 1917-1950

Abstract

The service organization of the Religious Society of Friends, the American Friends Service Committee (afsc), was established by prominent Philadelphia Quakers less than one month after President Woodrow Wilson declared war in April 1917. The first item on the afsc agenda—to support and protect conscientious objectors—was tied closely to the Quaker Peace Testimony of 1651, the group's long-standing commitment to nonviolence and pacifism. The afsc scrambled to find alternative service work for conscientious objectors but soon expanded its efforts to include foreign relief efforts in countries afflicted by the war. Laboring alongside the American Red Cross and other organizations, the afsc was participating in hunger relief programs in Germany and relief efforts in countries such as Poland, Austria, Serbia, France, and Russia soon after the war ended. To this well-known chapter in American Quaker activism, Allan W. Austin's Quaker Brotherhood adds an analysis of a subsequent period, when afsc members confronted questions of racial justice. As Austin demonstrates, there were powerful reasons for this important shift in organizational emphasis. Memory of the war's tragic results, combined with the passage of the National Origins Act in 1924 (providing a race-based quota system for immigrants to the United States), convinced a small number of Quakers to see the dangerous linkage between racism and war and therefore to focus on racial justice. Drawing extensively on afsc organizational archives, meeting minutes, and correspondence, Austin examines afsc projects from the earliest years and follows the trail of the variously named afsc committees assigned to work toward racial equality for Japanese, African American, Jewish, and Native American people.