American Friends Service Committee Research Articles

Tracy E.K'Meyer. To Live Peaceably Together: The American Friends Service Committee's Campaign for Open Housing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022

Peace & ChangeEarly View BOOK REVIEW Tracy E. K'Meyer. To Live Peaceably Together: The American Friends Service Committee's Campaign for Open Housing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022 Rebecca K. Marchiel, Corresponding Author Rebecca K. Marchiel [email protected] University of MississippiSearch for more papers by this author Rebecca K. Marchiel, Corresponding Author Rebecca K. Marchiel [email protected] University of MississippiSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 February 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/pech.12599Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

To Live Peaceably Together: The American Friends Service Committee's Campaign for Open Housing by Tracy E. K'Meyer (review)

To Live Peaceably Together: The American Friends Service Committee's Campaign for Open Housing by Tracy E. K'Meyer (review)

To Live Peaceably Together: The American Friends Service Committee's Campaign for Open Housing. By Tracy E. K'Meyer. Historical Studies of Urban America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 240 pp. $45.00 cloth.

To Live Peaceably Together: The American Friends Service Committee's Campaign for Open Housing. By Tracy E. K'Meyer. Historical Studies of Urban America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 240 pp. $45.00 cloth. - Volume 91 Issue 4

The Invention of Professional Quakerism: Academia, Gender, and Social Class in the Shaping of Quaker Leadership in the Twentieth-Century United States

This article describes the emergence of ‘professional Quakers’, or Friends who emerged as leaders of Quaker institutions based on secular credentials. In the early twentieth century, many American Quaker institutions, especially Quaker colleges, large yearly meetings, and Quaker organisations like the American Friends Service Committee, began hiring full-time staff and assembling boards that resembled the structures of corporations and other secular institutions. Furthermore, the leaders of these bodies became de facto leaders within the Religious Society of Friends, a process accelerated by the comparative decentralisation of the Quaker denominational infrastructure relative to other Protestant groups. Over time, the Quaker leadership apparatus came to reflect the values and prejudices of the larger American society in which it operated, privileging those to whom secular credentials were widely available, namely wealthy male Friends, and excluding those also excluded from most secular institutions of learning, especially women.This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.

To Live Peaceably Together: The American Friends Service Committee’s Campaign for Open Housing, by TRACY E. K’MEYER

This historical monograph chronicles the varying strategies adopted by the Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), to improve the housing opportunities for black families. For almost three decades beginning from the 1940s, the AFSC made cohousing a priority whilst rarely being able to achieve wholesale success. Using the detailed local and national minutes and reports typical of Quaker organizations, Tracey K’Meyer has been able to reconstruct the successes and challenges of the initiatives. In so many ways and in concert with each other, hostile neighbors, developers, realtors, and the apparatus of local government—all supported by the fear of falling housing prices should neighborhoods become racially mixed—blocked attempts to desegregate the suburbs. It is a well-rehearsed history that continues today. What makes the book distinct is its detailed focus on a single faith-based organization’s attempts to promote equality of opportunity and the techniques it pioneered. Given the abundance of data available to the author, the account is rich both in chronological detail but also into the personalities and background of some of the leading staff members working on the ground in Chicago, Richmond, California, and Philadelphia. It gives an ample portrait of Quaker service agency and the value of the book lies in its meticulous attention to detail whilst remaining highly readable. As K’Meyer suggests, academic work on the activists remains under-researched.

Neutrality of a special type: George Loft’s abortive racial reconciliation in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 1957–1960

In 1957, George Loft, an American Quaker, arrived in Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) as the field representative of the American Friends Service Committee. In his effort to help the region navigate a period of intense political change in a peaceful manner, Loft cultivated diverse contacts during three years in southern Africa. His attempts to ostensibly serve as a neutral facilitator generally rebounded to the favor of the white settler establishment. While Loft’s often stumbling efforts to steer the region away from violent political conflict were unsuccessful, his shaky balancing act illuminates how quickly an already marginal space for compromise and cooperation across racial divides evaporated. It became virtually impossible to maintain a perception of neutrality. Beyond the evolution and views of the political characters he encountered, Loft’s tenure offers critical context on the demise of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and the rise of Zimbabwe’s armed liberation struggle.

Pacifist utopias: humanitarianism, tragedy and complicity in the Second World War

Pacifist utopias: humanitarianism, tragedy and complicity in the Second World War

Palestinian Arabs, Development, and the American Friends Service Committee in Israel, 1950–1955

Palestinian Arabs, Development, and the American Friends Service Committee in Israel, 1950–1955

An Inverted Detective Thriller: Henry Ries and the Quakers’ Rescue of Stefanie Ries from Nazi Germany, 1939–41

An Inverted Detective Thriller: Henry Ries and the Quakers’ Rescue of Stefanie Ries from Nazi Germany, 1939–41 Vivien Green Fryd (bio) During the academic year of 2012–13, I had the opportunity to live in Berlin, Germany as the Terra Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität. My desire, or should I say compulsion, to bear witness to and try to piece together and understand my family’s history in the Holocaust and World War II brought me there. I had long thought about writing about the photographs taken by my uncle, Henry Ries (1917–2004), especially his Landing Arrival of the Candy Bombers in the Tempelhof Airport (fig. 1) of the Berlin Airlift, which has become an iconic image in both the U.S. and Germany. But after giving a tour to some of my friends and former students in February of the exhibition, “Art in Berlin, 1880– 1980,” an exhibit that included seven of his photographs in the Berlinische Galerie, I began to look through papers about my mother’s rescue from Nazi Germany. [End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Henry Ries. Landeanflug eines “Rosinenbombers im Tempelhof Airport” (Landing Arrival of the Candy Bomber in the Tempelhof Airport). 1948. Photograph. © Henry Ries. Deutsches Historisches Museum. Invoice No. 2007/952, file PH009230. My brother, Kenneth Martin Green, and his daughter had gathered the material from the American Friends Service Committee’s (AFSC) archives, which at that time was located in the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia: correspondence about my uncle’s and the Quaker’s frustrating two-and-a-half-year attempt to get my mother, Stefanie Ries, out of Berlin. That year, twelve years after I had received those letters, I read them and felt as though I was reading a thriller with its dramatic rescue, its puzzles, its suspense, its villains, heroes, and heroines. Of course, I knew the outcome, my mother did escape, but the suspense was inverted. I knew neither the plot nor all the characters, and as with any mystery, I worked to unpack the many factors that resulted in my mother’s [End Page 32] safe passage to the U.S. in March 1941—six months before a worker for the AFSC reported that “emigration from Germany and German-controlled areas was largely choked off.”1 I knew the villains were the Nazis; the heroes the Quakers, my mother’s nanny, Maria Schönfeld (fondly referred to as Fräuchen), and my uncle; and the victim my mother. To my surprise as I read through the correspondence, I found a protagonist I had not much considered before—the U.S. State Department—the role of which became more troubling the more I dug beneath the surface. I learned that the person in the State Department responsible for impeding my mother’s escape from Nazi Germany, an individual whom I now consider a villain, was Avra Milvin Warren, Chief of the Visa Division. To my dismay and disappointment, I realized that not just Warren, but also others in the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did their best to obstruct my mother’s rescue and that of many others. And I learned about three additional heroes—Senator John A. Danaher (CT), Jacob Weiss from New York City, and Benjamin Gross from Rockland County, New York. Many scholars have examined those in the U.S. State Department under President Roosevelt’s administration who expressed antisemitism in their diaries, and the ways in which it influenced their immigration policies.2 Surprisingly, less has been written about the AFSC Refugee Section, especially its work on behalf of saving children from Central Europe before and during World War II.3 The unpublished archival material from the Friends’ library about my mother’s situation not only adds more information about the life of her to-be-acclaimed photojournalist brother, Henry Ries, but also about the role Quakers actively played in saving her life as well as others. They are the central protagonists in this story: my uncle, born Heinz Ries, later known as the New York Times photojournalist Henry Ries...

Challenging a ‘Warist’ Society with Digital Peace Pedagogy

This article offers strategies for a peace pedagogy that is informed by combining techniques from feminist theory and peace studies with the digital humanities. Here we describe how the first-year Writing Seminar “Peace Testimonies in Literature & Art,” taught in Spring 2017 at Haverford College, collaborated with the activist organization the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to participate in the collection and curation of oral histories projects. In this class, students conducted oral history interviews of peace activists at the 2017 AFSC symposium “Waging Peace: AFSC’s Summit for Peace and Justice” (April 20-23 in Philadelphia, PA), and then analyzed the videos of these interviews through OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) and the video editing software Camtasia. Here we discusses how feminist, digital, and peace pedagogies can be combined to help students recover the lost histories of pacifist activism.

Quakers and the Disciplines. Vol. 5: Quakers, Politics, and Economics ed. by David R. Ross and Michael T. Snarr

Reviewed by: Quakers and the Disciplines. Vol. 5: Quakers, Politics, and Economics ed. by David R. Ross and Michael T. Snarr Issac Barnes May Quakers and the Disciplines. Vol. 5: Quakers, Politics, and Economics. Ed. by David R. Ross and Michael T. Snarr. Philadelphia: Friends Association for Higher Education, 2018. xvi + 380 pp. Notes and index. Paperback $19.95; Kindle $9.95. One of the chief virtues of this latest addition to the Friends Association of Higher Education's "Quakers and the Disciplines" series is that its scope is extremely broad; most topics in Quaker history are in some way connected to either economics or politics. The twenty-two contributors come from a variety of fields. The book's focus is largely restricted to British and American Friends, but the sixteen articles address time periods that range from the foundation of Quakerism until the present. The breadth of the collection's content makes it less focused, though most chapters address Friends' response to social concerns arising from capitalism. Taken on their own merits, many of the contributions are fascinating additions to scholarship on Quakerism. In a section of the book labeled "Historical Engagement and Friends," Thomas D. Hamm's contribution to the volume highlights how a small collection of Hicksites in New York began to critique market economics in the 1830s, linking liberal theology and radical economic ideas. This is followed by Robin Rogers Healey's nuanced history of debates over how to end apartheid that occurred between South African Friends and the American Friends Service Committee in the late 1970s. Healey works to center South African Quaker perspectives, highlighting how these Friends accused the AFSC of imperialism and abandoning nonviolence. The work and thought of several prominent Quakers are repeatedly referred to this volume. Sociologist Elise Boulding and economist Kenneth Boulding are the focus of a chapter by Robert Scott and Russell Boulding (the Bouldings' eldest son). John Bellers, the seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century English social reformer who designed a workers' community, is the subject of a chapter by Keith Hemuth. John Woolman's attitude towards economics is the focus of two chapters, one by Mike Heller the other by Geoffrey Plank. Plank makes a compelling case that understanding Woolman requires not just focusing on his opposition towards slavery and support for boycotting goods, but also examining his ownership of land. Woolman's land meant he was wealthy compared to many of his neighbors, and he was comfortable with such systems of privilege and hierarchy. [End Page 57] There are discussions of the role of Quaker organizations in politics. Ruth Flowers provides an insider's account of the Friends Committee on National Legislation's efforts to convince the U.S. Congress to pursue antipoverty programs. One of the most fascinating details in Flowers's account is that the FCNL was hostile to federal support for these efforts for the first twenty years of its history, until the early 1960s. Lori Heninger and David Atwood provide two case studies of the work of the Quaker United Nations Office, focusing on work for small-arms control and efforts to reduce global inequality. A few of the chapters are not written from a position of detached scholarship, but try to propose a new direction for contemporary Quakerism. Activist George Lakey, for example, calls on Friends to model society on Sweden, Norway, Demark and Iceland, which provide considerable government services to their residents. For Lakey, these Nordic nations "serve as a reminder to today's Religious Society of Friends that God's Peaceable Kingdom is achievable today on this earth" (p. 55). It is a testimony to the vibrancy of Quaker studies scholarship that this edited collection can contain theological reflections, alongside history, sociology, political science and a host of other methodological approaches to scholarship. Disciplinary divides are still firmly in evidence, and one does not get the sense that this is a shared conversation, but the individual contributions ably show the ongoing work about Quakerism in their respective fields. Anyone interested in the study of Quakerism is likely to find something useful in this volume. Issac Barnes May University of Virginia Copyright © 2020 Friends Historical Association

“Incredibly Difficult, Tragically Needed, and Absorbingly Interesting”: Lessons from the AFSC School Program for Palestinian Refugees in Gaza, 1949 to 1950

This article examines a school program operated by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) for Palestinian refugees in Gaza in 1949 and 1950. Drawing on historical records from organizations involved in the broader relief effort, it examines why the school program was set up and how it operated, and considers the lessons it offers for contemporary refugee education efforts. I argue that, while AFSC adopted an atypical approach to humanitarian relief that prioritized education from the outset of the crisis, the school program it developed was invariably constrained by the overarching humanitarian paradigm within which it operated. Funding for education was limited, which left the schools vulnerable to competing political objectives. This article underscores the importance of understanding the history of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in order to understand its present, and to inform contemporary education efforts for other refugee populations. The article also highlights the need for a critical appraisal of attempts to align refugee education programs with the generally accepted principles of humanitarianism.

“We Just Can’t Afford to Be Democratic”: Liberals, Integrationists, and the Postwar Suburb of Park Forest

Abstract Park Forest, Illinois, emerged as a prototype suburb in the post–World War II era. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to Park Forest but have not thoroughly explored the efforts of the American Friends Service Committee to integrate this village outside of Chicago in the 1950s. Philip Klutznick, the lead developer of Park Forest, advertised the suburb as a melting pot for a new America, drawing the interest of open housing advocates wanting to include African Americans in this mix. Klutznick and most villagers resisted racial integration, but activists persisted, and by the mid-1960s, the suburb became an interracial community. The exhausting and intricate efforts to realize and sustain integration, however, demonstrated the struggles of the open housing campaign.

Expanding Access: Renovating Quaker & Special Collections at Haverford College

Expanding Access:Renovating Quaker & Special Collections at Haverford College Sarah M. Horowitz and Mary A. Crauderueff Quaker & Special Collections at Haverford College will reopen September 3, 2019 after the completion of a renovation. This 18-month project transformed Haverford's library, preserving historic portions of the building while adding brand-new spaces. Quaker & Special Collections will reopen with a new reading room, which provides easy access to curatorial staff; a classroom with 30 seats and flexible furniture to allow for a wide variety of teaching activities; processing space; an exhibit gallery; a conservation lab; and climate-controlled secure stacks. These new spaces will allow for the growth and expansion of Quaker & Special Collections programming, including extensive engagement with classes across the curriculum, student-curated exhibits, and research fellowships. The philosophy behind the renovation was to infuse light, technology, and access to collection materials throughout the entire library building. Thus, two seminar rooms, in which faculty teach semester-long classes, are equipped with locking cases. These cases can be used to house materials from Quaker & Special Collections selected by faculty in concert with curators. Throughout the semester, faculty teaching in these classrooms can bring out materials from the cases as they are referenced in class, rather than only being able to engage with original primary sources during a single instruction session. The main gallery space, located near the Quaker & Special Collections reading room, will host two exciting exhibits during the 2019–2020 academic year, both curated by students. Our opening exhibit on incunabula, or 15th century printing, was curated over the course of a summer internship by a rising Haverford senior; the spring exhibit will be curated by a first-year writing seminar exploring borders and borderlands in literature, and will focus on abolition and slavery. Display walls in several areas of the library allow students, classes, and student groups to display their work without needing to create a formal exhibit. The radical access and exciting possibilities inherent in these new library spaces will enable students to deepen their engagement with primary source materials across the curriculum and throughout their careers at Haverford. [End Page 66] Expanded access is not limited to the spaces which will soon be opening. During the renovation, Quaker & Special Collections staff processed approximately 700 linear feet of archival materials in 300 collections, including materials from the 1670s through 2016. Topics include: war resistance and relief work, family papers, literary organization papers, education-related papers, Quaker Meeting records, and Haverford College history, including student organizations like the Wom*n's Center, student scrapbooks, class governance materials, Board of Managers and Corporation records, and more. Collections with new or expanded access include the Lewis Benson collection, parts of the Philadelphia and Baltimore Yearly Meeting records, the papers of Richard Thompson, a Vietnam War medic and CO; Marlis Gildemeister, who volunteered with the American Friends Service Committee after World War II, Quaker educator Joan Countryman, the Tract Association of Philadelphia records, the Bible Association of Friends records, and a collection of Emlen and Mifflin family papers. The official dedication of the Lutnick Library will take place on the afternoon of Saturday, October 26, 2019. The festivities will include the printing a commemorative broadside, pop-ups with the opportunity to view and handle new acquisitions and collection highlights in Quaker & Special Collections, opportunities to explore digital projects based at the Haverford Libraries, and the curatorial talks for our exhibit "Who Created the New and Copied the Old: Printed Books of the Fifteenth Century," which features materials from The David Wertheimer, Class of 1977, Collection of Early Printed Books. The reopening of Quaker & Special Collections also means that our Gest Fellowship and Scattergood Fellowship are being offered again. These fellowships provide support for researchers to work with Haverford's unique collections. More information is available at www.haverford.edu/library/quaker-special-collections/fellowships, and an announcement in late 2019 will proceed applications due in early 2020. These fellowships also bring greater access to Quaker & Special Collections materials not only through providing dedicated time for researchers to study them, but also through their infusion into the scholarly discourse when this work is disseminated. The reopening of Quaker & Special Collections at Haverford...

What I’m Doing Is for Them: Rosa Ortez-Cruz, interviewed by Lori Fernald Khamala

Rosa del Carmen Ortez-Cruz fled Honduras in 2002, following a brutal stabbing attack by her former partner that left her hospitalized for over a month. She has lived in the U.S. undocumented since then, but she cannot return to Honduras because her abuser has threatened her life. The Church of Reconciliation and Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, offered Rosa sanctuary, because places of worship are considered safe havens for immigrants. She entered sanctuary in April 2018. Nearly a year-and-a-half later, her attorney continues to fight her case in court. To learn more about sanctuary or about Rosa, visit www.sanctuaryNC.org. A lifelong resident of North Carolina, Lori Fernald Khamala served as the director of the American Friends Service Committee’s NC Immigrant Rights Program for more than ten years. This interview has been translated, edited, and condensed for publication.

GregoryAllen Barnes. A Centennial History of the American Friends Service Committee. Philadelphia, PA: Friends Press, 2016.PaulR. Dekar. Dangerous People: The Fellowship of Reconciliation Building a Nonviolent World of Freedom, Justice, and Peace. Virginia Beach, VA: Donning Company Publishers, 2016.

GregoryAllen Barnes. A Centennial History of the American Friends Service Committee. Philadelphia, PA: Friends Press, 2016.PaulR. Dekar. Dangerous People: The Fellowship of Reconciliation Building a Nonviolent World of Freedom, Justice, and Peace. Virginia Beach, VA: Donning Company Publishers, 2016.

Feeding Children, Communities, and Souls

Feeding Children, Communities, and Souls

Dilemmas of humanitarian aid in the twentieth century

Dilemmas of humanitarian aid in the twentieth century is a comprehensive historical account of humanitarianism from the mid-nineteenth century to the 2000s. It situates developments in international aid, assistance and relief in various parts of the world within larger, enduring themes. As the editor, Johannes Paulmann, underlines, ‘some of the dilemmas of modern humanitarianism have been inherent in humanitarian practice for more than a century’ (p. 3). The contributors to the volume focus on interconnected turning-points in the history of humanitarianism. Matthias Schulz and Daniel Maul detail the beginnings of aid internationalism, focusing on the ICRC and the American Friends Service Committee, from the late nineteenth century to the first two decades of the twentieth. They argue that the emergent humanitarianism ‘undermined the sole authority of the state in international relations’ (p. 61). Nevertheless, as Alain Guilloux remarks, these new forms of assistance were ‘integrated with military health services and firmly entrenched in nationalistic values’ (p. 401).

Hope in Hard Times: Norvelt and the Struggle for Community during the Great Depression, The Mutual Housing Experiment: New Deal Communities for the Urban Middle Class

Hope in Hard Times: Norvelt and the Struggle for Community during the Great Depression, The Mutual Housing Experiment: New Deal Communities for the Urban Middle Class

A Service of Love in War Time: A Vignette

ABSTRACT This is a discussion of Rufus Jones's classic memoir about the American Friends Service Committee during World War I, A Service of Love in War Time.