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

There has been far too little research and publication examining the work of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), already nearing its centennial. Allan Austin has made a welcome addition to this meager literature, analyzing the AFSC’s interracial activism for the first thirty-seven years of its existence.

AFSC first decided to become involved in interracial activism in 1924. Its prospective work was summarized by Chairman Rufus Jones as building “better interracial relationship(s) … by bringing people together in friendly groups.” (19) During its first seventeen years, it utilized encounters that were often closely scripted to bring together select groups of whites and African Americans. After the 1930 founding of Pendle Hill, these encounters often took place there. The opportunities provided in the 1930s were often quite scholarly, drawing from leading scholars in the social sciences such as Robert E. Park of the University of Chicago and Franz Boas of Columbia University. The African Americans involved in the AFSC dialogues were also often quite scholarly and eminent: e.g., Leslie Pinckney Hill, holder of a Master’s degree from Harvard and president of Quaker-founded Cheyney Normal School (for African Americans), was the head of the AFSC-sponsored American Interracial Peace Committee during the late 1920s.

These cautious dialogues took place during a time of American race relations designated by historian Rayford Logan as “the nadir.” During the 1920s, the reborn Ku Klux Klan was thriving, even in such locations as Wayne County, Indiana, home to Earlham College, where one-third of white men were members, including a good many Quakers. White supremacist terrorism, or lynching, was raging unchecked in much of the South, and occasionally was perpetrated in other parts of the nation. In Indiana, Austin shows us that Quakers were bitterly divided in deciding on any response to a 1930 lynching in Marion of two African American men, impeding any possible response by AFSC. As one consequence of lynchings in the South, large numbers of impoverished African Americans were migrating North and profoundly changing cities such as Philadelphia. But this was a movement with which the genteel elites being assembled for interracial conversations by Quakers seemed to have minimal contact. This “Great Migration” is not mentioned in Austin’s book.

The desire for interracial activity was most intense among sectors of American Quakers closest to Philadelphia, but the pressing tasks to be addressed definitely included challenging racism and desires for racial segregation within the Religious Society of Friends. If racial segregation constituted a lingering badge of slavery, as Justice John Marshall Harlan of the U.S. Supreme Court had declared in a dissenting opinion in 1883, Quakers were still engaged in a Wool-manesque task of confronting slavery’s lingering badge within their own Religious Society throughout most of the twentieth century. Austin narrates that, in 1933, while AFSC’s interracial conversations were in full swing, Westtown School refused to enroll the two sons of YMCA official Max Yergan, an African-American. Swarthmore College declined to admit an African American student that same year. AFSC executive secretary Clarence Pickett believed that West-town’s turning away of the Yergans would “hurt Westtown more” than it would the Yergan family. (91)

Howard Thurman, an advocate for AFSC who was well acquainted with it during these years, praised AFSC efforts to bring about integrated worship in Philadelphia beginning in 1936. (Fluker and Tumber, 221) Austin does not mention anything about this, and I wonder whether there is anything that he has encountered in the AFSC archives in relation to this particular work of AFSC that Thurman found praiseworthy.

American race relations have often been examined in two different frameworks, one a black-white binary that is very much about dealing with the entrenched legacy of American slavery, and the other a multi-racial perspective that examines diverse forms of prejudice and discrimination, all of which...