Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice (review)

The popular image of Quakers and their work for racial justice has taken on something of a bipolar quality, both among the public at large and within the Society of Friends itself. On the one hand, the initial and enduring story presents Quakers as crusaders who heroically risked their property and even their very lives to oppose slavery in the ultimately successful abolitionist movement before moving on to champion equal treatment in the aftermath of the Civil War. On the other hand, and perhaps as a reaction against this dominant memory, others now remember Friends as racial hypocrites who failed to live up to their religious ideals, especially in response to African Americans. Writing as much for Friends as historians and scholars, Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye take up the "difficult and sensitive" history of Friends and African Americans, exposing an "insidious, complex, and pervasive racism" among Quakers since their arrival in what would become the United States (p. xi). Yet, even as Julye suggests that the "overall popular notion of Quaker progressivism is a myth," the authors present a nuanced story that balances the "persistent tension between individual and corporate witness" as Friends struggled to find a way forward on race (pp. xx, xvi).

The first half of this lengthy book addresses Quakers prior to the twentieth century, relying largely on the copious extant secondary historical literature. Starting with the very gradual movement of the earliest American Friends away from enslavement, McDaniel and Julye trace how, after a century of debate, division, and delay, radical and outspoken individuals eventually convinced Friends to end their involvement with slavery. Some Quakers then moved to combat slavery in the broader society, following the not uncommon trajectory from gradualism to immediate abolitionism during the first half of the nineteenth century. Friends' relationships with freed people, both before and after the Civil War, the authors argue, continued to reflect a deep ambivalence: while Friends "may have been willing to accord African Americans a certain measure of political equality, most hesitated to accept them as social equals" (p. 110).The chronically divided Quakers struggled, not surprisingly, to engage African Americans as equals in their efforts to help reconstruct the nation and to welcome African Americans as members in the Religious Society of Friends.

Continuing with the argument that Friends "were, on the whole, unable to separate themselves from the racist attitudes and behaviors of the wider culture," the second half of Fit for Friendship, Not for Freedom mines primary archival sources—reflecting the surprising dearth of scholarship on Quakers and race after 1900—to explore the twentieth century (p. 181). Organized thematically, the book addresses a variety of topics but sometimes lacks chronological coherence as the authors jump back and forth in time as they examine different subjects. The book's investigation of twentieth-century activism presents a relatively small group of Friends who managed to make a "profound" record in race relations (p. 258). Still, such achievements were balanced by a frustration among activists, especially as violence increased in American society, that larger numbers of Quakers did not join their work for desegregation and economic justice. Driving the point home, the authors devote one chapter to the often excruciatingly slow and hard-won integration of Quaker schools and a second to the even slower movement toward integrating the Society of Friends. The epilogue, written by Julye, calls for Friends to build a more inclusive community, using a better understanding of the past—and thus a better sense of what has or has not been lost along the way—"to step away from the status quo and step forward to join the few of us who are working on racial justice" (p. 392).

Fit for Friendship, Not for Freedom represents an important contribution to our understanding of Quakers and African Americans in U.S. history. While the authors...