“Let’s do away with walls!”: The American Friends Service Committee’s Interracial Section and the 1920s United States

Introduction

Formed in 1917 to provide alternatives to military service for conscientious objectors, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) had expanded its work during and immediately after the Great War to include a wide variety of projects in wartorn Europe. Despite its early successes, the AFSC found itself at a crossroads in fall 1924 when a group of Quakers met in Philadelphia to debate whether to lay down the AFSC or to expand its activities. The outcome of the debate seems to have been a foregone conclusion, despite Chairman Rufus Jones’s assertion in his opening remarks that the committee “should not go on, unless we are sure we have a vital mission to perform. ... I do not want to see us go out and hunt for tasks to keep our machinery going.” Jones, however, quickly followed with a list of “tasks lying clearly at our door—God-given tasks which we can do better than anybody else.” In addition to urging the AFSC to continue its current work and to promote “Quaker peace work” more effectively, Jones suggested helping to build “better interracial relationship [s] ... by quietly forming new contacts, bringing people together in friendly groups and practicing the spirit and ideals of our way of life.”²

Exploring Jones’s call for the AFSC to address race issues leads to a deeper understanding of Quakers and race in the 1920s. Historian Thomas Hamm has described that decade as the “nadir” for Quakers and race, citing Friends joining the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana and elsewhere, strong resistance to admitting nonwhite students to Friends’ schools in the east, and the overall paucity of African American Friends. Still, even as many Quakers struggled with race issues, some attempted, at least nominally, to address racism. Yearly meetings, Friends General Conference, and other organizations, while typically privileging peace and temperance work, at least contributed to southern schools and held occasional interracial events. In 1919, furthermore, both branches of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting began anti-lynching projects, which quickly expanded into broader race relations agendas. All of these early efforts, and especially those in Philadelphia, where the AFSC would soon network with local activists, helped to set the stage for AFSC activism. Thus, while Hamm suggests that Quakers would develop “a new awareness of racial justice” only in the early 1930s, at least some activists had already begun this reassessment in the 1920s.³

Understanding early AFSC race work also enhances our understanding of a relatively neglected aspect of the organization’s history. As with much history of twentieth-century Quakerism, secondary sources are limited. While scholars have examined the AFSC in relation to its peace work, no extended organizational history of the AFSC exists beyond Mary Hoxie Jones’s Swords Into Ploughshares, published in 1937. The role played by Quaker concerns regarding interracial issues also has received scant attention in terms of both the decision to continue the work of the AFSC and the ramifications of that choice. As a result, no scholarly work has attempted to treat the complicated tripartite relationship between the AFSC, various racial minorities, and the wider American society in the late 1920s. A closer examination of AFSC race work illuminates how the Quaker activists, working in a highly charged atmosphere of nativism and racism (both in the wider society and between Friends themselves), built on new theories of race to stage intercultural connections designed, in the AFSC’s words, to “do away with walls!”⁴

The Formation of the Interracial Section

Jones’s emphasis on interracial problems at the 1924 reorganization meeting reflected a growing concern within the AFSC about race relations in the United States. These concerns, in fact, played an important role in convincing Quakers of the continued need for their service organization. In March 1924, L. Hollingsworth Wood, a Haverford College graduate practicing law in New York City, spoke to a General Meeting of the AFSC to share “his concern that a plan for work with the Negro today should be presented to Friends and to the American...