New Eyes for the "Invisibles" in Quaker-Minority Relations

New Eyes for the "Invisibles" in Quaker-Minority Relations Emma J. Lapsansky* In the three decades since Benjamin Quarles and Jane Pease1 challenged us to explore the multivariate strands inthe braid ofearlyAmerican Quakerblack relations, we haven't made a lot ofprogress. Some scholars—far too few—have followed their direction, probing beneath the one-size-fits-all term "abolitionist," to question what meaning the concept had for the many different stripes ofAmericans who carried its banner. As Bacon's interpretation of Sarah Mapps Douglass vividly illustrates, "the Quakers" had varying opinions about what sort, and what amount, of interaction was appropriate with their black fellow humans. "Anti-slavery" was not always the same as "pro-black." Part ofthe problem withuntangling the story is that the history of American Quakers and black Americans sits at the nexus of three lines ofinquiry that have historically had only an erratic andjumbled interpénétration: "American" history, which defines Quakerism mostly in the context of social reform, with little attention to the complex web of theology that supports that reform; "Quaker" history, addressing the doings of "the world's people" mostly in terms of how those doings required Quakerintervention; and"African-American" history, which oftenrefers to non-black participants only in that most general term—"white"—that obscures the complex shadings of "whiteness." American history texts, which often refer glibly to "the Quakers' " anti-slavery agitation, are silent, or disappointingly vague on the subject of how differently individual Quakers andmeetings viewedtheiranti-slaverywork, howunitedthey were in supporting black rights, and what intra-community tensions arose as "the Quakers" sought to define a correct relationship between religious belief and social reform. Despite Jean Soderlund'spath-breaking Quakers andSlavery:A Divided Spirit,2 which reminds us of the slow and deliberative process by which "some Quakers" became anti-slavery inthe eighteenth century, andher later work, with Gary Nash, measuring black Americans' Freedom byDegrees,1, it is still common to hear discussions of "the Quakers" as if Quaker belief and behavior on race relations have always been monolithic—and unimpeachable . Quaker history has been no more immune to filiopietism and rigidity than any, and this, too, has made it hard to tell the full story. For * Emma J. Lapsansky has been a member ofLansdowne Meeting since 1982. She came to Quakerism accidentally by way of a Methodist minister grandfather who told her that "heaven and hell are not places you go to when you die, they are states ofbeing we all create while we live." She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and is now Curator of Quaker and Special Collections and Professor of History at Haverford College. 2 Quaker History example, conventional wisdom perpetuates the facile interpretation that those Friends who followed Elias Hicks were more committed to radical methods of abolitionism than were the more staid Orthodox Friends. Yet both Bacon and Grundy overturn some ofour cherished notions ofhow the Hicksite/Orthodox schism in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting played out in the energies Philadelphia Quakers put into African-Americanprojects. Butthey are not to be blamed forjust hinting at this story, and notpursuing it very far: Thomas Hamm and H. Larry Ingle have only just begun to disentangle the morass of the schism—a collection of economic, regional, and family tensions, with a moving-target oftheology mixed in.4 Add to this the dense film of racial and class distrust that continues to cloud the exploration of subtleties in American race relations, and the result is a mix to confound the most committed researcher. In addition, obfuscation in the story can be attributed—among other things—to Quakers' lack of a central creed, and their commitment to a notion of "continuing revelation" that makes what creed Quakers have hadmurky and elusive to Friends andnon-Friends alike. Hamm and Ingle have helped us get a start on the Hicksite/Orthodox part ofthe race-relations puzzle, but there is much more to be done before we can begin to understand how these relationships, which tore apart families and seemed to be ever-changing, shaped relationships with people outside the Quaker fold. Gurneyite Orthodox Friends who ran the Bethany Mission, Grundy tells us, were more willing to work...