Negro Membership in the Society of Friends (review)

88 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION BOOK REVIEWS Joseph Wright Taylor: Founder of Bryn Mawr College, by Margaret Taylor Macintosh. Haverford, Pennsylvania, Charles Shoemaker Taylor , 1936. xvii+211 pp.; illustrated. $1.75. TN DESIRING that the college which he established for the advanced A education of women should bear the name of the community in which it was located rather than that of its founder, Joseph Wright Taylor denied himself some of the honor which has come to the names of his two Quaker contemporaries, Ezra Cornell and Johns Hopkins. But Bryn Mawr College is no less a worthy memorial to the contribution of Quakerism to higher education in the United States than are the great universities in Ithaca and Baltimore. In this life of Dr. Taylor (1810-1880), drawn largely from the letters and diaries which his great-niece, Margaret Taylor Macintosh, has recently presented to Haverford College, one can follow the interesting story of his activities in the field of education. Service on the Board of Managers of Haverford College brought him into intimate contact with others who were affected by the growing concern for higher education in the Society of Friends. And out of this association grew his purpose to establish a college which would educate young women in the way in which Haverford was educating young men. Death interrupted him as he was preparing the buildings and the grounds for the new college. But, as Rufus M. Jones, present Chairman of the Trustees of Bryn Mawr College , writes in an illuminating introduction to this volume, Dr. Taylor would doubtless have approved the successful development which the College experienced under the administration of Friends such as Francis T. King and James E. Rhoads, whom he chose to administer the trust. Ten of the twelve chapters in the book are devoted to Dr. Taylor's ancestry, his education, and his life as a physician in New Jersey, as a business associate of his brother Abraham in Cincinnati, Ohio, and, after 1851, as a "country squire" near Burlington, New Jersey. Some of the most interesting chapters are those concerning his trips to Europe in 1849 and 1861, and the accounts of his travels in this country as companion to visiting English ministers such as J. Bevan Braithwaite and John Hodgkin. The book as a whole is essentially a source book for the history of nineteenth-century Quakerism, a readable one, interesting in the picture it gives of a group and a generation of cultivated, enlightened, and sincerely religious Friends. Thomas E. Drake. T>ENDLE HILL has arranged for a reprint from the Journal of Negro *¦ History, vol. 21, no. 2 (April, 1936), pp. 151-213, of an article by Henry J. Cadbury entitled Negro Membership in the Society of Friends. A footnote explains that the article covers only the American continent, and BOOK REVIEWS89 hence omits reference to the large Quaker membership of Negroes in Jamaica; and that living Negro Quakers are not referred to by name. The study grew out of a series of lectures by the author at Pendle Hill on the general subject of the development of Quaker social testimonies. The article holds up the early interest of Friends in the religious welfare of the Negroes, and the very slow growth of the idea that Negroes might not only attend Quaker meetings (where they were often segregated in a gallery or on the rear seats), but might be received into membership. Many recorded cases of Negroes who were members are cited, and other cases in which Negroes were denied membership. It is pointed out that Philadelphia Yearly Meeting laid down the principle that "our Discipline, already established, relative to receiving persons into membership is not limited with respect to Nation or Colour" in 1796; and in this year the first printed Discipline was issued, containing the statement: ". . . Meetings are at liberty to receive such [convinced persons] into membership, without respect to nation or colour." A similar regulation was retained in the successive revisions of the Discipline for a century and a quarter; but in 1925 and 1927 the two Philadelphia Yearly Meetings acting independently issued extensively revised editions of their Disciplines and in each this phrase...