Quaker Brotherhood: Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee, 1917-1950.

Kennedy, Thomas C.

Quaker Brotherhood: Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee, 1917-1950, by Allan W. Austin. Chicago, Illinois, University of Illinois Press, 2012. xii. 257 pp. $55.00 US (cloth).

American Quakers are understandably proud of their Society's long history of work on behalf of their black fellow citizens. From the abolitionist movement to educational reform and the civil rights struggle, Friends can claim to have been in the forefront of endeavours on behalf of African-Americans. However, as Allan Austin's book makes clear, the story is more complicated and uneven than often depicted. As anyone who has read Jean Soderland's Quakers and Slavery (Princeton, 1985) is aware, the Society of Friends' record with regard to African Americans is not without flaws. Most people would be stunned to learn that during the 1920s over twenty per cent of adult male Quakers in Wayne County Indiana joined the Ku Klux Klan.

Austin rightly begins with a discussion of Rufus Jones' influence in founding the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) as a body dedicated to his vision of the Society of Friends as a mystical religion demanding Quakers embrace a new form of social gospel and actively engage in efforts to overcome evil and injustice in seeking a better world. The author examines Quaker racial and peace activism in the early twentieth century with a view to broadening the "understanding of the implications of Quaker thought for AFSC projects as well as evolving American ideas ... concerning race and ethnicity" (p. 5).

Austin emphasizes the importance of the Peace Testimony in the development of Quaker racial activism. After WWI there was for the first time widespread pacifist recognition of the relationship between the horrors of war, the injustices of the economic system and the baleful influence of these evils on racial and ethnic minorities. The AFSC worked diligently, if not always successfully, to end violence, advance racial harmony, and mitigate economic exploitation. It so doing it opened possibilities for Quaker social activism, especially for women.

In attempting to carry out its admirable goals, the AFSC faced three serious problems. The first was lack of experience, a difficulty addressed and at least partially solved as the Service Committee evolved and matured with an increasingly large majority of non-Quaker workers. Lack of sufficient funding, especially but not only during the Depression, hampered the AFSC's programs if not its dedication. Finally, and perhaps most troubling, was the absence of consensus within the Society of Friends about the need for, or even the efficacy of, bringing blacks and other minorities into the mainstream of American society. Many American Quakers of the period sustained the racist views of majority white society. For example, vaunted Quaker schools and colleges for a long time stubbornly refused to accept black or other minority students. AFSC efforts to transform the views of recalcitrant Friends were, alas, not always successful.

Thus, members of the religious faith from which the Service Committee emerged were one of its greatest problems. On the other hand, Austin's careful summaries of AFSC-sponsored programs, meetings, and conferences over three decades, leave no doubt as to high-minded objectives and earnest sincerity of the Service Committee's leaders and workers. Still, too often, the words of pious Friends reflect a Quaker-felt necessity to say something meaningful in an effort to resolve difficulties Friends did not understand or were powerless to effect. So, even Friends of troubled conscience or great good will could obstruct the advance of AFSC programs. Austin's account reveals the frustration often felt by non-Quaker AFSC workers with Friendly ways of proceeding, or failing to proceed.

Probably the best example of this problem was the case of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, former wife of poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and for over two years executive secretary of the AFSC-sponsored American International Peace Committee (A1PC). An able and strong-willed woman, Dunbar-Nelson was an active speaker and organizer in the AIPC's efforts to demonstrate the relationship between racial harmony and international peace. However, she became increasingly frustrated with the "Quaker wet blanket" (p. 71) ways of doing business and AFSC parsimony. Dunbar-Nelson repeatedly clashed with good, grey Friends like Wilbur Thomas (she called him "Frozen Face," p. 59) and she finally resigned with her high hopes and the AIPC's ambitious programs unfulfilled.

Austin's study provides a detailed chronicle of the numerous projects the AFSC undertook to advance racial justice and international good will. Its efforts on behalf of European refugees and interned Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, though small in scale, proved effective. Most of its programs to encourage what was pejoratively called "race mixing" had more limited success. Over the years AFSC race-relations work moved from dependence on guidance from the Inner Light to a more worldly consideration of social science or what Austin calls "the oblique approach" to confront racism on a broader level. Thus, the AFSC "drifted left and became more overtly political" (p. 193). In the case of one of last programs covered in the book, the so-called Washington Project, this method proved largely effective.

Austin's account is a useful addition to the history of American Quakers earnest, sometimes troubled, endeavours to achieve racial justice in American Society and peace in the world. Austin's thorough research in AFSC records and relevant secondary material is a strength of the book, but the extensive presentation of Quakers in their own words reveals the AFSC and its leaders frequently stumbling as they grasped for meaningful and important work. Still, the Service Committee's efforts were far in advance of the ideas and attitudes of most Americans and even American Friends. One of the Service Committee's greatest gifts to American Quakerism and boarder American society was, in AFSC executive secretary Clarence Pickett's words, its "effort to help the entire community realize its full human assets and wholeness" (p. 196).

Thomas C. Kennedy

University of Arkansas