Publishing the Truth: Are We Listening?

By Donna McDaniel

From the earliest of our days, Friends have published pamphlets and large one-sheet “broadsides” in our desire to share the Truth. George Fox gathered around him people who would become “Publishers of Truth” through their writing and preaching. Those three words carry the sense of Friends commitment to sharing our understanding of the Truth with Quakers and others in the wider world.

Thus, among our plenitude of epistles, diaries, pamphlets, books, letters, and minutes are appeals speaking to racism. In 1730, Elihu Coleman of Nantucket was urging Friends to end their own practice of enslavement, and in the 1750s, Anthony Benezet of Philadelphia wrote to heads of state and influential people in Europe urging them to end the slave trade. Skipping ahead, we find many AFSC publications written to help sort out the difficult issues of the mid-twentieth century. They have included: Some Quaker Approaches to the Race Problem (the 1940s); They Say That You Say: The Challenge of Housing and Race, countering myths used against open housing in 1955; and in 1959 Race and Conscience in America and Intimidation, Reprisal, and Violence in the South’s Racial Crisis.

FGC’s Quaker Press is publishing Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice, the book that Vanessa Julye and I have written. When we are asked what we hope to accomplish, our answer is that we believe that telling the truth about our past, namely our relationships with people of African descent, will open a new future.

However, we have a question of our own. While our prayer is that we are speaking Truth to power, we ask, “Will Friends be listening?” We recall the comment of a Friend long committed to helping Friends understand racism and bringing African Americans to join us in a truly egalitarian Society. After years of leading racism workshops on many occasions, she concluded: “Quakers smile and nod politely [when the subject is racism], but they don’t do anything and nothing changes.”

For 50 or more years, Friends concerned about racial equality tried to educate others in the Religious Society about the oppression encountered by African Americans, and what Friends could do to help bring justice. Since the 1920s, dozens of conferences have been held. For example, in 1935 Five Years Meeting and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting jointly sponsored “Interracial Understanding.” A post-conference publication, A Quest in Interracial Understanding, posed several questions. They included “Has the Society of Friends a contribution to make to the improvement of Race Relations?” “What would a Friends’ testimony on present day race relations involve to make it comparable to the Friends’ testimony on slavery?” “How can local meetings help to evolve such a testimony?” “How vital is it that such a testimony should exist?” Few Friends took up these questions, yet they continued to appear in a multitude of forms. In 1958, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting had the following special query for its monthly meetings: “What are we doing through our meeting to eliminate the spirit and practice of racism a) in our personal friendships? b) In our meeting activities? c) In the civic, social and business groupings of which we are a part? How are our meetings enriching the lives of our children through intercultural and interracial activities and associations? What are Friends doing to make their community more inclusive?”

Two years later, Friends United Meeting appealed to Friends with these words, “We deprecate all forms of race prejudice and beseech our members to take questions of race prejudice which they feel, for advice and solution to the Divine light of the Sprit of God, confident that the honest devotion of our minds to such a guidance will bring to our life the fervor of a Whittier or a Woolman.”

In 1969, Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s Social Order Committee queried its meetings about their awareness of racial problems and requested them to reflect on whether they were working “vigorously” to create equal opportunities for all. A number of meetings reported many activities; most were silent.

The same year African American Quaker activist George Sawyer of Indiana charged Friends with unsealing “the lips of those silent millions” who said nothing as cities burned. In a Quaker Life article, Sawyer said Friends must convince people not be afraid of their “racist brother” but rather to realize that “America may well perish if she continues on this perilous path” of exclusion and separation.

In October 2001, 50 Friends gathered at Pendle Hill for the Quakers and Racial Justice Conference. After “prayerful work on our own and our Society’s racism,” the participants prepared an epistle “with the hope, desire and expectation that you [Friends] will join us in our next steps forward.” It expressed deep concern “about the lack of attention to racism and White privilege within the Religious Society of Friends.” The epistle declared, “We must step forward as Friends to work together to challenge practices, actions and institutions that reinforce patterns of privilege and racism.” These are a few examples of how yearly meetings and Friends are calling us to examine ourselves and grow into Truth.

Vanessa and I often ask Friends whether 10 or 20 or 50 years from now Quakers will have answered the call—or will yet another Friend be repeating the same messages that so many have been asking all these years?

For those who ask “What can I do?” here are some possibilities:
• Join the NAACP (Quakers helped found it in 1910). I guarantee for 99 percent of Friends of European descent, that each issue of their magazine, Crisis, will double your knowledge of African American views and history as it has for me.
• Inform yourselves about what African American intellectual Manning Marable calls the “unholy trinity: mass unemployment, mass incarceration, and mass disfranchisement.” See his website and subscribe to his newsletter.
• Watch some of the powerful African American history videos from PBS.
• Make and take opportunities to speak to African Americans. More than one African American Friend at a yearly meeting has said that Friends did not look them in the eyes or invite them to their dining table.
• For those who live where there are few People of Color, consider what a speaker told New England Friends a few years ago: “Let your meeting become an “oasis” of anti-racism, if not for today, for tomorrow and for our children whose world is already beginning to look very different than ours.”

About the Author(s)

Donna L. McDaniel has enjoyed many different careers-teacher, counselor, community activist, journalist, editor, and volunteer with inner city “youth at risk.” She has written
widely on issues of racism, and is an active member of a Gospel Choir.