Black Fire Live: QuakerBooks Hosts Hal Weaver
On Thursday, July 24, 2025, QuakerBooks of Friends General Conference hosted a conversation between Dr. Harold D. Weaver, Jr., editor of Black Fire: African American Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights; Dr. Emma Lapsansky-Werner, who wrote the foreword, and Rashid Darden, FGC’s Associate Secretary for Communications and Outreach. Over seventy participants joined in the online event.
Thank you so much for creating the audio book! I am a person who learns much more via audio than visual, so the audio book of Black Fire has made the book accessible to me. And, I must say, the audio of this book is so well done! It really comes alive!
Resources
Thee Quaker Podcast Episode on the Black Fire Audiobook
- Race, Systemic Violence, and Retrospective Justice: An African American Quaker Scholar-Activist Challenges Conventional Narratives
- “A Proposed Plan for Retrospective Justice”
- The Black Quaker Project
- Hypocrisy, Racism, and Self-Interest on the Path to Reparations: Quaker Complicity with Slavery (1657–1776) and White Supremacy by Mary Watkins
- “How Important is the Justice Testimony?” by Dwight Wilson (Begins on page eight)
From ‘Living the Spirit of Ubuntu:’ Johannesburg and online FWCC World Plenary 2024:
We grieve with God for the exponential impact of historical and ongoing injustice. This includes the impact of colonisation, forced displacement, slavery, economic exploitation and racism. We are called to disrupt patterns of oppression and division, to acknowledge offences, to challenge false notions of white supremacy, to repudiate doctrines of discovery, to make amends and to work for reparative and retrospective justice. We are called in our Quaker communities to be patterns and examples, to share gifts and skills, to be brave, to become radically inclusive and to celebrate diversity. Are we all ready to take up these callings?
How might Black Fire help to inform Quakers’ understandings of Friends in a society of tomorrow? (Answers from the chat below.)
We need to pay more attention to the concentric circles in which we move. Complete focus within the Religious Society is unacceptable and limits healing’s potential.
We start by NOT being part of the problem such as avoiding putting out our own fake information. We are mindful in behaving in ways that show an example to others – that we want to see from others such as peacefully protesting. We act as allies to those that deserve equity and inclusion.
May we listen deeply and celebrate each other!
Let us envision a “Cloud of Witnesses” that contains, embraces, and envelops Friends of all places, minds, hearts, expressions, and understandings — rooted in and deepened by our variety of Quaker Faith and varieties of Quaker practice. And let that vision help us all help us find that way will open for us all to continue and flourish together.
We must have a ground to stand on. There is wisdom in Black Fire that inspires and guides. It can fuel our own fire and others. Knowing those who put together Black Fire and the Black Quaker Project has certainly give me ground to stand on and given me es hope. And the book has done. Thank You!!
The first one – did power ever seek consent? Or only the consent of the few, enough to legitimize itself? I think listening and sharing are the types of human needs that are eternal, and healthy societies/communities/structures provide for human needs. So the more our society turns away from those needs, the more sick/oppressive it is, and the more liberatory it is for us to do that for each other.
The second one – this one is trickier because I see algorithmic social media/technology/AI as serving us an endless stream of what we think we want (distraction/entertainment) while wresting our most powerful resource (attention) away from us. I think it’s helpful for us to continually examine whether what is taken from us is worth what we are getting in return, while at the same time acknowledging that these systems are designed to be addictive (so it is not a failure on our part to not be able to quit them entirely).
I totally agree with this sentiment. I believe one of the first persons included in the book who’s name I can’t remember now who wrote a letter to Jefferson reminded me that Quakers have a way to help bring about the reality of the ideal of America which continues to be elusive.
The multidimensional roots of Friends and Friends of Color, a commitment to looking theologically and the impact of structural racism and classism needs to always be on the table in furthering the equity of humanity, always a query! Always a mission of education!
We must communicate that diversity, equity and inclusion are of equal or greater benefit to white people than to Black.
Endowment support for archives
I’d like to listen to the audiobook and share it with the meeting in which I have sojourned since 2013 in California and together work to birth something new that will take us out of our self-satisfaction with the way things have been in our Quaker world. I hope we will consider voices that are not seen as Quaker, but which I think speak to our condition, such as those in the Reverent William Barber’s Repairers of the Bridge. Reverend Barber insists that we need to unite and form a solid coalition to be a moral voice in the world in which we live.
About all those non-US Quakers— I wonder if they have grown so much in number in the last 10-15 years? Or is it that we have just begun to notice them? It’s tempting for some unprogrammed Quakers to consider Especially the very programmed African Quakers as a different kind of religion really?