Quaker mythbusters

It is almost a truism around Philadelphia: In the long struggle for racial equality, Quakers have been in the forefront.

Whether the cause has been abolition of slavery or an end to segregation, the Society of Friends has pushed further and faster than other religious and civil institutions.

But a new history, Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship, just published by Philadelphia's Quaker Press, tracks a much different story. In this telling, Quakers are pretty much like everyone else when it comes to race: complacent.

"The bottom line is that all Quakers receive credit, or take credit, for doing a lot of things that only a few did," said Donna McDaniel, 74, one of the book's authors. The push for racial justice "was never a mass movement among Quakers. It was the work of a courageous few."

Vanessa Julye, 48, her coauthor, underscored the point. "It was courageous," she said.

McDaniel, who is white, and Julye, who is black, will speak and sign books at a reception at 6:30 tonight at the Arch Street Meetinghouse, Fourth and Arch Streets.

Both women are Quakers, and neither began the project seven years ago with the intention of undermining conventional wisdom.

Julye, who had attended Quaker schools as a child in Philadelphia and became a member of the Society of Friends in her 30s, was more than aware of racial issues among practicing Quakers. But she thought the distance and unease she felt in the 21st century might be a legacy of the racial dogmatism of the late 1960s and early '70s.

Instead, her research revealed that Quakers had been just as liable to resist calls for racial justice as every other American ethnic or religious group.

While Fit for Freedom discusses race and Quakerism since the late 17th century, the groundbreaking work it contains covers the 20th century.

Quaker schools, it shows, refused to desegregate for years, using a variety of excuses and arguments. Quaker meetings declined to diversify. Friends avoided reaching out to African Americans down the block, although they were perfectly happy to send missionaries to Africa.

"Quakers are very much a part of the status quo," said Julye, who now serves as coordinator of the Committee for Ministry on Racism with the Friends General Conference in Philadelphia.

"As far as the myth [of racial crusading] was concerned, that's what I knew," she said, discussing her views at the onset of research. "I expected to find this wonderful [racial] relationship. . . .

"What I found out was that there wasn't any wonderful relationship that had been ruptured. The wonderful relationship didn't exist."

Take schools.

When Barack and Michelle Obama elected to send their two young daughters to Sidwell Friends School in Washington and Bethesda, Md., Sidwell administrators reported that 39 percent of Sidwell students identified themselves as people of color.

It hasn't always been that way - by a long shot.

The school, founded in 1883 on the belief that "the poorest negro in the land should have every right," remained totally segregated until the fall of 1956 - two years after the Supreme Court found public school segregation to be unconstitutional. By 1963-64, McDaniel and Julye report, only seven of Sidwell's 856 students were African American.

While the pace of desegregation at Sidwell was slow, it was by no means unusual. At Westtown School in Chester County, desegregation was vociferously opposed by students. In 1945, an African American girl was finally admitted to Westtown for her senior year. Two students withdrew from the school in protest.

At least 10 years went by before significant numbers of African American students matriculated, McDaniel and Julye report.

By the time Julye attended Westtown in the 1970s, the school's segregated past and its lingering effects were smoothed over, if not covered up.

Nevertheless, she felt isolated in a white world.

Julye formally entered the Society of Friends in the 1990s, comfortable with the theology. Quaker culture was another matter. Friends did not want to address racial issues and often did not even acknowledge them, she said.

For both authors, Fit for Freedom is at once a work of scholarship and a vehicle to address living issues within the Society. A study guide based on the text is due out in March.

"I wanted to do one thing where I felt I had made a difference in racism," said McDaniel, a Boston-area journalist for most of her life. "This needs to come out now . . . the age of Obama. It's kind of the right moment for people to talk about race. I hope."

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