Limit this search to....

Quaker Brotherhood: Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee, 1917-1950
Contributor(s): Austin, Allan W. (Author)
ISBN: 0252037049     ISBN-13: 9780252037047
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
OUR PRICE:   $56.43  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: September 2012
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Political Science | Civil Rights
- History | United States - 20th Century
- Religion | Christianity - Quaker
Dewey: 267.189
LCCN: 2012022675
Physical Information: 1" H x 6.2" W x 9" (1.20 lbs) 272 pages
Themes:
- Chronological Period - 20th Century
- Religious Orientation - Christian
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

The Religious Society of Friends and its service organization, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) have long been known for their peace and justice activism. The abolitionist work of Friends during the antebellum era has been well documented, and their contemporary anti-war and anti-racism work is familiar to activists around the world. Quaker Brotherhood is the first extensive study of the AFSC's interracial activism in the first half of the twentieth century, filling a major gap in scholarship on the Quakers' race relations work from the AFSC's founding in 1917 to the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the early 1950s. Allan W. Austin tracks the evolution of key AFSC projects such as the Interracial Section and the American Interracial Peace Committee, which demonstrate the tentativeness of the Friends' activism in the 1920s, as well as efforts in the 1930s to make scholarly ideas and activist work more theologically relevant for Friends. Documenting the AFSC's efforts to help European and Japanese American refugees during World War II, Austin shows that by 1950, Quakers in the AFSC had honed a distinctly Friendly approach to interracial relations that combined scholarly understandings of race with their religious views. In tracing the transformation of one of the most influential social activist groups in the United States over the first half of the twentieth century, Quaker Brotherhood presents Friends in a thoughtful, thorough, and even-handed manner. Austin portrays the history of the AFSC and race--highlighting the organization's boldness in some aspects and its timidity in others--as an ongoing struggle that provides a foundation for understanding how shared agency might function in an imperfect and often racist world. Highlighting the complicated and sometimes controversial connections between Quakers and race during this era, Austin uncovers important aspects of the history of Friends, pacifism, feminism, American religion, immigration, ethnicity, and the early roots of multiculturalism.