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Quakers
4 articles on Quakers
Quakers
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 1645 Includes: The American Friends Service Committee. | Bayard Rustin and the March on Washington. | Employment and Education in the 1940s and 1950s. | The AFSC and the Civil Rights Movement. | BibliographyBecause of their service to enslaved African men and women, Quakers were historically recognized in African American lore and legend as heralds for freedom. The Quakers were founded by George Fox in 1650; in 1652 the group was officially named the Religious Society of Friends. Quakers began to settle in Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth century. The concept of divine light as a beacon within the conscience of Quakers is the core of their commitment to peace, social justice, and human equality.More than any other Christian denomination, Quakers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries organized antislavery societies, supported colonization, served as conductors on the Underground Railroad, and founded schools for quasi-free and enslaved Africans. Quaker attitudes toward abolition foreshadowed Quaker approaches to civil rights in the twentieth century. Depending on geographic location and prevailing social climate, Quakers favored passive protests for ...
Read full articleSociety of Friends (Quakers) and African Americans
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 4796 Includes: Bibliography | Bibliography[This entry contains two subentries dealing with theological and practical aspects of the relationship between the Society of Friends and African Americans from the colonial period to the Civil War. The first article discusses the Society of Friends' slaveholding and debates about slavery and abolitionism until 1830, while the second article discusses the role of Quakers in antislavery activity from the antebellum period to the Civil War.] Quakers raised some of the first voices against slavery in the seventeenth century. They were also the first group of people to actively oppose slavery, abolishing it from the Society of Friends in 1776. Yet Friends were noticeably reluctant to treat African Americans as social or spiritual equals. It took years after they ...
Read full articleQuakers
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 186 Includes: For information onReligious group that espoused the idea that slavery was morally wrong. In the nineteenth century Quakers promoted manumission and abolition, founded schools for black children and supported their education, and participated in the Underground Railroad. Early African American Quakers: See Abolitionism in the United States; Cuffe, Paul.Eighteenth-century Quaker abolitionism: See Abolitionism in the United States; At the Heart of Slavery; Free African Society; Manumission Societies; New York Manumission Society.Eighteenth-century primary school for blacks cofounded by Quakers: See African Free School.Nineteenth-century Quaker school, the Institute for Colored Youth: See Bassett, Ebenezer Don Carlos; Bouchet, Edward Alexander; Browne, Hugh M.The twentieth-century Fellowship of Reconciliation (an interracial, ...
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Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
The relationships between Quakerism, women's rights, and African American women are complex. Since its beginnings in seventeenth-century England, the Religious Society of Friends has had a well-deserved reputation for treating women with equality and fairness. This Christian-based sect—whose early adherents came to be known as Quakers because they would often shake or quake when they felt the presence of God—quickly acquired what would become its signature characteristic: engaging the political controversies of the day with the goal of protecting human life and resisting injustice in whatever form these controversies might take. Speaking out against war and violence and protesting certain elements of social inequality are among the issues for which Friends, or Quakers, have become widely known. ...
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