(For other essays, see <www.brightworks.com/quaker/midpas.html> and for general information about the Pilgrimage, see <www.interfaithpilgrimage.com> To reach me by email: skipschiel@gmail.com. Or by snail-mail: 9 Sacramento St, Cambridge MA 02138. Comments appreciated.)
How have Friends in the past engaged in the struggle for racial justice in the United States? In addition, how are they acting now? I am deeply committed to Quaker principles and practices. I am an active (though currently sojourning) member of an enriching Friends community in Cambridge Massachusetts. I am currently a pilgrim of the Middle Passage Pilgrimage traveling during the past two and one half months some 1,000 miles on the eastern seaboard. Within this context, I will try to write of what I'm learning of Friends and racial justice. I am not a professional historian, nor particularly gifted at remembering names, dates, places, but I do love history--what it can reveal, how it might assist in opening a window wide on visions for the future, and how it can urge current action to construct that future. I step into the past, through my imagination, to know better how to act now, how to help build the new world, one benefiting the generations yet to be.
Begin at the beginning, with meeting Mr. John Woolman, long dead. I met him during approximately the 240th year of his long life. In September 1980, on one of my first visits to Friends, he greeted me at the library of the Friends Meeting at Cambridge. He materialized from his journal and several essays. During that period of my discovering Friends, I felt so lonely and so distant from Friends that I met one of my first Friend in a book. Hello John Woolman, I'm Skip Schiel, searching.
Nearly twenty years later, good friends from my community of Friends Meeting at Cambridge are the many of the people who have sent me on my way--encouraging me with money, prayers, guidance, and a website posting for this series of essays. And from what I hear at a distance, they plan a parallel journey of their own through a monthly video series of Roots, Alex Haley's own exploration to his African motherland. No doubt, some Friends are devising sojourns of their own, pilgrimages of their definition. Perhaps they relate to themes of the Middle Passage Pilgrimage: revealing the often hidden history of slavery, comprehending its legacy of racism, and fostering conciliation of people of all skin colors in this deeply divided nation.
John Woolman, in his region of southwestern New Jersey, Mt. Holly, just north of Camden, not far from Philadelphia, had been among the most vocal people calling for the end of slavery. Our Pilgrimage bussed past near his homeland, but because of our schedule, I could not stop to visit, could only throw him a greeting in passing. "John, I savor your life, your writing, continue to learn from it." I recalled what he taught me: be present where suffering abounds (in his case, not only where enslaved people lived and worked, but with the native people of that time, on the frontier not far from his home), refuse to use any products of oppression (no cotton goods for him, for example, land no amenities granted by the slave holders he visited, without payment,), go to those causing the suffering (he did this one by one, risking his life for his convictions), downsize my routine to free myself for social activism work through my community of Friends as much as possible, and share stories of what I do and think (in his case, through his journal, in mine, through photography and writing).
Yes, John Woolman, exemplary character among many early Friends. I try to emulate him, ask, what would he do now, what would be his message?
New Jersey is still filled with Friends. In Princeton, they hosted us for lunch, as we pranced into the cozy meeting center from a drenching rain. Among the greeters, an old friend, Robin Buckingham and her two small children, Lucy and Daniel. Robin is formerly of Cambridge meeting. She was one of the most stalwart in our committee, Friends for Racial Justice. She told me she regretted not being more active currently, she's raising two small children. But she helped feed us, found ways for us to dry our clothing, sat with us and her children as we ate, listened to our stories, and, with the other ten or so Friends, wished us well on our continuing journey. However, none walked with us, a recurring theme.
We learned the area had been settled by Quakers in the mid 1600s. The meetinghouse we worshipped briefly in was built in the 1720s. Kato-oshoni, one of the Japanese Buddhist monks, commented to me, "Looks and smells just like the old Japanese temples." The meeting now attempts to be more overtly antiracist. For instance, they recently sponsored a multicultural concert on their spacious and pristine land.
A day later, in the Trenton meeting house, Friends told us about John Woolman, that he lived so near he probably had visited the Trenton meeting, perhaps imploring them to divest of their slaves. A shocking fact I'd already realized was that Quakers had both held and traded in enslaved peoples. Ninety years had passed between the first Friends' declaration for abolition and the entire Religious Society of Friends on this continent agreeing. I have felt proud repeatedly hearing from many people, including black people in the south, that Friends and Mennonites were the only Christian groups consistently opposing slavery.
In both Princeton and Trenton, I felt truly at home. I could eat lunch with Robin and her children, while commiserating in my imagination with neighbor John Woolman.
Further south, in Camden at the Newton Friends meeting house, just across the river from Philadelphia, we were treated to foot and body massages while listening to an African dance and drumming troupe. Camden Friends had hosted meetings of the Philadelphia organizers of our Pilgrimage. Several walked with us for two days. Alan Nelson, a black Friend from Camden, escorted us in Philadelphia to the site of the firebombing of an African-American complex, M.O.V.E. He later joined us for an evening of nonviolence training.
Hearing that Walt Whitman had lived just one-half mile from the Camden meeting house, and knowing he'd been strongly influenced by Quaker theology and practice (Wasn't his mother Quaker? As far as I'm aware, he never practiced), several of us broke away from the main group to pay homage to this poet, teacher, dramatic figure in United States history. We stood in front of his home (one of three he lived in, successively), dilapidated but under slow renovation. The black woman, in her sixties, guiding us there had grown up nearby. Then the neighborhood had been relatively open, hilly, with a train line running through. Now: a new courthouse and prison sit formidably on leveled land.
We wondered, what had been Whitman's feelings about slavery and resistance, what did he write? I puzzled how any of this might have been related to Quakerism. (I intent to research this question when I return home.)
Philadelphia was a trying experience for me. Although we resided for three nights in a community center initiated by Friends over one hundred years ago, Friends Neighborhood Guild, few Friends joined us. And this in one of the centers of historic and contemporary Quakerdom. Earlier, one of the key Philadelphia organizers, a prominent black Friend, decided to terminate her role. She related to me (and I paraphrase), "I don't think this Pilgrimage is going to happen. It needs more time to evolve. The international planning is too sketchy. I wouldn't trust my children to it. I am a person of deep faith, but I don't have faith in the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage."
Eighty or so days into our year-long venture, I find she might be right. We are having problems of leadership and direction. We are suffering from the seeds planted when the Pilgrimage idea first occurred to Sister Clare Carter and Ingrid Askew, seeds that indeed might be fruiting today in our discord and tumult. I don't know. Mentioning this, I am aware of digressing from my theme. I simply express an immediate concern of the heart. My concern may tie with what might be an accurate premonition of an astute Friend.
I will stop here for now, and return to the train of story in a later installment. Take up perhaps again in Philadelphia, both because of its importance to Friends, and its role in slavery and resistance, and because of a primary instance of healing we experienced, organized by another Quaker, Lark Worth.