• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Quaker Studies Volume 10 | Issue 1 Article 6 2006 Broadcasting Truth to Power:The American Friends Service Committee and the Early Southern Civil Rights Movement Brian Ward University of Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/quakerstudies Part of the Christian Denominations and Sects Commons, and the History of Christianity Commons Recommended Citation Ward, Brian (2006) "Broadcasting Truth to Power:The American Friends Service Committee and the Early Southern Civil Rights Movement," Quaker Studies: Vol. 10: Iss. 1, Article 6. Available at: http://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/quakerstudies/vol10/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ George Fox University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Quaker Studies by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ George Fox University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 86 QUAKER STUDIES QUAKERST UDIES 10/1 (2005) [87-108) ISSN 1363-013X 49. The Friend 91,16 (21 April 1933), p. 324; it is possible that 1917 is a typographical error. 50. It is not clear who advised him; it may have been an officer at the court martial. 51. Foucault, M., Discipline and Punishment: 71zeBirth cf the Prison, New York: Vintage Books, 1979 (French edn 1975); Lewis, G.K., Elizabeth Fry, London: Headley Brothers, 1909; Ignatieff, M., A just Measu re cfPa in: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 17 5G-1850, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978; Rose, J., Elizabeth Fry, London: Macmillan, 1980. 52. The Friend 91,16 (21 April 1933), pp. 324; 57, 20 (18 May 1917), p. 382; see also Pioneers cf Good J!Vi'/1, p. 4. He may have borrowed some of his tem1inology from P.B. (Percy Bartlett?). BROADCASTING TRUTH TO POWER: News Sheet 53. (25 December 1916), p. 5; cf 25 October 1916, p. 3; 1 May 1917, p. 10. See THE AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE AND THE also Graham, Conscription and Conscience, p. 90. 54. United Church Archives, R.ichard Roberts archive, file 39, 19 September 1916. EARLY SOUTHERN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 55. FOR 456; 5/3; 19 June 1917. 56. For the Home Office scheme, see Rae, Conscience and Politics, Chapter 8; Graham, Conscrip­ tion and Conscience, Chapter 7; Kennedy, TI1e Hound cfCons cience, Chapter 8. Many NCF members Brian Ward rejected the scheme. Beck's complaint was not unique; many COs who accepted the scheme complained about it; see Ed Beck to C.J. Cadoux, letter dated 25 April 1917. Cadoux' archives are University of Florida, USA in the Bodleian Library, Oxford: Box 9. See also FOR 456; 5/3; letter of 10 January 1917 to Bertrand Russell, then acting NCF chairman. 57. James, S.B., The Adventures of a Spiritual Tramp, London: Longmans, 1925, p. 106. ABSTRACT 58. The Friend 57, 23 (8 June 1917), p. 465; 24 (1 5 June 1917), p. 480. 59. CAB 24/24/1833. He referred to Sparkes' industrial relations work. See Rae, Conscience and This article addresses two gaps in the historical literature on the modern civil rights movement. Politics, p. 210 n. 2; for the release and the politics, see pp. 208-25. First, it highlights the contributions of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to the 60. The Friend 59, 9 (28 February 1919), p. 128. According to Graham, Sparkes was released struggle for racial justice in the South. Second, it reveals the importance of radio broadcasting in early 'because the King happened to ask who was the author of the Whitley Councils scheme' helping to create a climate in which southern white racial attitudes and discriminatory practices (Conscription and Conscience, p. 243). Sparkes himself compared the Whitley Councils to a ship were challenged. It demonstrates how AFSC-sponsored broadcasts reflectedQuaker principles, but without an engine. also how debates over appropriate programme content exposed the tensions between principled 61. Historians of guild socialism have rarely explained the role of Sparkes. Yet as S.T. Glass and pragmatic considerations, morality and expediency, that shaped the Movement and detem1ined wrote, 'the influence of guild ideas on the build.ingworkers had much to do with the work of the AFSC's role in it. Malcolm Sparkes, a London company d.irector'(The Responsible Society, London: Longmans, 1966, p. 54). See also Carpenter, L.P., G.D.H. Cole, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, p. 101, and Carpenter, N., Guild Socialism, New York: D. Appleton, 1922, pp. 118-19. For the KEYWORDS troubles Sparkes encountered, see Den Boggende, 'Pacifism and Labor Relations', pp. 101-06. 62. For the influence of nineteenth century Nonconformity, see Bebbington, D.W., Tite AFSC, Quakers, radio, civil rights movement, US South Nonconformist Comcience, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982. 63. The FOR did not maintain its all-encompassing world-and-life view Roberts propounded. During the 1920s much of it disappeared. INTRODUCTION In recent decades, historical writing on the origins and development of the southern AUTHOR DETAILS civil rights movement has become ever more sophisticated and wide-ranging.1 The author emigrated from the Netherlands to Canada in 1967. He obtained Inevitably, however, there remain significant gaps in our understanding of the genesis graduate degrees in Art History, Christian Studies and History and completed his and structure of a social revolution that transformed the region's racial arrangements PhD in 1986, at McMaster University, Hamilton, on 'The Fellowship of Recon­ by destroying statutory segregation and ending the widespread disenfranchisement of ciliation, 1914-1945'. He has published articles about Luther and art, marriage rites, African Americans. With no claims to comprehensiveness, this article begins to nineteenth century Methodist fe male education in Ontario, twentieth century address two such gaps in the literature. First, it draws attention to the under-appreci­ Christian school education in Hamilton, and Harriet Martineau. ated contribution of the Quaker-inspired American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to the struggle fo r racial justice in the South. Second, by examining the Mailing address: AFSC's efforts to use radio broadcasts to promote racial reconciliation, civil rights, Bert den Boggende, 77 Greenbrook Village, Brooks, AB,T1R OR8, Canada. and equality of economic and educational opportunity, it affirms the importance of E-mail: [email protected] that medium in shaping the ideological context and the range of acceptable protest strategies fo r a social movement that grew steadily during the decade after World QUAKER STUDIES 88 WARD BROADCASTING TR UTH TO POWER 89 War Two and flourished during the late 1950s. By yoking together these two AFSC fr equently alluded as it publicly pledged itself to battle racial prejudice and apparently discrete topics, it is possible to illustrate both the elusive potential and the discrimination in post-World War Two America, especially as it appeared in its most inherent limitations of commercial radio as a vehicle fo r progressive racial politics in egregious fo rms in the segregated South. 6 As a 1959 AFSC primer on Race and the South and to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the AFSC's distinctive Consdence in America summarised: approach to promoting racial justice in the South and nation. For forty years the American Friends Service Committee has labored with problems, domestic and world-wide, which stand between mankind and the achievement of THE AFSC AND RACE RELATIONS brotherhood among individuals and nations. A considerable part of our recent effort has been exerted toward replacing segregation with freedom, equality, and mutual trust. In some ways the continued lack of scholarly attention to the role of the AFSC in This has been a natural extension of the historic Quaker concem for the welfare and the civil rights movement is puzzling, since historians have long been interested in rights of persons who face prejudice and discrimination. A Quaker belief that 'there is of God in every man' requires living up to the best in one's self and respecting 'that of the religious coordinates of the southern fr eedom struggle.2 Nonetheless, the role of God' in others. 7 the AFSC in the civil rights movement and the Committee's relationship to the precepts of the Religious Society of Friends remain largely unknown. 3 Originally The AFSC, then, grounded its efforts to promote racial equality in the South deep in fo unded by Quakers in 1917 to offer conscientious objectors an alternative to mili­ the soil oflongstanding Quaker values and beliefS. Nevertheless, it is important to tary service, the AFSC quickly developed an interest in racial affairs amid its other acknowledge that the Committee's active pursuit of racial justice often placed it at commitments to peace work and humanitarian relief. In the mid- 1920s it established odds with the majority of Religious Society of Friends Meetings in the nation, an Interracial Division that was superseded in 1944 by a Race Relations Division and earning it a reputation as a rather radical, vanguard, group in Quaker circles. An then in 1950 by a Community Relations Division. Through these divisions and via a AFSC questionnaire on race relations sent to 700 Friends Meetings in 1961 only network of fo rmal and informal links with other progressive groups and individuals, elicited 250 responses, a low rate of return that the Committee fe lt indicated 'less the AFSC played an important part in the emergence of a mass movement fo r civil concernfo r race relations than one would expect fromthe Society of Friends'. While rights in the South and in the transformation of racial opinion throughout the nation the great majority ofMeet ings agreed that 'discrimination should be ended', less than that enabled the Movement to triumph over statutory discrimination in the region. half of respondents accepted the notion that 'Friends should refuse, personally and corporately, to participate in any pattern of racial discrimination and segregation'.

Load more

  13

Copy Link