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.

"To Live Peaceably Together is a lively examination of the methods and accomplishments of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a primarily Quaker group that took a unique and influential approach to cultivating cultural acceptance of residential integration in America after World War II. K'Meyer offers a close study of how a social movement develops and wields influence, and how social activists do their work and why. Driven by detailed stories of activists and the obstacles they encountered, the book studies how a mostly white faith-based activist group worked to ally itself to a cause that demanded constant learning and reassessment. K'Meyer details the AFSC members' spiritual and humanist motivations, their understandings of segregation, their visions of integrated neighborhoods, as well as how their strategies changed as they came to better understand structural inequality, and how they were eventually adopted by other groups"--

Devised in 1917 as a means of providing young Quaker males and other pacifists alternate wartime service, the American Friends Service Committee has gone on to become, in the 21st century, a major peace-building and community-building organization. Part 1 of this centennial history explores its early and occasionally heroic service in rebuilding France and feeding German and Russian children at the climax of World War I, followed by its unprecedented feeding in Spain of refugees on both sides of that country's civil war and similar relief efforts in Depression-torn Appalachia; it concludes with a description of renewed feeding programs across Europe in the aftermath of World War II and more significantly for its future work, attempts to build good relations with Japan. Part II explores the AFSC's often-controversial efforts in the period 1950-1990 to bring justice to the underserved both overseas and in domestic arenas, with special reference to work with Martin Luther King in matters of civil rights. The concluding Part III focuses on the modern organization's shift in focus to work behind the scenes in lessening ethnic and other tensions, such as work on immigrants' rights at home, alternative-to-violence projects in Africa, youth exchanges between Cuba or Puerto Rico and the United States, and service in "unlikely places" such as North Korea in an effort to defuse political animosities. Pervasive themes in the book have to do with the AFSC's standing in the larger, sometimes impatient community of the Religious Society of Friends and the organization's own growing sensitization to the power of diversity in its ranks--such that today it may be considered a model of Affirmative Action. The major activities of the book are complemented by maps, photos, and a bibliography. A thorough index appears in the published copy.