Category Archives: Black & White & Other Colors

A Call to Quakers: Change That Name– Now!

This idea of removing the names of slaveholders from major public spaces has spread nationwide, and as I reflected on it today, took on a distinctly Quaker flavor.
If The Stars & bars is now relegated to museums & history books; if Mississippi’s state banner is being redesigned & scrubbed; if even Calhoun College has to go (tho the buildings get to stay) — then it’s time, and past time, to rename Quakerism’s greatest (or at least inarguably its largest) public monument.
I refer, Friends, to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, whose founder was, of course, William Penn.
Did I mention that William Penn was a shameless slaveholder? He bought slaves & sold them, and used them at his manor house, Pennsbury, north of Philadelphia. [And unlike some others, he never “repented” of this.]
BTW this is no secret, no shocking exposé.
Shameless slaveholder? A ground view of the William Penn statue that now stands atop Philadelphia City Hall.
Despite it, I readily admit to having admired Penn for much of his legacy; but this part doesn’t fit. And given the temper of the times, it will not do to make a string of excuses.
So Pennsylvania has to go.
But what could be its replacement?

A Hidden Piece of (Quaker) Women’s History: Leadership in The Ku Klux Klan

Historian Leonard Moore’s analysis of the 1920s KKK membership list for Wayne County, Indiana — home of the city of Richmond, numerous Quakers, and the Quaker Earlham College — offers a startling (to modern Friends) disclosure:

The religious affiliations . . . also closely approximated the city’s Protestant spectrum . . . . The large, traditionally evangelical denominations (Methodist, Baptist, Disciples of Christ, and Presbyterian) were strongly represented, but so too were the equally consequential German (Lutheran and United Brethren) and Quaker churches.

That is, Indiana Quakers were just as likely to join the 1920s Indiana Klan as any other churches; and many did.

And Daisy Douglass Barr was their star. She served as pastor in at least two prominent Friends churches, and preached in many more, over many years.
Daisy Douglass Barr in a 1922 newsclip (her maiden name was spelled Douglass, not Douglas, as here.)
She also used her notoriety and her Klan office to make money. The profit came mainly from selling Klan women’s robes and other paraphernalia. When the Indiana Klan could boast several hundred thousand members, and draw tens of thousands to its (white) family-friendly mass rallies, the paraphernalia business was good; nay, it was a goldmine.

The Day I Didn’t Help Bury Bobby Kennedy

When the others came back, hours later, I felt no regrets. The photographers, they said, were crammed onto a platform, where the scene was like an ongoing brawl. The veterans pushed, shoved & swore nonstop, wielding the huge long lenses of their Nikons like weapons, weaving this way & that to get better views as the family & dignitaries sweated in the heat and sleepwalked through their steps and genuflections a few dozen yards away.

All my colleagues were disgusted by the whole scene, and repeated their stories for my tape recorder.

Then we turned on the music, not quite as loud, and I was ready to hear the records all again.

“He’s Got The Whole World In His [VERY WHITE] Hands”

I went to the website of a Friends church out west today, seeking information about a dispute of which readers have heard a good deal here.

Didn’t find any, but while browsing, saw an image that seemed very striking, for the church’s Vacation Bible School:

The caption for it was — as thee might expect, “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands.”

Some of us might know that the song which gave rise to this meme is one of the classic black spirituals.

But maybe many of us don’t.

Wikipedia says it was first published a 1927 collection, Spirituals Triumphant. And while the song has been recorded by numerous artists of various backgrounds, I’m old enough to remember 1958, when a British teenager, Laurie London, became a one-hit wonder when his version, a smash in the UK, managed the then-unthinkable and crossed the Atlantic to hit #2 on the U.S. pop charts.

Laurie London, whose popstar career was very short; he was last spotted running a pub near London.
I say this because after pondering the image above, I couldn’t help but notice that the hands in it (or at lest the wrists), are quite noticeably caucasian — er, white.

It made me wonder: The hands for the whole world are like that? Hmmmm.

How widespread, I wondered was this probably unconscious, or at least unthinking, notion?

Looking Back at a Unique Woman Author — “Go Set a Watchman”: My Review

Surrounded by her former peers, the painfully uncomfortable Jean Louise is peppered with questions about her life in New York City, which to many of them might as well be on Mars: how can she stand it? All those people, including “Negroes,” on the loose. The noise, the constant hubbub, the rudeness and ugly accents. Not to mention the fact that she’s (still, at 26!) single there, and working.

Jean Louise speaks up tepidly for her urban existence, but thinks to herself more candidly about its pluses and minuses.

In truth, she often resents the patronizing attitudes of many New Yorkers toward other, benighted regions, especially the South. She bridles at how so many of them, with the smug assurance of big-city liberals that hasn’t changed much since Lee wrote in the 1950s, feel they know all the answers for problems there, even if their nostrums are no more than bien-pensant slogans, based on little or no knowledge or experience.

Yet she puts up with this annoyance because New York offers her a compensation she has to have, and can’t hope to find in her hometown: anonymity, and the space created by the indifference of the mass, in which to continue seeking her identity and destiny.
If that sounds pompous, the clumsiness of expression is mine, not Lee’s; but that’s what it was. Later, after the shattering confrontations with Atticus and ex-beau Henry, there seems no way forward for Jean Louise but to climb on the train and head back up north, alone. This reader was relieved that she had somewhere to go for refuge, someplace where she could at least breathe, and be herself, even as a stranger in a sea of strangers.

In Manhattan she could bask in being ignored, free of family and community expectations, no longer carry the stigma as the renegade runaway daughter who abandoned a “good family,” and get on with the long work of becoming a writer.