Current practices of “anti-racism” in churches and religious organizations have a rich history that stretches back not only to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, but also to the pioneering work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, and their organizational allies in the early twentieth century. Quakers, drawing on their abolitionist heritage, were important participants in this work, and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) supported an especially wide array of interracial initiatives. As the first scholarly study of the AFSC's interracialism, Allan Austin's Quaker Brotherhood makes an important contribution to both Quaker history and the history of race in America.

With perhaps 100,000 members in the United States, the Society of Friends (or Quakers) is famous far out of proportion to its numbers. Unfortunately, historical scholarship on twentieth-century Quakerism is proportionate to the numbers rather than the fame. Quakerism has a complex organizational history, with four major (and highly divergent) denominations and many smaller factions; it also has a rich array of connections to movements for peace, international relief, women's rights, and racial justice. Though there is one excellent overview (Thomas Hamm's The Quakers in America [New York: Columbia University Press, 2006], which covers both history and contemporary practice), there are no scholarly histories of the Quaker denominations or of the AFSC, which was organized in 1917 in an effort to reconcile the factions by providing a common arena for international service. Since Austin's work is on just one dimension of the AFSC, the lack of supporting historiography creates significant interpretive challenges.

Austin responds to the challenge with a meticulous archival study. Drawing extensively on records held at the AFSC's Philadelphia headquarters, he documents a fascinating array of specific projects, most of which were sustained for only a few years. The Interracial Section of the AFSC, organized in 1924, sought to introduce white Quakers to exemplary professionals of other races through lecture tours by African American activists and Japanese students, as well as carefully orchestrated social gatherings. The American Interracial Peace Committee, under the leadership of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, brought the Quaker peace testimony to African American communities through a music festival, essay contests, and conferences for educators between 1927 and 1931. The Institute of Race Relations, held intermittently between 1933 and 1941, introduced religious leaders to the new social science of race championed by Franz Boas, who held that apparent racial differences stemmed from social and cultural circumstances rather than from inherent differences in biology. During the Second World War, the success of AFSC hostels for refugees from Nazi Germany inspired racial justice activists to create additional cluster of hostels for Japanese Americans who had been released from internment camps. And after the war, the Race Relations Committee, eventually renamed the Community Relations Committee, fostered cooperation indirectly by bringing the races together in shared projects such as settlement houses and college lectureships.

Austin stresses the positive results of each initiative, but the result is not an especially heroic story. The AFSC never clarified the place of interracial work within an organization primarily committed to international relief, and as a result each project was bedeviled with funding challenges. Staff turnover was so constant that Austin describes one Race Relations Committee staffer's four-year term as “an era.” Alice Dunbar-Nelson, in particular, never fully trusted the white Quakers who ran the organization. The leaders of the AFSC, in turn, seem to have taken on interracial work because they could not trust any other Quakers to continue their tradition's abolitionist legacy. Again and again, they found themselves battling Quaker schools that refused to admit African American students and Quaker employers who would not hire people of color. And to the extent that the AFSC achieved diversity in its own ranks, it was because of its willingness to hire non-Quakers, who were 68% of staff in 1947 (and 85% in 1985).

The overall trajectory of AFSC interracialism, Austin suggests, was from an emphasis on interpersonal relationships to one on social structures. This seems plausible enough, though such techniques as conferences for teachers recur throughout the narrative. It might also have been possible to argue that each initiative reflected the particular perspective of its leading sponsor. Had Austin extended his scope into the second half of the century, he would likely have been able to build a more convincing case for a continuous shift of emphasis. Indeed, one of the real weaknesses of the book is Austin's failure to justify his choice of chronology. Though the title indicates an end date of 1950, most of the conclusion is devoted to description of interracial activities in the 1950s, and there are repeated hints of the ongoing evolution of interracial work in subsequent decades.

If there were more scholarship on twentieth century Quakerism, Austin would have found it easier to construct a strong interpretation to hold together the individual episodes he describes. But Austin could have done much more to connect his narrative to the broader history of racial justice. There are recent histories of many other organizations devoted to interracialism in these years, among them the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Urban League, Congress of Racial Equality, Federal Council of Churches, National Catholic Welfare Council, Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resisters League, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, YMCA, YWCA, Student Christian Movement, Socialist Party, and Communist Party. Austin makes clear that AFSC activists participated in some of these organizations and defined themselves in opposition to others, but he fails to explain when the AFSC pioneered new approaches that were then adopted by others, when it borrowed techniques already tested by others, and when it held fast to a distinctly “Friendly” approach to interracialism. Nevertheless, he succeeds admirably in documenting a story that future historians of interracialism will do well to take into account.