How anti-slavery Quakers invented the modern political campaign

[T_i_B]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6476645.stm

Quakers started the British campaign against the slave trade and invented modern campaigning, championing the petition and the consumer boycott, and mastering the use of images and logos. Not that they like to shout about it.

It is perhaps the defining image of the battle to end the slave trade. Not a picture of a shackled slave, or some gruesome punishment, but a cross-section of a ship. It is a ship packed so full that the mind boggles at the sheer logistics of inhumanity.

The use of the engraving of the Liverpool slave ship, the Brookes, is the perfect example of how Quaker mastery of PR kick-started the movement that toppled the slave trade. But today their contribution has largely been forgotten.

The campaign to abolish the slave trade was an overwhelmingly religious affair. The importance of evangelical Anglicans, like William Wilberforce and John Newton, is well known. But Quakers were the pioneers of the movement, its brains, and much of the soul too. The more you delve into the story, the more you find Quakers under every shadow.

[ThomCat]

1. And now their innovations are used to smear candidates

instead of inhuman practices. Their innovations are used to deceive people instead of educate people.
x(

No good deed goes unpunished.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. As with Baptists, much Quaker history has been...

dusted under the rug. Baptists were once also leaders in pacifist and abolitionist movements, but you don't hear about that any more, either.

I suspect it's because much of it wasn't as good as this, and good was whitewashed and forgotten with the bad. Some Colonial Quakers were slaveholders until about 1820 when the last holdouts were finally convinced it wasn't a good idea. John Woolman made the case why slavery was anathema to Quaker faith and practice, and his arguments eventually worked. And, up through the 1930's, Midwestern Quakers were a major force behind the Ku Klux Klan. Modern Quakers find all this highly embarassing, and more often than not ignore the lapses of our forbears rather than confront history-- why confuse things with stuff that might sully our reputation?.

On the other hand, a delegation of Quakers visited George Washington the week of his first inauguration to demand he declare slavery illegal.

There was a period we call "Quietism" after the original radical, firebreathing, Quakers pretty much died out and Friends just kind of sat back and became extremely intospective. During that period, we seem to have become somewhat publicly irrelevant and those who worked for change worked primarily in the background through other activists. Lucretia Mott and Bayard Rustin, for instance, remained largely in the shadows of more charismatic movement leaders.

Even today, people like Bonnie Raitt don't hide that they are practicing Quakers, but rarely stand up and say "It's my religion that leads me to..."

[lonestarnot]

3. I love those Quakers! One big one comes to mind when I think of them.