Word: quakerly
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...Quaker, just back from seven years as a missionary in the Orient, and he thought himself pretty tolerant. But one day in 1925 Thomas Elsa Jones walked into a washroom at Columbia University, and found himself resenting the presence of a Negro, washing his hands. "My old feelings of superiority came back," he said, and he was alarmed. Jones ran into the Negro again in a German class, and discovered that the Negro knew more German than he did. "Soon we were playing handball together-and in less than a year I had accepted the presidency of Fisk University...
Last week, after 20 years as president of the most prestigious Negro college in the South, 58-year-old Thomas Jones decided it was time to leave. His old Quaker alma mater, Indiana's small, earnest Earlham College (enrollment: 450), had offered him its presidency. Behind him in Nashville, slow-speaking, spiritual Thomas Elsa Jones left a tough challenge to his old students: "The Negro will get respect when he does things to command respect...
...With Quaker faith in good works, Thomas Jones decided to give his students community chores. A Nashville judge paroled young Negro offenders to Fisk "custody." Soon Fisk "internes" were running social centers in Nashville's tawdry red-light district, in rural Whiteville, in Indianapolis, had made case studies of racial tension in 67 cities. By 1944, local hostility had retreated enough for Fisk to hold an interracial institute at Nashville, with whites and Negroes sharing dormitories and dining rooms...
Religion v. Materialism. Solon Barnes is a Quaker, brought up in unworldliness. He marries (for love) into a richer family of Friends and becomes a Philadelphia banker. For many years he floats along on uneasy rationalizations about the sacred stewardship of wealth (which he honestly tries to live up to). When his associates mire themselves and their bank deeper & deeper in crooked, within-the-law self-interest, he can stay silent no longer. In part the novel is a study of the losing struggle between the moribund U.S. religious sense and proliferating U.S. materialism...
...rocklike unity with the earnest intelligence, the upright and enduring heart, which even Dreiser's detractors give him credit for. They may also find that Dreiser was capable of a remarkable purity of communication whenever he was deeply moved. For in the words of the American Quaker, John Woolman, which he quotes, Dreiser at his best lived and wrote in faithfulness to "a principle placed. In the human mind, which in different places and ages hath had different names; it is, however, pure and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of religion...