My state public media PBS station has announced they’re ceasing operations next year, hit hard by both federal and state budget cuts. Wedged between two top-five U.S. media markets (New York and Philly), statewide news is often an afterthought to their stations, so our PBS has been important. It’s also commissioned lots of quirky local history documentaries. In other media news, I’m excited for next year’s Mandalorian movie, though my two Star Wars kids are worried that the trailer is too cute.

Glad to see my new colleague Renzo Carranza in the latest QuakerSpeak.

How many skeletons might remain buried? Possibly thousands, according to archaeologists, but no one knows. Historical maps are unclear on the cemeteries’ boundaries, but numerous histories portray the grounds as used first by Quakers and then by the poor, whose numbers increased along with the size of the city.

They quote the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting general secretary, who had heard nothing about this. The article also cites a 1880s article in Friends Intelligencer, the predecessor to Friends Journal.

https://www.philly.com/arts/schuylkill-yards-quaker-cemeteries-philadelphia-history-brandywine-drexel-20190502.html

As White searched for graveyard ledgers in the library — crammed with stuffed birds, clothing, shells and books — she came upon the skull. Her legs wobbled. And her stomach dropped. Arsenault-Cote offered advice and reassurance. “You’re out there looking for them, and now they’re showing themselves to you,” she told White. “He’s been waiting a long time.” Historically, Philadelphia Quakers were “inconsistent friends” to Indians, engaged in the same colonizing projects as other faiths while seeing themselves as uniquely able to educate natives.

Inconsistent is an apt word. Paula Palmer has been tracing the history of Quaker Indian Boarding Schools: high-minded enterprises that often forcably stripped heritage from their pupils in ways that were as culturally imperial as they were unaware.

Byberry Meeting dates to the 1690s and the meetinghouse grounds are full of abolitionist history. The skull was apparently dug up in the mid-nineteenth century as part of a nearby canal project and is thought to have come to the meetinghouse as part of a collection from a shuttered historical society. Its presence on the shelf represents the attitudes of Friends many decades ago who thought nothing of placing a Lenape skull in a case. There’s also the sad subtext that the meeting library is said to be so unused that most of the meeting’s contemporary members had no idea it was there. It’s a shame that it took an outside researcher to notice the skeletons in our display case.

https://www.philly.com/philly/news/483072571.html

Ariel Eure and Layla Helwa allege the Quaker school violated their civil rights by suspending and terminating them last year for supporting student protests to permit the Palestinian professor [Sa’ed Atshan] to speak. Additionally, they claim school administrators conducted a smear campaign after they were fired.

Friends Journalcovered the incident last year, as did multiple news outlets. It also came up in an interview I had with Sa’ed Atshan a few months ago. When we contacted Friends’ Central to fact-check Sa’ed’s account, the school couldn’t point to any inaccuracies but still said “we disagree with the fact pattern, including the timeframe, as described.” I still not sure what that’s even supposed to mean.

https://www.philly.com/philly/education/fired-friends-central-teachers-sue-palestinian-professor-saed-atshan-invite-20180508.html

http://www.phillyvoice.com/fired-teachers-sue-quaker-school-discrimination-defamation/

About 12 years ago, the Abington meetinghouse caretaker, Dave Wermeling, found an old sketch of Lay in a box. A short biography on worn brown paper was glued to back of the drawing. “I thought, ‘Who is this, and how can you not be talking about him?’” Wermeling recalled.

I’ve long admired the story of Benjamin Lay. I’m not sure that the general public reading these articles is quite realizing that Quaker disownment wasn’t a full shunning. As far as I know he continued to be influential with Quakers, for his passion if not his strategy. Lay went far, far ahead of the Quakers of the time. His stunts were awesome, but drenching yearly meeting attenders with pig blood and publishing books without permission was going to get you uninvited from formal decision making meetings.

I would very much hope that if any of us moderns were transported back to that era, we would find the conditions of human bondage so outrageous that we would all go full Benjamin Lay: disrupt meetings, shatter norms, get disowned by our religious bodies. If you read the history of eighteen-century Quaker activism in the Philadelphia area you’ll see there were many tracts starting in the earliest years of the Quaker colonies. There were lots of Quakers who felt slavery was morally wrong. But few felt the empowerment to break from social conventions the way Lay did. But that’s kind of the nature of prophecy. I would be suspicious of any candidate for prophet that is liked by the administrative bodies of their time. What kind of complacency are we demonstrating by our inactions today?

https://www.philly.com/philly/news/quakers-benjamin-lay-dwarf-abolitionist-slavery-abington-friends-meeting-20180419.html?mobi=true

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I briefly sat in on the Quaker/Interfaith tent, where a meeting was going. I couldn’t hear much but the main issue of business was how open an interfaith speaker’s series should be. I didn’t have too much time so I quietly slipped off afterwards to take more pictures of Occupy. #blog

In album Occupy Philly, 10/25 lunchtime #occupyphilly (7 photos)

Part of the “Idea Wall”

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