When you know better – you do better

From Friends Journal …

by Vanessa Van Wagner

January 1, 2023

A grandchild of immigrants once asked my husband why anyone whose family arrived in the United States long after slavery was over owes reparations. “Shouldn’t you be the ones paying for it? Your family was here.” My husband, a birthright Quaker and descendant of abolitionists, responded by telling the story of his mother’s mission work.

When you say “missionary,” people think of conversion, but there are other forms of mission. Distinctly aware of the harm done by Quaker Indian boarding schools of the nineteenth century, some Friends strove for reconciliation of communities in the twentieth. My late mother-in-law (a Quaker recorded minister’s daughter) went to… READ MORE