Quakers, Slavery, and the Slave Trade
On 25 March 1807, the British Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in the wake of growing uprisings by enslaved Africans throughout the “New World,” most notably the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). In 2006, the United Nations General Assembly acknowledged that “the slave trade and slavery are among the worst violations of human rights in the history of humanity” and selected 25 March as the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This UN-designated day of memorialization honors over 15 million victims of Western Europe’s centuries-long enslavement and trafficking of Africans throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. The BlackQuaker Project wishes to impress upon readers the breadth, duration, and depth of cruelty characterizing both the slave trade and legal chattel slavery, focusing especially on the USA. We also wish to discuss how Quakers, who actively participated in these crimes against humanity, can atone for their historical culpability.
Chattel Slavery in the USA (1619-1865)
From the time an English pirate ship landed in Hampton, Virginia, in 1619 with captive Africans below deck to the final surrender of Confederate holdouts in Galveston, Texas, on 19 June 1865 (Juneteenth), European settlers bought and sold Black men, women, and children as livestock, forcing generations into a life of hard manual labor, often at the barrel of a gun. For over 200 years, Africans were stripped of their religion, culture, and language; forced into brutal forms of labor; and lived under the threat of torture, mutilation, sexual assault, and family separation. Whether as house servants, field hands, factory workers, seamstresses, masons, carpenters, shoemakers, spinners, or millers, Black labor was the economic bedrock of the USA. Enslaved Africans worked in iron furnaces in Maryland; laid the tracks for railroads throughout Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and much of the South; mined and cut the stone lining the walls of the White House; and constructed various other key pieces of American infrastructure, such as the Patowmack Canal in Washington, D.C., through brutal, physical labor. Furthermore it was the grueling work of African field hands–who grew cotton, tobacco, and sugar under the exploitative Southern planter class–that truly fueled the country’s 19th-century transformation into an agricultural superpower.
You may be familiar with the plantation regimes of the antebellum South, but perhaps are unaware of the North’s extensive participation in chattel slavery. Kidnapped Africans were auctioned on Wall Street, worked the docks of New York City, tilled soil on farms throughout New England, and acted as house servants to the president and professors of Harvard University. Additionally, cotton grown in the South was processed in textile mills throughout the North; major investment banks, such as Brown Brothers Harriman, financed the cotton industry by lending millions to Southern plantation owners, slave traders, and cotton brokers; and New England’s prestigious universities accepted endowments from plantation owners in the South and Barbados.
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (1450s-1860s)
“The European slave trade was a direct block in removing millions of youth and young adults, the human agents from whom inventiveness springs. Those who remained in areas badly hit by slave capturing were preoccupied about their freedom rather than with improvements in production.”
Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)
For over 300 years, the empires of Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden forcibly relocated more than 15 million people from western and central Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean. European merchants destabilized the continent’s civilizations by selling spears, knives, and even gunpowder to African conquerors in war, who kidnapped men, women, and children from rival communities and marched them hundreds of miles in chains to ports on the Gold Coast and elsewhere. Those who survived the journey were penned into holding cells by the hundreds before being forced onto ships bound for the infamous Middle Passage.
During the 6-7 week transatlantic journey, European slavers shackled kidnapped Africans together, hand-to-leg, in spaces 4-5 feet wide and 2-3 feet tall. Captives endured physical, sexual, and psychological abuse from their captors and were beset by disease, dehydration, sea sickness, and malnutrition. A 1990 study by Patrick Manning estimated that, of the 12 million Africans captured and sold into slavery between the 16th and 19th centuries, roughly 4 million died before even leaving the continent and another 1.5 million perished while crossing the Middle Passage. (Manning, p. 261) Legal trafficking of Africans to the USA ended in 1807, a year before Britain’s abolishment of the trade. However, the trans-Atlantic trade continued legally in Spain until 1817 and illegally throughout the world until the 1860s.
Quaker Complicity & Profiting in Slavery & the Slave Trade
“The self-righteous narrative of Quaker superiority to other Christian faiths by virtue of our involvement in the Underground Railroad and other abolitionist efforts situates us as enlightened folks who have steadily been on the right side of history. This false narrative of exceptionalism does not help us dissolve ongoing hypocrisy by confronting historical and ongoing racism.”
Mary Watkins, Pendle Hill Pamphlet #489 (October 2024)
How did Quakers historically participate in and benefit from the economic juggernaut of chattel slavery in the Americas? Drawing on the groundbreaking 2024 Pendle Hill pamphlet, Hypocrisy, Racism, and Self-Interest on the Path to Reparations: Quaker Complicity with Slavery (1657–1776) and White Supremacy, by Mary Watkins, we learn that many Friends directly participated in and benefitted financially from slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, thousands of Friends enslaved and sold Africans. By 1700, for example, all but four of the Quaker families living among the roughly 1,200 Friends settled in Barbados, owned slaves. In her 2019 Friends Journal article, “Slavery in the Quaker World,” historian Katherine Gerber notes that “trade with Barbados was a source of pride and a symbol of prosperity for many English Quakers who considered slavery to be necessary for economic development.” The majority of Quaker leadership in Pennsylvania, including William Penn and Benjamin Franklin, owned enslaved people until slavery was made a disownable offense by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1758. Even Friends who did not own enslaved people directly profited from the labor of enslaved Africans by exchanging their timber and food for cash and slave-produced sugar. Importantly, Quaker founding father George Fox did not oppose slavery. In fact, he argued that slave owners should share the Gospel with their captives so that the enslaved could achieve spiritual–but not physical–freedom.
Retrospective Justice:
A Quaker Model of Atonement for Addressing Past Injustice
“We grieve with God for the exponential impact of historical and ongoing injustice. This includes the impact of colonization, forced displacement, slavery, economic exploitation and racism. We are called to disrupt patterns of oppression and division, to acknowledge offenses, to challenge false notions of white supremacy, to repudiate doctrines of discovery, to make amends and to work for reparative and retrospective justice.”
Tapestry Document, Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC), 2024 World Plenary Meeting, Johannesburg, South Africa
In August 2024, BQP director Friend Harold D. Weaver Jr., and Friend Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge urged Quakers participating in the FWCC World Plenary in Johannesburg, South Africa, to adopt a model of Retrospective Justice as the Quaker approach to dealing with reparations on the global stage. Click here to watch Friend Weaver’s oral presentation. To implement this model, the BQP advises Friends to take the following chronological steps: (1) acknowledge an offense but do not apologize; (2) commit to truth-telling through exhaustive research; and (3) make amends in the present via programs of political, economic, psychological, cultural, and spiritual rehabilitation and healing.
The concrete advocacy of Friends Nozizwe and Hal culminated in the FWCC’s release of a landmark post-plenary tapestry document, excerpted above, that called on Quakers worldwide “to work for reparative and retrospective justice.” It also led to the formation of the PARR (Participation, Action, Reflection and Research) Working Group on Reparatory/Retrospective Justice which, under Nozizwe’s leadership, aims to assist Quaker meetings and organizations in their efforts to address the “exponential impact of historical and ongoing injustice.” We implore Friends to seize the momentum generated by the 2024 World Plenary and take real action in advance of the forthcoming FWCC Global Online Conference, 27 September to 3 October 2027.
Questions for Friends
- How do you personally feel about the complicity of Quakers, including weighty Friends, in the slave trade and slavery? What do you feel that we should be doing now in response to their involvement in this historical injustice?
- What is your response to the 2024 World Plenary Tapestry Document excerpted above? How do you feel the Society of Friends should respond?
- Was there information revealed today that was new or shocking?
Works Cited
- Gerbner, Katharine. “Slavery in the Quaker World: Christian Slavery and White Supremacy.” Friends Journal, 1 Sept. 2019, www.friendsjournal.org/slavery-in-the-quaker-world/.
- Manning, Patrick. “The Slave Trade: The Formal Demography of a Global System.” Social Science History, vol. 14, no. 2, 1990, pp. 255–279, https://doi.org/10.2307/1171441.
- Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972.
- Watkins, Mary. Hypocrisy, Racism, and Self-Interest on the Path to Reparations: Quaker Complicity with Slavery (1657–1776) and White Supremacy, Pendle Hill, Wallingford, PA, 2024.
- Weaver, Harold D., Jr. Race, Systemic Violence, and Retrospective Justice: An African American Quaker Scholar-Activist Challenges Conventional Narratives. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill. 2020 pamphlet/2026 audiobook.
- Weaver, Harold D., Jr. “A Proposed Plan for Retrospective Justice.” Friends Journal, 3 Jan. 2021.
We encourage you to write to us at theblackquakerproject@gmail.com with your thoughts, questions, and feedback.
Peace and Blessings,
The BlackQuaker Project
Wellesley Friends Meeting,
New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers)
25 March 2026
Friends Association for Higher Education 