The Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers, of which I am a member, has of late been seeking to find a new hero to lionize. Many have focused squarely on the person of one Bayard Rustin, a Civil Rights Activist whose best known accomplishment was organizing the March on Washington. The reason you may never have heard of Rustin is that he was gay, and knew that taking a more public role might compromise the movement. And, though he was posthumously pardoned, he had been convicted on a morals charge for having sex with another man in a car.
I bring this up to make a much larger point. While I see no issue with elevating Rustin’s achievements and advancements, I worry that we are forsaking and willfully condemning the very important founders of our faith to obscurity because they don’t measure up to our standard of acceptable conduct. One of the most important early Friends was William Penn. He helped elevate, through his high birth, a kind of social acceptability that we had not achieved. Until Penn got involved, we were often thought of as a bunch of crack-pot, working class radicals. So if it were up to me, I would not remove his name from our history, even if he was a slave owner and profited from the system.
I write against the backdrop of a story within a story. Some context, I recognize, is necessary. I spent many a fond time at the William Penn House when I lived in Washington, DC. Some years ago, a Quaker couple donated their home to our Society in the hopes that it would be a resource center and hub of Friendly activity. It also serves as a cheap place to house and feed large groups of Quakers (often youth groups) for the night who come into DC to participate in political activities like protests. I’ve spent a night on one of the bunk beds myself and eaten breakfast there the following morning.
Two Quaker ministers who now live in California were employed by William Penn House during my time in DC and I got much of my Friendly education through my interactions with them. They are a married couple with three young children. I appreciated having the William Penn House at my disposal, both as a social outlet, and as a way to grow closer to my faith.
I write now because I have some really strong reservations about the current plan to change the name of the building. Clearly, the decision is not up to me, but if it were, I’d prefer it would be left as is. Yes, William Penn may have committed acts that we find deplorable today, but I have found much inspiration in his acts, words, and deeds.
Should you wipe away the name “William Penn House” completely, then we might as well completely remove William Penn from our history, as I said, and remove his statue from the top of a notable building in Philadelphia. If this were a matter of Quaker process in a Business Meeting, I would reluctantly stand aside over this concern. And for the non-initiated, what that means is that I would allow the name change to go through but make it plainly known that I do not approve.
Taken to an extreme, we should take George Washington off the one-dollar-bill, tear the Jefferson Memorial down, close up Mount Vernon, close Monticello, rip up the Declaration of Independence, and remove half the signatures who signed our Constitution, many of whom were slave owners or profited from the proceeds of chattel slavery.
The Right calls this cancel culture. I am not inclined to agree with their arguments, but there is absolutely no way to completely remove the stain of slavery from our history. Even abolitionists wore cotton cloth picked by black hands and ate cane sugar produced in plantations. Everyone is complicit, and perhaps it’s just a matter of degree, but I question whether that really matters.
I don’t doubt the sincerity and the good intentions that are going into this push, but I have to say that, while I may stand as a minority, I simply do not agree with this proposal. Nor do I agree with other proposals that would seek to make vastly important people in our history disappear. Yes, slavery is indefensible, but the Founders of this nation put in place a radical experiment that was considered audacious by the rest of the world. And it has, recent struggles notwithstanding, held up for over two hundred years.
Let’s think this through carefully before we summarily cast aside our history. It is responsible for who we are and it is a measuring stick that can be used to judge where we have come from and how far we have to go. Certainly lifting up the names of the previously disenfranchised in the historical record is a worthwhile endeavor, but they must co-exist with the dead white men that are so crucial to understanding ourselves and our national character. We can make room for minorities and point proudly to their accomplishments at the same time as we remember the legacies of the huge personalities who set us on the course we are on today. In essence, we cannot throw the baby out with the bathwater, and that is what I think we are doing here.