Harold D. Weaver

In this book the reader gets a close look at the broad diversity within the black Quaker experience. For nearly a century, historians and philosophers have struggled to understand and interpret the many moving parts of race, race relations, religion, and social justice. Black fire presents some of these moving parts of history to the Religious Society of Friends, unrolling some new scrolls and offering us new foundations from which to continue to explore African American stories, Quaker stories, and the intersections between the two.… (meer)

The author asks friends to look at societal problems through new lenses: confronting systemic violence within anti-violence; acknowledging institutional and systemic racism, rather than merely individual racism; considering a retrospective justice system the compensates for and helps remove the historical inequities related to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, chattel slavery, and their legacies – Jim Crowism, other forms of dehumanization and exploitation, police brutality, and the school to prison pipeline. This unjust world is maintained by misinformation and disinformation in the media, formal education, scholarship, and political discourse. Dr. Weaver lays out steps and queries to guide Friends and others to begin addressing these concerns in the wider world.… (meer)