PACIFIST

Pacifist

Pacifist

This paper compares and contrasts following two pacifist organizations Anglican Pacifist Fellowship and Fellowship of Reconciliation. APF is an organization whose members are pledged 'to renounce war and the preparation to wage war, and to work for the construction of Christian peace in the world'. It has members in some 30 countries around the world some of which are experiencing military conflict. The latest (October issue) of its newsletter, The Anglican Peacemaker focuses on the ongoing conflicts in Africa which are of real concern to some APF's members.

The Fellowship supports the Dealing with the past project because unresolved violence and repression from past military conflict can so easily fuel future conflict. The history of conflicts in many parts of the world confirms this. Hence Dealing with the past is a means of war prevention, which is consistent with the APF pledge.

On the other hand the other organization selected is The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) was founded by a group of clergyman at an international conference at Lake Constance in 1914. These Christian pacifists were totally opposed to nations using violence to solve international problems. Early members in the FOR in the United States included Abraham Muste, Norman Thomas, Roger Baldwin, Anna Murray, Scott Nearing and Oswald Garrison Villard.

In 1940 Abraham Muste was appointed executive secretary of the organization. In this position Muste led the campaign against United States involvement in the Second World War. Two years later Muste gave permission for James Farmer, George Houser and Bayard Rustin to establish the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), a group that was to play a leading role in the struggle for African American civil rights.

In early 1947, the Congress on Racial Equality announced plans to send eight white and eight black men into the Deep South to test the Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in interstate travel unconstitutional. Organized by George Houser and Bayard Rustin, the Journey of Reconciliation was to be a two week pilgrimage through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky.

Although Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was against this kind of direct action, he volunteered the service of its southern attorneys during the campaign. Thurmond Marshall, head of the NAACP's legal department, was strongly against the Journey of Reconciliation and warned that a "disobedience movement on the part of Negroes and their white allies, if employed in the South, would result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved."

The Journey of Reconciliation began on 9th April, 1947. The team included George Houser, Bayard Rustin, James Peck, Igal Roodenko, Joseph Felmet, Nathan Wright, Conrad Lynn, Wallace Nelson, Andrew Johnson, Eugene Stanley, Dennis Banks, William Worthy, Louis Adams, Worth Randle and Homer Jack.

The Anglican Pacifist Fellowship was established in 1937, and now has some 1,400 members in over 40 countries, as well as a sister organization, the Episcopal Peace Fellowship, in the United States of America. APF was founded as a specifically Anglican offshoot of Reverend Dick Sheppard's secular Peace Pledge ...