Reflection on: Why does Quaker education matter to your school population and the world?

 By Brenda Esch, Head, Friends School of Wilmington (NC) 

There are lots of Quakers in North Carolina along the path that George Fox himself (the founder of the Religious Society of Friends) walked in 1672, 350 years ago, and John Woolman after him. But George and John never stopped in Wilmington and very few Quakers have settled in its vicinity since, so what is a Friends school doing in Wilmington North Carolina and why does it matter?

When I arrived as Head of School at Friends School of Wilmington in 2012, I imagined that my job was to share my knowledge of Friends education as I had experienced it working at Friends schools in Pennsylvania. Afterall, all Quaker education emanates from the belief that there is that of God in every person and that we need to establish excellent schools that promote justice and belonging no matter where we are.

But, FSW taught me that it very much matters where we are and when Quaker education is grounded in its very distinct location, its mission is powerfully animated through knowing and telling the story of people and place.

Friends School established our new environmental education center this year and we named it the Longleaf Center for Environmental Learning. When a visitor asked me if it was named after a donor, I was surprised that it wasn’t common knowledge that longleaf refers to the Longleaf Pine, because at Friends School of Wilmington we are deep into the longleaf pine story.

The longleaf pine forest covered a vast area in the southeast United States and was decimated by the turpentine and naval industry that used indigenous people and enslaved people to harvest its sap in order to, among other things, waterproof ships.

Land acknowledgment for us at Friends School started with tracing who has lived here before us, but evolved quickly into what has lived here as well and how the people and the nonhuman environment interacted. We know this story of injustice, we tell this story, we take care of these endangered trees and are committed to honoring these people.

Abraham Galloway is a superhero who you have never heard of. He was an enslaved person who escaped from the Cape Fear area at the age 20, traveling to Philadelphia, Canada, Haiti, and Mississippi before returning to North Carolina as a Union spy, helping to turn the tide of Civil War battles here. He was among the first black elected officials, becoming a NC State Senator in 1868. He was bold, brave, defiant, patriotic, charismatic, and he spoke truth to power. Friends School students know all about him.

In 1897, 28 years after Galloway’s death, Wilmington had a fusion government, made up of white and black officials, and the largest African American population in NC. In 1898, there was an armed insurrection lead by white supremacists – a terrorist attack which decimated the black population, whose trauma continues to be felt.

We teach 1898 and we teach Abraham Galloway so that we can own our responsibility to people and place. We know the longleaf pine so that we can own our responsibility to people and place. The opposite of decimate is animate, and that’s what these stories do for our mission. They are not simply topics to be studied but a way to justice and belonging.

That’s what a Friends school is doing in Wilmington, NC and why a Quaker education matters here, there, and around the world.