They saw the light of God in everyone, including the people labeled “the enemy.”
October 4, 2026: World Quaker Day is observed each year on the first Sunday of October.
The name “Quaker” is said to have started as an insult.
In 1650, George Fox, the movement’s founder, was prosecuted for blasphemy. He told the judge, Gervase Bennet, to tremble at the word of God, and Bennet is said to have mocked Fox and his followers as “Quakers.”
Others say the name mocked early members who sometimes shook with religious emotion during worship.
Quakers turned the insult upside down. Fox liked the name, because he believed everyone should quake before the love of God. The name became the most common one for the group, and Quakers embraced it with pride.
What It Meant To Be Friends
They have another name for themselves: Friends. Early members called themselves “Children of the Light” and “Friends of the Truth,” drawing on the Bible. The name is commonly traced to the Gospel of John, where Jesus calls his followers friends. In time, they became simply Friends, and the group’s formal name is the Religious Society of Friends.
Quakers believe in “that of God” in every person, and their life is guided by shared principles: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship.
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) was created in 1917 to aid conscientious objectors. By World War II, it had worked with Japanese students for years.
True Friends of Japanese Americans
After Pearl Harbor, Quaker volunteers helped Japanese Americans pack and store their belongings and sell their businesses.
Floyd Schmoe, a Seattle Quaker, set up a regional AFSC office to try to prevent the removal of Japanese Americans. It didn’t stop the incarceration of more than 120,000 people. So he organized Seattle church leaders to help families pack and store their belongings, and he and his wife, Ruth, visited friends held at Minidoka, Heart Mountain, and Tule Lake.
Herbert Nicholson, a Quaker missionary who spoke fluent Japanese, helped 500 fishing families given 48 hours to leave Terminal Island. He stored belongings in his church, then drove to the camps with supplies and gifts. Japanese Americans called him “Friend Herbert.”
A Quaker Who Said No
Gordon Hirabayashi was a Quaker himself. Born in Seattle, he became a Quaker as a University of Washington student in 1941 and began working with the AFSC, helping Japanese families get their affairs in order before removal.
In May 1942, he broke the curfew on purpose. Hirabayashi then turned himself in. “I must maintain my Christian principles,” he wrote in his statement. Thomas Bodine, a fellow Seattle Quaker, later recalled driving him downtown so he wouldn’t have to do it alone, while Friends gathered at the meetinghouse to pray for him.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction in 1943. In 1944, he married Esther Schmoe, Floyd Schmoe’s daughter, in Spokane’s first Quaker wedding. They became more than friends.
In 1987, a federal appeals court overturned his conviction. In 2012, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Getting Students Out, And More
Quaker volunteers refused to let incarcerated Japanese Americans feel forgotten by the outside world. They visited the camps to bring moral support, food, and other necessities.
The AFSC took the lead in the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council, created in May 1942. By the end of the war, it had helped more than 4,000 students leave the camps and enroll at more than 600 colleges.
The AFSC ran hostels in cities including Cincinnati and Des Moines, where people leaving the camps found temporary housing and help finding work. In Philadelphia, a hostel backed by church and peace groups was run by an Issei couple, Saburo and Michiyo Inouye, whose three children attended Swarthmore with the help of the student relocation council.
Today, within the Japanese American community, the Quakers are remembered as the defining example of allies who put their faith into direct, dangerous, and unwavering action.