Witnessing Peace: Contesting Racial Discrimination in Civilian Public Service Camps, 1941-1946

Witnessing Peace: The Civilian Public Service and the "American Creed" in Wartime America
Witnessing is often conceived of as a passive act, but in a religious sense it refers to a dynamic process that encompasses action. To make what they referred to as a witness for peace, 12,000 conscientious objectors chose to join the Civilian Public Service and perform alternative service rather than enlist in the military during WWII. These objectors understood "making a witness for peace" as the embodiment of pacifist principles and ideals in everyday life as well as the rejection of structures that kept them from living these ideals. Civilian Public Service men generally used the word 'witness' in the Quaker sense—to bear witness to one's belief through actions.
The Civilian Public Service, or CPS, was created under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940. It enabled draftees who objected to military service on religious grounds to participate in service of "national importance" that did not directly contribute to the war effort. Selective Service partnered with the three historic peace churches—the Mennonite Church, the Church of the Brethren, and the Society of Friends—to administer most of the camps and units where this service was carried out. The Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), the Brethren Service Committee (BSC), and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) were theoretically responsible for the daily operations of the 120 of the 153 camps and units outside of the work projects supervised by federal and state agencies. The government first placed conscientious objectors in locations where they could work in soil conservation and forestry. As the program evolved, smaller service units developed outside of the camp system to bring CPS labor to state mental hospitals, farms, public health initiatives, and human guinea pig research. While these detached service units enabled the program to diversify its "work of national importance," the Forest Service and the Soil Conservation Service, in cooperation with the historic peace churches, operated the majority of the 67 base camps established during World War II.
The conscientious objectors assigned to these camps and units struggled to find saliency and relevance in their work while staying true to religious principles and maintaining their witness for peace. For many men in Civilian Public Service, 60% of whom were affiliated with one of the historic peace churches, striving for human equality was an integral component of their pacifist testimony. With a focus on camps operated by the Friends and the Brethren, my work explains how Civilian Public Service camps became sites of resistance and protest as conscientious objectors grew dissatisfied with the churches' inability to uphold the principle of brotherhood in the CPS program. In particular, I illustrate the shift from reliance on pre-Myrdal Myrdalian educational programs focused on "race relations" to end segregation and discrimination within CPS to the rise in the use of nonviolent direct action tactics that enabled COs to bear witness to their beliefs through action. The institutional dilemmas these actions created forced the Church of the Brethren and the Society of Friends to confront their own hypocrisy and eventually to clarify their stance on race and segregation before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Early in the war, AFSC-CPS assignees were primarily eager to preserve freedom within their race relations educational programs rather than petitioning the AFSC to take a clear stance on the status of African American COs and on race as it related to the basic principle of brotherhood. CPS assignees were quick to express their support for African American speakers in camps across the system—after all, COs often expressed the belief that "the policy and action of one camp effects [sic] the whole camp program… [and] the larger peace program and testimony." In 1942, the secretary of the camp council at CPS Camp No. 23 at Fresno, Ohio, wrote to protest the cancellation of African American pacifist Bayard Rustin's scheduled lecture at the AFSC camp at Magnolia, Arkansas. Though Camp No. 23's director was unwilling to "challenge the status of the camp" by appealing to the AFSC to allow Rustin to speak, the camp council protested this violation of the "basic principles on which our life is formed."
As 1942 slipped away, conscientious objectors in Friends and Brethren camps grew more and more dissatisfied with the churches' facilitation of the CPS program and their inability to uphold the values and morals of assignees. What administrators like George Bent and Claude Shotts saw as "flexibility" with race policy, the COs most committed to racial justice regarded as betrayal. But that left open the question of what to do about it? In answering it, men who shared principles took different paths for fulfilling them. Many men in the service abandoned their assignments altogether, preferring to be jailed than to compromise their personal witness for peace. Other CPS workers stayed within established government channels, and remained in the camps to express pacifist ideals. The different trajectories of Wilson Head and Wallace Nelson—who were once allies—are cases in point.
Both men began their CPS service in 1942 at the Cheltenham school, a Maryland reform school for delinquent African American youth. At Cheltenham, 23 white men from the 25-man unit slept in two buildings. Cheltenham's superintendent assigned the remaining two African American men, Head and Nelson, to a separate building. Soon after arrival at the school, Head and Nelson approached the superintendent to register their opposition to this residential segregation and preferential treatment of white men in institutional assignments. Besides registering their protest, the two men held a meeting with the remainder of the unit and decided to employ direct action tactics to end segregation in the school's dining facilities. White COs in the unit began eating in the "black" dining room. Following this protest, tensions within the school increased to such a degree that the superintendent called the AFSC and requested that the unit be withdrawn. The superintendent held firm in meetings with AFSC officials and refused to integrate the unit. The AFSC took no further action and Nelson transferred to the Coshocton camp in protest on November 18, 1942, citing his refusal to accept Jim Crowism at Cheltenham. Nelson would go on to reject the CPS program wholesale when he walked out of Coshocton with five other men (and, due to desertion of his post, into prison) in July of 1943. In prison, he would work towards the attainment of equal treatment for all races within the justice system. While Nelson and his compatriots found even the most basic act of staying in a Civilian Public Service camp for the entirety of the war to be a violation of their pacifist principles, men like Wilson Head believed that the camps could "make a contribution to interracial harmony."
Many men in CPS camps strove to protect the brotherhood of all mankind as an integral component of pacifist testimony. While the Church of the Brethren and the Society of Friends presided over educational programs designed to promote pacifist ideals and racial harmony among assignees, they had difficulty upholding these principles in the overall administration of Civilian Public Service. These difficulties were sometimes the result of their administrative partnership with Selective Service. Determined to stay true to their beliefs and preserve their witness for peace, conscientious objectors in Civilian Public Service protested hypocrisy within the peace church programs. While there were not enough nonwhite and non-Christian assignees in CPS to turn camps into publicized testing grounds for cooperative living between men of different races and religions, CPS men did quietly demonstrate "the fact that peoples of different racial groups harmonously [sic] and in complete brotherhood."
Assignees' efforts to navigate within the unique space of confinement presented by CPS camps in order to work towards brotherhood within camps and in the often hostile communities outside of them created public relations and administrative problems. These problems, in turn, forced the peace churches to reassess their priorities. Thus, by resisting the hypocritical policies and compromises of the administrating agencies, CPSers who collaborated across camps were able to achieve small victories and spur concrete policy changes within the AFSC-CPS and BSC-CPS administrations.
One response to these institutional dilemmas was the creation of the AFSC-CPS Standing Committee on Race Policy, which began as a temporary subcommittee appointed by AFSC-CPS in January of 1944 to consider a resolution produced by the Big Flats camp in New York. At a camp meeting on January 14, the COs unanimously adopted the following resolution, which came to be known as the Big Flats resolution:
Be it resolved that no Friends CPS camp shall deny admission to any assignee for reason of race or color, and that in the Units no discrimination shall be exercised; that it be clearly understood between the Friends and any Unit Superintendent that the Friends will not be a party to discrimination or exclusion; and further that on any application to a Unit no mention of race shall be made.

Ten days after the Big Flats meeting produced this text, the Race Policy Committee issued a statement recommending that the principles expressed in the resolution. They concluded that the principles aligned "with the unquestioned position of the Society of Friends" and should be prerequisites for the establishment of any future CPS units and camps supervised by the Quakers. Support for unequivocal adoption of the resolution poured in in the form of letters and petitions against opening new segregated units in the south. These constant demands for clarification of policies related to racial discrimination and conflicts caused by discriminatory assignments in the camps pushed the AFSC to establish its Standing Committee on Race Policy. Pressure from COs later caused both the AFSC and the BSC to adopt policies prohibiting the establishment of new camps and units that would not be open to all assignees. The BSC stated in March 1945 that it would "attempt the withdrawal of existing units and refrain from sponsoring new projects in which the men and the Committee feel that the progress toward equality of race and creed cannot be made." By managing CPS camps, these two peace churches experienced the difficulty of putting their beliefs into administrative practice as they struggled with government bureaucracy. They also were able to evaluate their position within a social system on the verge of change.
By highlighting instances of civil disobedience, interracialism, and collective action among conscientious objectors, my work exposes institutional negotiations that solidified Quaker and Brethren espousal of racial liberalism. I tell a story of negotiation and renegotiation, a period of time during which both the peace churches and conscientious objectors confronted their principles in action, admitted to operating outside of their own ideals, and interrogated the way they put their beliefs into practice. Both individually and collectively, many CPS assignees in Brethren and Friends camps bore witness to their beliefs by challenging the peace churches to release official statements clarifying their stance on racial minorities in CPS and to end the racial segregation that remained pervasive within the program. My research describes a moment when peace churches, seen as among the most progressive white proponents of the civil rights movement, confronted institutional dilemmas that compelled them to clarify their stance on race and segregation before the [conventional periodization of the] civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
At various points, as many scholars have shown, pacifist religious groups employed nonviolent direct action tactics to combat racism well before the 1954 Brown decision, the U.S. Supreme Court's formal renunciation of "separate but equal." We know very little, though, about the impetus for antiracism within peace church theology, and the ways in which churches had to actually work through their own institutional and cultural commitments to segregation in order to eventually build pacifist alliances with civil rights activists during the 1950s and 1960s. Scholars have not yet placed the rise of peace churches and pacifists as allies in the fight for civil rights in context. Historians of the civil rights movement seem to presume that peace churches were natural supporters of the civil rights movement, as if a philosophical commitment to equality, or a theological commitment to universal human rights somehow assured a commitment to egalitarianism and racial justice in practice. I show, however, that peace churches experienced deep internal struggles that, only in their resolution, enabled the churches to position themselves as allies in struggles for racial justice in the postwar period. In coming to terms with the contradictions of war, peace churches also reconciled contradictions in their own theology and practice.
While the CPS program included only a small population of men—approximately 12,000 draftees served in the camps—the conscientious objectors who performed this "work of national importance" helped shaped the course of the peace churches they belonged to. The experience of administering the camps and units on the home front was pivotal for the Friends and the Brethren. It forced them to face the societal implications of their own beliefs. The evolution of the peace churches and their eventual alliance with civil rights figures, organizations, and agendas was not foreordained. This paper shows that the processes of institutional negotiations between the churches and Selective Service, on the one hand, and between the churches and the men on the other, created the impetus for the Brethren and the Friends to position themselves within the struggle for civil rights before the movement exploded after the Brown decision. Remaining agnostic on Jim Crow was no longer an option.
By focusing on peace church processes of negotiation within the CPS framework and CO activism in the camps, this paper points to the pivotal moment when peace churches, spurred by black activists, began decisive opposition to Jim Crowism in the United States.




"Witness," Friends Meeting at Cambridge, accessed April 6, 2014, http://fmcquaker.org/about-2/witness/.
Mitchell Lee Robinson, "Civilian Public Service During World War II: The Dilemmas of Conscience and Conscription in a Free Society" (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1990), 121.
Henry Frank, Willing to Work But Not to Fight," The Baltimore Sun, August 16, 1942, SM1. Also see "Overview of Camps," last modified January 2014, http://civilianpublicservice.org/campsoverview. As human guinea pigs, CPSers served as test subjects in medical experiments to devise treatments for diseases, injuries, and other conditions.
"Overview of Camps," last modified January 2014, http://civilianpublicservice.org/campsoverview.
Cynthia Eller, "Oral History as Moral Discourse: Conscientious Objectors and the Second World War," The Oral History Review 18 (1990): 53.
This paper employs the term "race relations" to describe study groups because this is the term conscientious objectors used when speaking of educational programs or interactions with people of color. The author concurs with John Hartigan's analysis of "race relations"—that this term, along with terms like "racial problems," focus on conditions of people of color without recognizing the "position of dominance whites maintain." For further discussion, see John Hartigan, Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 190-191.
H.G. Secretary, Camp Council C.P.S. Camp 23 to Paul Furnas, May 2, 1942, in the Records of the AFSC: Civilian Public Service (DG 002 Section 1 Series G4 Box 19c), SCPC.
Ibid.
Wilson Head, A Life on the Edge: Experiences in 'Black and White' in North America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 132.
Ibid, 133.
John Wood, II, "Wally and Juanita Nelson and the Struggle for Peace, Equality, and Social Justice: 1935-1975," (PhD diss., Morgan State University, 2008), 100. Also see "CO's Struggle for Equality and Freedom," The Chicago Defender, August 17, 1946, 13 and "Conscientious Objectors Smash Bias at U.S. Prison," The Chicago Defender, February 2, 1946, 2.
Wilson Head to Unknown Recipient, undated, in the Records of the AFSC: Civilian Public Service (DG002 Section 1 Series G4 Box 19c2), SCPC.
This essay will focus on the AFSC and Brethren Service Committee's administration of CPS camps because Mennonite assignees rarely challenged the CPS system and almost never challenged their church. Despite sociologist Stephen Taylor's assertion that the historically isolated Mennonite Church was "silent on the race question," it clarified its stance in its informational newsletter, the Bulletin, in 1945. The church admitted that the question of race was a new one for Mennonites, who had not had much contact with people of color. On March 1, 1945, the Bulletin wrote that while Mennonites were not always as "Christlike" as they should be in their relations with people of color, they nevertheless believed in the brotherhood of mankind. They recognized that race and segregation were important and hotly contested issues within CPS camps and pacifist belief systems.
Wilson Head to Unknown Recipient, undated, in the Records of the AFSC: Civilian Public Service (DG002 Section 1 Series G4 Box 19c2), SCPC.
"Race Policy in ASFC's C.P.S." in the Records of the AFSC: Civilian Public Service (DG002 Section 1 Series G4 Box 19c), SCPC. The Race Policy Committee became a permanent Standing Committee within AFSC-CPS in May 1944.
"Statement of Events in the Case of Dr. Colin Lawton, Fisk University," in the Records of the AFSC: Civilian Public Service (DG002 Section 1 Series G4 Box 19c), SCPC.
Memo #117, W. Harold Row to Directors and Men in BCPS, March 14, 1945, in the Records of the Federal Council of Churches: Committee on the Conscientious Objector (DG048), SCPC.
For example, see Glenn Feldman, ed., Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004) and Scott H. Bennett, Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence, 1915-1963 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003).