Peace and Social Concerns Committee is hosting a luncheon on October 12 at rise of meeting to benefit the Friends Association for Children. Please come and learn more about FRIENDS and our connection to it. Here’s some history about the organization which opened in 1868 and came under management of black Richmond churches in 1871.Thanks to Mary Fran Hughes-McIntyre’s History of Richmond Friends Meeting for the following information.

After the Civil War, as leader of the Ladies Sewing Circle for Charitable Work, Lucy Goode Brooks, a formerly enslaved person, convinced her circle that an orphanage was needed. She asked Cedar Creek Meeting (later Richmond Friends Meeting) for help in raising money to start the home.

With Lucy, John Bacon Crenshaw, clerk of Cedar Creek Meeting, was instrumental in starting the Friends’ Asylum for Colored Orphans. Receiving contributions from the Freedman’s Bureau, Philadelphia Friends, Negro citizens of Richmond, and others, Friends established a home and school, and after three years turned it over to the “colored ministers” of the city, with the following invitation: 

Friends: Deeply impressed, at the close of the late unhappy contest with the necessity for such an Institution — Your friends the Quakers with considerable labor collected the necessary funds and erected what is now known as the Orphan House for Colored Children…. Trusting that you will appreciate the great importance of such an Institution, where the helpless orphans may be received and sheltered from the cold charities and cruel temptations of a heartless world till opportunity offers to place them in suitable homes, where they may receive the sympathy, care, and training, their sorrowful lot so much needs….

This institution was a continual place of involvement for Richmond Friends who served on the Executive Board even after it became a Community Fund enterprise in 1941.