Work Camps

In Nashville, Tenn. last week, young black and white students of both sexes were sitting down to breakfast together in an old red-brick house near Fisk University. All morning and most of the afternoon they were swinging pickaxes on a onetime plantation at the end of 18th Avenue North, west of Hootin' Annie and Billy Goat Hills. Members of the American Friends Service Committee's first interracial work camp in the South, they were converting a little patch of former slave soil into a recreation field for local

Negroes. They were also cultivating a new field of interracial relations.

The first Quaker work camp was established by the Service Committee's Clarence E. Pickett and Homer L. Morris in 1934, at Westmoreland, Pa., to give that year's unemployed college students something to do. Since then the idea has been picked up by many schools and other groups. Combining some features of summer camp, settlement house, college and the CCC, work camps teach neighborliness, public service, respect for manual labor, self-government.

The Quakers alone now have 13 work camps in the U.S., three in Mexico, one in Puerto Rico. Colleges from Pennsylvania's Swarthmore to Kansas' Wichita give credits for theses based on camp projects, hashed out in camp seminars staffed with college teachers. The eight-week sessions cost the student $100 (but scholarships are available). Their Quaker sponsors expect to find plenty of work in postwar Europe for work-camp alumni.

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