Below are Tom’s welcoming remarks to the East Ed Middle School Diversity Conference hosted by Sandy Spring Friends School on January 26 and attended by over 500 middle school students from 34 schools from Richmond to Philadelphia.
Welcome to Sandy Spring Friends School and the East Ed Middle School Diversity Conference. We are delighted to have you here to do this important work.
You won’t be able to claim that you began this work, because it was begun by ordinary people sprinkled with heroism before you. But you will be able to continue this work. Deepen it. Extend it. Enrich it. And season it with your own heroism.
It might sound a little silly to have the word “Friends” in the name of a school. I thought I would explain how it got there. “Friends” is kind of shorthand for “Society of Friends,” which is the formal name for what most people call Quakers. So Sandy Spring Friends School is a school founded by Quakers exactly 50 years ago, right on this spot.
Quakers believe that there is that of God within each person. They also believe that the God within, which we also think of as Light, is not separate and does not speak a foreign language. The soft, still voice within speaks your language, and speaks every language, so we don’t need other people to interpret for us or to tell us what is true. We can discover the Light and the Truth within ourselves. And Quakers believe that this journey, this seeking of Truth, happens most vigorously, in the most precious way, when we are together as a members of a community. Or society. The Society of Friends. Or Quakers.
Before a school was here, this space was a farm, owned for 6 or 7 generations by the same Quaker family. Esther Scott wanted the land to be used for a school where kids would be seen as well-balanced individuals. The Friends who started this school made sure that it was racially integrated at a time when other schools were still trying to figure out how to keep people separate. Why in the world would anyone want to keep people separate? It makes no sense. That is why it is important work to understand and confront intolerance, to understand and confront privilege. To finish the work.
Brook Moore, the founder of the school, hoped that students of this school would be nourished - that they would just “get a kick” out of being here and would leave feeling happier and more loving for having been exposed to the Sandy Spring quality of Spirit.
And that is my wish for all of you today.