Luke Lamberti | Honors Research - American Friends Service Committee (Philadelphia, PA)

In December 2023, I traveled to Philadelphia to conduct research at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) archives for my honors thesis project. My thesis focuses on AFSC activities within prison reform and abolition during the 1970s.

The AFSC was founded in 1917 to provide conscientious objectors within the Society of Friends access to relief work. It has grown over the decades into an activist organization that unites both Quakers and non-Quakers towards more general social justice goals. While recent years have seen the publication of some monographs discussing AFSC social justice work, these mostly focus on the 1950s and 1960s. There is very little secondary literature on AFSC activities during the 1970s, and particularly on specific studies of AFSC prison reform efforts during this period. As such, visiting the AFSC archives was essential to my research. I need to build a working chronology of this period within the organization almost entirely from primary sources.

Working with AFSC archivist Don Davis, I sifted through a decade’s worth of material related to AFSC prison reform goals. I left with copies of over 1,000 documents from AFSC chapters across the United States. This work allowed me to determine the specific time frame I wanted to study and the arc of each chapter of my thesis. Additionally, many of the historical figures and events within these archival materials remain missing from digitized sources and the academic literature. Without visiting the archives in person, I would have been unable to learn about these pieces of AFSC history.