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In 1964, UB philosophy professor Newton Garver, a Quaker, supported by
New York Yearly Meeting, refused to sign the loyalty oath required by the
state's Feinberg Law when UB became part of the State University of New
York system. He claimed the oath would violate the principles of his
religion. Along with other UB faculty, he filed a class action suit in
this regard, which resulted in the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that
declared the law unconstitutional. One of the book chapters contributed by Densmore records the long-term involvement of New York Quakers in the anti-slavery movement. He noted that slave-owning by members of the New York Yearly Meeting ended around the time of the American Revolution and that 12 of the 18 founders of the influential New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves were Quakers. The Friends were also among the first conductors on the Underground Railroad in New York State. One of the first Protestant groups to recognize women as the spiritual equals of men, The Quakers brought their beliefs to the colonies by the mid-1600s. Their members contributed heavily to the country's first and continuing wave of political activism on behalf of women's rights. Of the five women who organized the groundbreaking Convention on the Rights of Women in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848, four, including Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann M'Clintock and Jane Hunt, were, or had been, Quakers. Quaker pacifism and anti-draft activity during America's wars has been well-known, but not universal. The Civil War and World War II, in particular, challenged Quakers to examine their pacifist tenets. While the Society of Friends remained pacifist, some individual Quakers joined the military in these and other conflicts.
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