Quaker Walk 2025: Tracing a Remonstrance in Living Boundaries of Justice

Quaker Walk in continuing.

From May 4 to May 22, 2025, Friends from across the Northeast are walking more than 276 miles from New York City to Washington, D.C.

The walkers carry not just their backpacks and banners, but renewed moral clarity in the form of an update for the Flushing Remonstrance—a centuries-old call to conscience, reborn in the urgency of today. 

Recently the Walk continued again. There is planning afoot for a Spring Walk in 2026

Along the journey,through Princeton and Trenton, from Germantown Meeting in Philadelphia to Friends Central Meeting, to Independence Hall, and then southward through Plymouth Meeting, across the Susquehanna River by canoe, walkers are encountering not only state and county lines—but also the invisible, entrenched boundaries of class, race, memory, and moral contradiction.

Life in these United States wells up, alive, like the original Flushing Remonstrance, both local and global. It speaks to America’s broken promises, yes, but it also invites a deeper truth: that we are all connected by spirit, by land, by moral imagination. It is our condition and imagination that the walk urgently defends—a power to see this better world, and to walk toward it, together.

One friend described the walk this way, “We walk because laws and lawmakers do not yet see humanity in our neighbors and neighborhoods. We need to find a trust in ourselves to say, ‘if you can cross through five countries and migrate over 1000 miles to get a child across to a border for freedom and opportunity with safety – that’s a neighbor I can live next to. We walk because our borders do not yet recognize our neighbor’s belonging. We walk because GAIA Earth, its people, its beings, cannot wait for justice to be convenient or protected by government.”

The original Flushing Remonstrance, written in 1657 by Dutch settlers in what is now Queens, New York, was a radical statement of religious tolerance aimed as a Minute to Protect their Quaker neighbors. The signers openly risked known persecutions to declare a right to receive Quakers and others to community regardless of faith. Today, spiritual descendants walk in same boldness—but with expansive emergent vision. This walk is not only about freedom; it is about economic justice, ecological repair, racial truth-telling, and indigenous sovereignty.

The original Flushing Remonstrance, written in 1657 by Dutch settlers in what is now Queens, New York, was a radical statement of religious tolerance. Signers risked persecution to declare their right to receive Quakers and others regardless of faith. Today, those spiritual descendants walk with that same boldness—but with an expanded vision. This walk is not only about religious freedom; it is about economic justice, ecological repair, racial truth-telling, and indigenous sovereignty. We are confronting what is citizenry for if not for actions of liberty?

Begun at New York City’s 350 year old Flushing Meeting House, walkers gathered near a site of where the original Remonstrance was collected. Some participants travel from afar; others are local youth, elders, teachers, ministers, students, and neighbors. All are invited to listen, reflect, and share their common hopes and visions first then take steps together.

Leaving the density on New York city into New Jersey, the walk first entered a corridor of contrasts. Princeton, its ivy walls and elite legacy, and many affluent suburbs offered the shady safety of a complicated gift. Abington, PA is not the same working lands as in a time of Benjamin Lay. Walking and the pace of human speed of travel gives us a recognition that even institutions of immense power can be transformed. Students and teachers gather with walkers at Friends’ schools; discuss ethical scholarship, decolonized education, student civic responsibility.

This walk is about healing the past by walking with it, interrogating how we’ve received it.. A deep historical echo repeats as the days and paths converge. One is at Germantown. In 1688, four activists of conscience drafted the first anti-slavery petition in the American colonies. As walkers enter the city and rest at Germantown Meetinghouse, they meet neighbors and Meeting hosts who together remember those early Quakers and Mennonites who saw the horror of slavery and spoke up. A silence and a space of pause deepens with Spirit as we remember.

Participants reflected on Germantown’s legacy and where it sits today. The history calls to them. They consider that leads to courage today. Many walkers are engaged in movements to end mass incarceration, support reparations, and promote immigrant justice. Some are friends of persecuted poor trans bipoc and formerly incarcerated youth. Some know they are descendants of a slaver class which gained power and immense wealth as enslaved people or Lenape survivors were subjugated and transatlantic trade built institutional systems that persist today.. 

On last Mother’s Day the  walk moved through Logan Circle and Center City. All eyes turned to Independence Hall. Here, contradictions of American founding ideals are on a more full display. Beneath the liberty bell’s silence lies a legacy of silenced voices. After a Meeting for worship Federal employees – out of uniform and off duty – approach the group to thank them and to state that they know the history and what Quakers have meant for the founding documents and ideals expressed in the shared dream of our country.

The walkers host public worships every where they go. Pausing to encircle the Logan Circle fountain with silent worship and spoken prayers. There are those among them who know the Quakers, the current political prisoners, a history of guiding the arc of justice.

Periodically they provide a public reading of the Remonstrance. They meet the public.

Without details, they are holding space for the names of the persecuted and the missing, the deported and the vanished: And, before today; the enslaved people owned by signers of the Constitution; Indigenous leaders betrayed by treaties; martyrs of modern movements; those unfairly persecuted.

The walkers have now reached the Susquehanna River. Here, they will switch from foot to canoe. They can honor ancient paths of the Susquehannock, Lenape, and other First Nations whose lives were rooted in and distributed by these waters. By canoeing this part of the route, the walkers interrupt the colonial gaze of straight roads and land claims. To acknowledge water as life, as border, as bridge their canoeing becomes both symbolic and spiritual: a call of humility, to deep listening to this river, to paddle not just with muscle but intention.

In and out of American dreaming; everywhere, economic disinvestment, gun violence, and political disenfranchisement shape daily life in a myriad of diverse ways. Yet, in these streets, hope is not ever absent. Community street summits on walks are met by passersby in all sizes. Partisanship organizers, youth poets, faith leaders meet walkers with resilience and invitation.