More about Dr. Rachel Davis DuBois and the History of the Art of Group Conversation

The Art of Group Conversation, a unique form of dialogue, was developed in the late 1930s by a Quaker woman, scholar, and social activist, Dr. Rachel Davis DuBois. It has been revived recently by Russanne Bucci who worked with her during the last decade of her life. In order to better understand this process and its power, it helps to know about the life of its founder, and how she spent over 50 years leading Group Conversations and promoting mutual respect and understanding among people of different racial, ethnic, age and socio-economic groups.

Rachel DuBois was born in Woodstown, Southern New Jersey, to a Quaker farm family in 1892. She often told the story of how immediately after her birth the midwife suggested she be taken to the attic before she was brought downstairs “so that she could be high-minded.”⁶ No one knows for sure, but many, including Rachel herself, wondered if this simple ritual in some way influenced the extraordinary nature of her life.

Her interest in people of other cultures began when she was a child as she befriended the Italian immigrant and African American laborers on her family farm. She graduated from Bucknell University in 1914 and began teaching high school. After a trip to the South in 1922, she became aware of racism for the first time and in that moment dedicated her life to improving race relations.

While teaching high school in 1924, she developed the Woodbury Plan, a school assembly program in which students of different ethnic and racial groups would make presentations about the history and customs of their cultural group and the ways it had contributed to American society. The program raised quite a bit of controversy locally and nearly cost her her job.

During the 1930s and 40s, Dr. DuBois was a professor of Intercultural Education, teaching teachers at New York University. Just prior to the Second World War, her students expressed concern about the anti-Semistism being expressed by the young students in their classrooms. They sought Dr. DuBois advice on how to address the situation, and though she already knew that you could not argue with adults about prejudice, she felt compelled to do something.

One fall evening in 1937, Rachel Davis DuBois, following an intuitive urge, gathered a group of ethnically diverse adults in her Greenwich Village apartment and led them through a sharing that became known as the Art of Group Conversation. This first experience was so moving and seemed to have such a positive impact on those gathered, that the group continued to meet and in the early 40s formed the Workshop for Cultural Democracy in order to make the Art of Group Conversation available in settings where it was needed most. They began working with Parent Teacher Associations and community groups in New York city school districts that were experiencing conflict between native born and immigrant, Black and Puerto Rican children and families.

In 1945, after achieving much success with this school project, Rachel was invited to be a part of an effort at Columbia with the anthropologist Margaret Mead who named her the “Mother of Intercultural Education.” During this time, she trained teachers and mothers in a neighborhood that had been coping with gang warfare. By 1951, a book she had written about this work reached a German school teacher who requested that Dr. DuBois come to Europe to help reconcile differences between German citizens and those of German ancestry who had been repatriated to that country from other parts of Europe. Rachel was sent to Germany by the U.S. State Department and conducted the first bilingual sessions of the Art of Group Conversation.

In 1953 while training social workers in Chicago, Dr. DuBois was called before Senator Joe McCarthy and the Committee on Un-American Activities. As someone who had a lifelong meditation practice, she meditated in advance of her hearing and affirmed justice for all people. At the end of her testimony, she received an apology from Senator McCarthy.

The late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King invited Rachel Davis DuBois and her colleague Mew-Soong Li to Atlanta to work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Dr. DuBois and Li conducted Group Conversation sessions and Citizenship Education around the south from 1965 until the assassination of Dr. King in 1968. After her return from the South, Rachel carried on the message of Martin Luther King by using the Art of Group Conversation in support of integrating college campuses across the U.S.

In 1977 she returned to her family farm in Woodstown, NJ where she built a small home near a ridge and named it “Dawn’s Edge.” Rachel launched Living Room Gatherings from this place; conducting Group Conversation sessions in people’s living rooms, she helped introduce and build relationships between members of diverse ethnic groups which had been isolated from each other in rural South Jersey.

From the time of her return to Woodstown, until March of 1993, Rachel Davis DuBois trained hundreds of people in the Art of Group Conversation and wrote her sixth book and autobiography, All This and Something More: Pioneering in Intercultural Education. Rachel devoted more time to prayer, meditation, and writing in her later years. She also did everything she could to assure that this unique dialogue tool, that she found to be so effective, would carry on. She died at the age of 101.