Rachel Davis DuBois (1892-1993) was active throughout her long life initiating and maintaining numerous projects and conferences to promote intercultural and interfaith understanding, shaping the field of intercultural education through her teaching and conferences, corresponding with a long list of friends and associates, writing articles and books, and much more. She worked closely with the New York Friends Center and Earlham College, as well as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and major Jewish groups. She was a pioneer in inter-faith and inter-racial dialogue and intercultural education and traveled all over the U.S. and abroad to share her programs with other communities.

Rachel Davis was born in 1892 into a Quaker family in Salem County, New Jersey, the daughter of C. Howard and Bertha Haines Davis. She earned a degree in natural science at Bucknell University, Pa., in 1914.

Her first job was as a teacher at a high school in Glassboro, New Jersey. In 1920, she traveled with her husband, Nathan DuBois, to the first World Conference of Friends held in London, England. At this Conference, she learned about the race riot in Chicago and affirmed a lifetime commitment to pacifism. On her return to the U.S., DuBois was inspired by an article by W.E.B. DuBois in which he contended that war would not be overcome until racial prejudice and injustice were overcome. This was crucial to her decision to devote her life to fostering better relationships between cultural and racial groups.

DuBois's experiences contributed to the development of the Group Conversation method, a means of intergroup communication by sharing common experiences. Group Conversation took place in small informal groups of adults who spontaneously shared memories, mostly drawn from childhood, with the aim of achieving a better understanding of the similarities in each other's lives. When she resumed teaching in 1924 at the Woodbury High School in New Jersey, she developed a series of programs to highlight the history and cultural contributions of various ethnic groups. She left Woodbury in 1931 to work for a degree at Teachers College, Columbia University. Three years later, she was the catalyst in the formation of the Service Bureau for Human Relations, an organization which assembled speakers and provided materials on the contribution of all ethnic groups to American society. As Director, she worked with the U.S. Commissioner on Education to develop a popular and award winning series of radio programs, “Americans All- Immigrants All.”

After she resigned from the Service Bureau in 1941, DuBois went to California to attend a month-long seminar led by Gerald Heard, a philosopher who taught that the universe is one organic whole, held together by the power of love. When she returned to New York, she proceeded to “put the pieces of my life in order.” She obtained an amicable divorce, completed the work for a Doctorate in Educational Sociology at New York University. Her thesis was published as Build Together Americans (Hinds, Hayden and Eldridge, 1945). With other leading academics, she founded the Workshop for Cultural Democracy. The Workshop gathered groups in individual homes, where understanding of differences was encouraged and respect was fostered in an informal setting. After a successful program at PS 165 in New York City, she took Group Conversation to other cities. The U.S. State Department sent DuBois to West Germany from 1951-1952, where she trained teachers and social workers in methods of intergroup relations. In 1953, she worked with the Chicago project of the East European Fund (Ford) in its work of integrating the latest newcomers to American life.

In the late 1950's, DuBois concluded that there was a need to adapt Group Conversation for the use of the Society of Friends. She devised the process which came to be known as the Quaker Dialogue Process in 1958. With the backing of the Advancement Committee of the Friends General Conference, she introduced Quaker Dialogue to over 400 groups in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and eight countries in Europe. She was 67 when she started her first Dialogue tour.

In 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King asked her to use the dialogue method in the civil rights struggle. She joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff in Atlanta for two years, where she conducted workshops and trained several Group Conversation leaders. At this time, she also became involved in the interfaith movement and was a member of the Advisory Committee of the Office of Christian-Jewish Relations of the National Council of Churches of Christ.

Rachel spent 1971-74 working at Earlham College, Indiana, training college and community leaders in group methods for developing mutual acceptance among the races. In cooperation with Earlham and a group of community leaders in Richmond, a Center for Ethnic Awareness was established.

After moving back to southern New Jersey in 1977, DuBois adapted group Conversation to the “Living Room Gathering.” Sponsored by the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities, this work fostered the development of intercultural understanding in the local communities of her region.

DuBois continued to work on many of her projects until the late 1980's, particularly the Quaker Dialogue and Interfaith relations projects. She died in 1993 at the age of 101.