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Fraternal
Lodges
Developing
& Expanding the
Village
in Rural
Southern Virginia
By Stuart W.
Doyle
From Reconstruction through the mid 20th
century, a "village" did a lot more than raise a child
when it came to building a strong community. Rural black
communities historically have relied upon the generosity and
sacrifices of their extended family and neighbors to rear their
children and meet economic needs. For example, it was not
uncommon for the court to have no record of a child adoption
since relatives or neighbors. Frequently a childless couple or
even a large household would assume parental responsibility of
orphans or abandoned children. Material and economic support
sometimes came from benevolent whites, who long had been
integral to the black world whether it was as slave owner,
closet abolitionist, or employer.
After the abolition of slavery, benevolence
and community-building emerged through the establishment of
mutual aid societies and fraternal orders in addition to the
strengthening of the black church. These organizations typically
functioned as an expanded resource to help families through hard
times and offer social and educational benefits. Many benevolent
societies established before the end of slavery also helped the
transition of blacks into their life of freedom by providing
them with financial resources..
Before the 1930s, for the most part, blacks
had to work together to ensure their academic, social, and
economic endurance. In southeastern Virginia, black fraternal
orders served their own with a vigor and commitment that deserve
more prominence in the documentation of the nation’s history.
The following is a sampling of the benefit societies and lodges
in Sussex County, Virginia, with African American memberships
through the 1930s.
The National Ideal Benefit Society.
Headquartered in Richmond, Va., the Hudson Lodge was established
in Sussex County’s Grizzard community in 1929. Eliza Wright, a
charter member, held the lead position during Hudson’s early
days. Members of this insurance and benevolence organization
were called Ideals.
The Trinity Lodge No. 3, a chapter of the
Grand Lodge of St. John Watchmen. Headquartered in Richmond,
Va., the St. John Watchmen aimed to "improve [the]
condition of its membership morally, socially, physically and
financially," according to its Constitution. Lee Taylor, a
Sussex resident, served as head of this lodge during the 1920s.
The Grand United Order of Odd Fellows.
African American men joined Odd Fellow lodges that were
chartered by The Grand United Order of Odd Fellows (as opposed
to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows). The Grand United Order
of Odd Fellows was founded in 1843 with a charter from the Grand
Lodge in Manchester, England. See Charles H. Brooks, The
Official History and Manual of the Grand United Order of Odd
Fellows in America (New York: Books for Libraries Free
Press, 1971 [1902]
The Household of Ruth. This
organization was the women’s auxiliary to the African American
Odd Fellows order. Household of Ruth was organized in 1857 for
the admission of the wives or women related to men in the
fraternal order of Odd Fellows.
The United Order of True Reformers. Founded
in 1881 by William Washington Browne (1849-1897), this
organization was most influential not only in the small rural
community of Sussex, but also it ascended to national
prominence.
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Reverend William Washington Browne was born a slave in Habersham County, Georgia.
Sold into Tennessee at age eight, Browne joined the
Union forces at age fifteen and served two years until
1866. While working as a farmhand, he gained some
education at a school in Wisconsin. In 1869 he returned
to the South and worked as a school teacher in Georgia
and Alabama and in Atlanta studied for the ministry and
became in 1876 an ordained minister in the Colored
Methodist Church.
It was
in Alabama that Browne first organized the "fountains"
that would become the United Order of True Reformers.
The formation of "fountains" (lodges or chapters) were a
means used to pool money and buy land. |
"Let us stop playing, trifling and wasting our time and
talents, and scattering our little mites to the four winds of
the earth, and let us unite ourselves in a solid band."
Browne left Alabama in 1880 and settled in Richmond, Virginia,
where he built his powerful Grand Fountain of the United Order
of True Reformers (GFUOTR) with branches in twenty states by
1893-94.
The national organization thus had its
headquarters in Richmond, Virginia. True Reformers offered this
reason for the "fountain" terminology:
"The names of our societies are
Fountains. A fountain is always running; it sends forth its
waters, pure and clear at all times. A fountain cleanses
itself, but a pond becomes stale and stagnant, and has to be
ditched off or it will make everyone sick who lives near or by
it." (From Twenty-five Years History of the Grand
Fountain of the United Order of True Reformers, W. P.
Burrell and D. E. Johnson Sr., 1909)
There were at least three fountains in the
vicinity of Jarratt (Sussex County, Virginia), including the
Emporia branch located in Greensville County, headed by Sussex
resident James H. Hunnicutt. The True Reformers offered far more
than the standard African American benevolence societies of that
era, which mostly were cash benefits to members for family
burial expenses.
In 1889 the GFUOTR organized the first
chartered black bank in the United States, the Savings Bank of
the Ground Fountain of the United Order of True Reformers, with
deposits amounting by 1907 to one million dollars. The fraternal
order owned real estate, purchased a farm, a hotel, owned over a
dozen halls; they also became involved in insurance, which
provided for the support of widows and the education of orphans.
In 1885 the Order organized and put in
operation a department for children known as the Rosebud
Department. The Rosebud fountains for youth addressed "the
great need for reform among . . . children in teaching them that
there is a higher and nobler purpose for which they can use some
of their pennies besides spending them all for delicacies and
toys; teaching them to unite themselves together for the bond of
union and love, and to assist each other in sickness, sorrow and
afflictions …"
The GFUOTR became a model for banking and
insurance enterprises throughout the South. With the death of
Browne in 1897, the bank, however, survived only another decade
and collapsed in 1910 as a result of mismanagement and
embezzlement. The True Reformers continued, nevertheless, as a
fraternal order and insurance agency until its demise during the
Great Depression .
Sources: The Official
History of Freemasonry Among Colored People in North America
(New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969 [1903]), 67-83.
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http://www.aagsnc.org/columns/feb99col.htm
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Stuart Doyle, a past president of the Central Florida Chapter of
the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society,
recently published Roots Exposed, an extensive family history
comprising 15 branches of his ancestry. Doyle has resided in Orlando,
Florida since 1989 but is a native of Richmond, Virginia. The
southeastern Virginia counties of Sussex, Southampton and Greensville
and their pre-1900 African and Native American inhabitants are the
focus of his historical and genealogical research and public
presentations.
Doyle earned a bachelor’s degree in English Language
& Literature from the University of Virginia (Charlottesville,
1981) and master’s degree in journalism/communications at Temple
University (Philadelphia, 1988). His professional career field is
public relations and corporate communications management. |
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” |
We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have disrupted and
convulsed the planet and will continue to do so until we are
finally living on one integrated or at least close-to-integrated
Earth. Whether or not the human instigators of all this
remarkable change will survive the process they helped to
initiate more than five hundred years ago remains, Mann suggests
in this monumental and revelatory book, an open question.
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America.
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This collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked together to
promote, disseminate, and critique the literature of
Spanish-speaking people of African descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” |
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His father distrusted the police, who had frequently
called him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr. Kennedy’s
father “relished Muhammad Ali’s quip that the Vietcong
had never called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places his
father, and Mr. Wright, in sympathetic historical light.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake.
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She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
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As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Karma’s Footsteps
By Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
Somebody has to tell the truth sometime, whatever that truth may be. In this, her début full collection, Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie offers up a body of work that bears its scars proudly, firm in the knowledge that each is evidence of a wound survived. These are songs of life in all its violent difficulty and beauty; songs of fury, songs of love. 'Karma's Footsteps' brims with things that must be said and turns the volume up, loud, giving silence its last rites. "Ekere Tallie's new work 'Karma's Footsteps' is as fierce with fight songs as it is with love songs. Searing with truths from the modern day world she is unafraid of the twelve foot waves that such honesties always manifest. A poet who "refuses to tiptoe" she enters and exits the page sometimes with short concise imagery, sometimes in the arms of delicate memoir. Her words pull the forgotten among us back into the lightning of our eyes.—Nikky Finney /
Ekere Tallie Table
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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