The Grand United Order of Odd Fellows had the largest membership of any African American fraternal society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only the Elks and the Masons enrolled more black members in the late twentieth century. Like a few other black fraternal lodges that shared a name with a white organization, the black Odd Fellows obtained their initial charters from a white fraternal society located in England. Since their beginnings in the mid—eighteenth century, the Odd Fellows of England had undergone many splits, the major one taking place in 1813. At that time, the Independent Order (Manchester Unity), soon to become the numerically predominant Odd Fellow organization, broke away from the Grand United Order. Nearly all the white Odd Fellows in the United States identified themselves with the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. In the early 1840s, after the white Odd Fellow lodges in the United States refused to charter black lodges, African Americans living in New York City turned to the older organization, the Grand United Order in England.
In this attempt to become Odd Fellows, the Philomathean (or Philomethean) Institute, a literary club led by Patrick H.Reason and James Fields, received help from a black man who had joined the Grand United Order in the English seaport of Liverpool. He was Peter Ogden, a steward on the ship Patrick Henry. In the course of his work, he traveled to England, where he obtained a charter on March 1, 1843. In addition, England’s Committee of Management commissioned Ogden as its agent in the United States. Predictably, the few white American lodges that had claimed affiliation with the Grand United Lodge in England refused to recognize the leadership of a black man. In the United States, the Grand United Lodge became identified as a segregated society for African American Odd Fellows. The Subcommittee of Management of the Grand United Order established for America kept loyally to the rules and practices of the parent English organization. Whites were eligible for membership, but over the years at best a handful joined.
In later years, Ogden was honored as the founder of black Odd Fellowship in America and consequently as one of the most influential African Americans of the mid-nineteenth century. Unfortunately, there is little information about Ogden, and nobody has attempted to write his biography. Ironically, Ogden’s relationship with the black lodges was sometimes troubled. When Fields was elected the first grand master of Philomathean lodge, Ogden was honored with the title past grand master. In contrast, America’s first Annual Moveable Committee, or general meeting, of the Odd Fellows challenged Ogden’s authority in 1845. The English Board of Management stood by him. Ogden died in 1852. A year earlier, the American Grand Lodge claimed twenty-five mostly northeastern lodges with a combined membership of nearly fifteen hundred men.
In 1857, the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows created the Households of Ruth. The first Household was organized in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Originally, membership in the Households of Ruth was restricted to males who held the fifth, or scarlet, Odd Fellow degree and the wives, daughters, and widows of Odd Fellows who held that degree. A pioneer of black Odd Fellowship, Patrick H. Reason (1816–1898), had proposed the Ruth degree, and he was the first person to receive it. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Households of Ruth had become the women’s auxiliary of the Grand United Order. Any woman sponsored by five inmates of a Household of Ruth could join.
Odd Fellow membership exploded after the Civil War when African Americans in the South were able to organize lodges. Members tended to be younger and better off financially than the black population in general. The Odd Fellows adhered to a strict code of moral conduct, provided financial and fraternal assistance to members at times of illness and burial, and offered the diversion of regalia, ritual, and parades. In some states, the Odd Fellows pursued more ambitious programs of collective self-help. Before the Georgia organization dominated by Benjamin Davis went bankrupt in 1916, it had created a fund that provided members with loans with which to purchase homes, farms, and businesses. Often Odd Fellows belonged to other societies, too. For instance, in 1921, 75 percent of the Odd Fellows in Oklahoma also were Knights of Pythias.
Although as individuals the black Masons probably were more prosperous than the Odd Fellows, the Odd Fellows was the most visible African American fraternal society during their early-twentieth-century heyday. In 1912, the Negro Year Book stated that the Odd Fellows owned $2 million in property, including a building in New Orleans that had cost $36,000 and one in Philadelphia valued at $100,000. In 1925, the Proceedings of the Ohio District Grand Lodge stated that the various branches of the Grand United Order owned property valued at $3.9 million. In addition to owning physical assets, the order published a half-dozen newspapers.
The 1916–1917 Negro Year Book credited the order with what appears to have been its greatest membership: 304,557 in 7,562 financial lodges, supplemented with some overlap by 197,654 in 4,993 financial Households of Ruth and 6,875 in 275 Past Grand Master Councils. Shortly afterward, the Grand United Order broke into the Morris and Davis factions, the former named after Edward H.Morris of Chicago, the long-serving national grand master. Apparently, the schism made it impossible to collect meaningful statistics because the 1918–1919 and 1921–1922 editions of the Negro Year Book challenge probability by repeating the old figures exactly. Presumably, the editor copied the old statistics because he could get no new ones. The schism did not last. From its 1925–1926 through 1937–1938 editions, the Negro Year Book lists only Morris as grand master. There was no longer an attempt to report exact statistics, merely vague claims in 1925–1926 and 1931–1932 that the Odd Fellows had more than 300,000 members, a rounding off of the 1916–1917 membership. In West Virginia, for which statistics are available, 1925–1926 appears to have been the peak year: 8,471 as the combined membership of the Odd Fellows and Households of Ruth, nearly double the total for the reporting year 1921–1922. Like most African American fraternal societies, the Odd Fellows presumably declined in membership after the mid-1920s, a decline that became devastating during and following the Great Depression. Despite such losses, the Grand United Order in the late 1990s reported a membership of 108,000. At that time, the order’s headquarters was in Philadelphia.
FURTHER READINGS
Beito, David T. “Mutual Aid, State Welfare, and Organized Charity: Fraternal Societies and the ‘Deserving’ and ‘Undeserving’ Poor, 1900–1930. Journal of Policy History 5 (1993), 419–431.
Brooks, Charles H. The Official History and Manual of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows in America. 1902. Reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1971.
Salvatore, Nick. We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber. New York: Times Books, 1996.
Trotter, Joe William, Jr. Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Work, Monroe, ed. Negro Year Book.
David M.Fahey
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