Fraternal Organizations and Mutual Aid Societies

With the emergence of free African American communities in the urban United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, blacks formed fraternal organizations and mutual aid societies to meet a number of pressing needs. One scholar estimates that as of 1840, more than two hundred organizations were spread across the nation's largest cities, with a membership conservatively estimated at ten thousand. Like many whites during the early years of the Republic, blacks sought ways to integrate themselves into a rapidly changing world. Black organizers in urban American, however, faced a unique set of challenges. They tried to meet the physical and social challenges to a community striving to realize the fruits of emancipation while responding to a largely hostile white population's antagonism to interracial citizenship, let alone fellowship and mutual assistance.

The leadership of African American organizations often overlapped with and sometimes preceded black religious institutions. Associations and churches shared similar purposes: seeking to build communal solidarity, to provide welfare services, and to promote moral responsibility. Organization members were bound to support one another and their families in times of illness and death while extending leadership and assistance to the broader African American community. More successful African Americans believed that their organizations should encourage work and personal habits that would enhance the respectability of the free black community while fostering individual advancement.

The major centers for African American organizations in the North were Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston, port cities that developed significant free black populations as gradual abolition gained momentum and newly freed people congregated together. Even before the Philadelphians Richard Allen and Absalom Jones founded black churches, they organized the Free African Society in 1778. Like many successor organizations, the Free African Society combined features of mutual aid organization, burial society, and community service organization. Membership dues created a pool of funds to support members in times of distress. The society also petitioned city authorities for land to establish a burial ground and initiated a series of home visits to assess the conditions of black families.

The Free African Society was the first of dozens of mutual aid societies formed in Philadelphia over the next half-century, including the Male African Benevolent Society, founded in 1811, and the American Female Bond Benevolent Society of Bethel, founded in 1817. New York City's African American communities also spawned a variety of self-help and community-stewardship organizations. Although a New York burial society existed in the late 1790s, associational activity began in earnest with the New York African Society for Mutual Relief, which was founded in 1808 by leading black activists, ministers, and educators, including William T. Hamilton, Peter Williams Jr., and John Teasman.

Free African Americans in southern cities also organized mutual aid societies. The Perseverance Benevolence and Mutual Aid Association of New Orleans was founded in 1783, long before Louisiana became part of the United States. Charleston, which developed a free black population as the result of private manumission, often the mulatto offspring of white masters, was a prominent center of free black institution building. The Brown Fellowship Society and the Free Dark Men of Color date back to the early 1790s, their names reflecting the castelike color distinctions that were particularly strong there. Additional Charleston mutual aid societies emerged in the early years of the nineteenth century. Although the persistence of slavery in the less urbanized South may have made the region less hospitable to free black associational activity, free blacks in Richmond formed a Burying Ground Society in 1815, and there are at least hints of organized fraternal activity in other southern locales. In the 1820s and 1830s African Americans in Baltimore, Maryland, launched dozens of organizations.

Masonry represented a significant strand of black fraternal activity. Membership in Masonic lodges offered black men fellowship and assistance while providing a platform for community service and for denunciation of racism and slavery. Black Bostonians took the lead in integrating Masonry, a fraternal tradition imbued with secret rituals and pledges of loyalty that was imported from England, into African American culture. Masonic organizations paralleled the West African secret society tradition, broadening their appeal. Prince Hall, a successful entrepreneur who immigrated to Boston from Barbados, founded the African Masonic Lodge in 1787 with a charter from British Masons, having been rebuffed by white American Masons. After his death in 1807, the Boston lodge was renamed the Prince Hall Grand Lodge. From Boston, black masonry spread to Providence, Rhode Island, Philadelphia, New York, and other cities.

Black women participated actively in the movement to found African American community service organizations, in an era when most such associations were sex-segregated. Although leading male organizations may have commanded greater financial resources, female organizations and female membership exceeded their male counterparts. Philadelphia women associated with black churches took the lead in founding associations, the first being the Female Benevolent Society of Saint Thomas, which dates to 1792. Female church-related groups also emerged in New York and Baltimore. Black women in Newport, Rhode Island, formed the African Benevolent Society in 1808, splitting off from a male society that limited the rights of its female members.

Parallels between white and black associational activity notwithstanding, black organizations embraced both African tradition and identity. Many early organizations were, at least in part, burial societies: the maintenance of proper burial customs and the social function of funerals represent continuities with African traditions. Moreover, the names of many organizations specifically included the term “African” or other references to Africa, thus asserting the national or cultural, rather than racial, nature of their affiliation. Black Masons could take particular pride in the Egyptian origins of Masonic myth, ritual, and symbolism.

Black associational activity provided a crucial network of support and service to communities beset not only by the ordinary challenges of urban poverty and isolation but also by the particular difficulties that burdened a people emerging from slavery and subject to racism. Thus, these groups provided a unique source of social capital and cultural ingenuity during the nation's early years, in keeping with African and African American traditions of organizing societies to meet collective communal needs.

Bibliography

Curry, Leonard P. The Free Black in Urban America, 1800–1850: The Shadow of the Dream. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Harris, Leslie M. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720–1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Rael, Patrick. Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Wilder, Craig Steven. In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

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