American Fraternities Research Articles

Darius Wilson, Confidence Schemes, and American Fraternalism 1869-1926

Many scholars, including Mark Carnes and Mary Ann Clawson, have noted that the last quarter of the nineteenth century was the ‘golden age of fraternity’ in the United States. These years, during which America transformed from a rural society with an economy based in agriculture to an urban nation funded by industrial manufacturing, were also a time of frauds, hucksters, and charlatans who exploited the country’s rapid changes as opportunities to enrich themselves at the expense of others. This paper examines the career of Darius Wilson, who founded the Royal Arcanum, assumed the title of ‘Grand Master of the Venerable Symbolic Grand Lodge Ancient Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry for the United States of America’, and claimed to have developed a cure for deafness. Between 1875 and 1915, Wilson was both hailed for providing insurance to poverty-stricken immigrants and decried as a fraud who foisted worthless fraternal, medical and financial certificates upon a credulous public. A resident of Boston, Massachusetts, Wilson was a member or Rochester, New York’s Yonnondio Lodge No. 163, F. & A.M., before he was expelled. Subsequently he was repeatedly arrested and tried for improperly selling masonic degrees. Wilson provides a case study for the exploration of issues of authority, legitimacy, and confidence within the American industrializing economy, and will provide new perspectives for understanding fraternalism at the birth of the twentieth century.

White Boys Drink, Black Girls Yell...: A Racialized and Gendered Analysis of Violent Hazing and the Law

In the past several decades, legal scholars have directed a modest amount of time and energy toward the issue of hazing. However, only within the past couple of years has there been any concerted effort to investigate the intersection of African American fraternities and sororities — also known as Black Greek-Letter Organizations (“BGLOs”) — and the law, particularly including hazing issues. The recent emergence of this scholarship is in striking contrast to the long and storied history of these organizations. Despite their longevity and accomplishments, information about BGLOs has largely been confined to their own internal texts. It was not until the mid-1990s that scholars generally began to investigate these organizations. It took almost another decade for public works on these groups to appear. Shortly thereafter, a proliferation of BGLO scholarship appeared. In this article, the authors theorize that legally consequential behavior is influenced by race and sex. Specifically, this article contends that hazing, as a form of legally consequential behavior, manifests itself quite differently within BGLOs than within their white counterpart organizations. Specifically, this article finds that hazing in Black fraternities is more physically violent. The authors contend that prevailing and yet provincial notions of Black masculinity in the United States underscore the violent nature of Black fraternity hazing. Section I provides an anthropological history of rites of passage, as well as the evolution of collegiate fraternity and sorority hazing. Next, Section II analyzes the legal implications of hazing in both the criminal and civil realms. Section III reviews the study of hazing in White fraternities and sororities, as well as Black fraternities and sororities. The article concludes in Section IV with an empirical analysis, via an archival study and a large national survey, of how race and gender intersect to predict different forms of hazing among fraternity and sorority members, and why race and gender intersect to create a unique variant of hazing within Black fraternities.

Belford Vance Lawson, Jr.: Life of a Civil Rights Litigator

Organizations, like people, have identities. As complex organizations, among the variety of identities that African American fraternities and sororities have is that of civil rights organization. Chief among these organizations is Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity -- founded in 1906 at Cornell University. This article explores the life of a little-researched civil rights lawyer -- one of the first African Americans to argue a case before the US Supreme Court -- named Belford V. Lawson. Specifically, the article explores Lawson's personal, educational, and professional lives. With regard to the latter, much of this analysis is done through the lens of Lawson's fraternal involvement and how he utilized his fraternal network -- and a broader network of African American fraternity and sorority members who were attorneys -- to advance African American's desire for civil rights.

Matthew W. Hughey, Gregory S. Parks: Black Greek-Letter Organizations 2.0: New Directions in the Study of African American Fraternities and Sororities

Matthew W. Hughey, Gregory S. Parks: Black Greek-Letter Organizations 2.0: New Directions in the Study of African American Fraternities and Sororities

Freemasonry and the Second Ku Klux Klan in California, 1921-1925

There is a profound misunderstanding regarding the relationship between freemasonry and the second Ku Klux Klan that rose to prominence in 1915 and carried on until the late 1920s. Within the long, dark shadow of American ethnic and cultural conflicts, fraternal and patriotic organizations, with their own idealized mythological identities combined with the entrenched and accepted nativist sentiment of that era, became embroiled in an American struggle for identity. America is a nation of joiners and has been proud of this distinction, for a large part of its social infrastructure has been built through the efforts of communal organizations and associations. Furthermore, these volunteer associations have been influenced by freemasonry through a natural cross-pollination of members, which, in turn, has influenced the American character of that auspicious fraternity. This is especially true during the golden age of American fraternalism into the early twentieth century. Consequently, confusion has arisen over the determination of what point certain fraternities’ true purposes begin, end, and overlap. Analyzing primary documents and correspondence found in the archives of the Grand Lodge of F & AM of California, this paper will give a first person overview of the problems that arose when the Ku Klux Klan attempted to gain prominence in California freemasonry in the 1920s. Pandering to the societal fears of white Protestants while mimicking the benevolent fraternal societies, the Klan gained sympathy amongst enough California freemasons to cause their Grand Lodge to take controversial action by forbidding its members from being associated with it. The paper will address the ideologies of the Klan and American freemasonry, and how its dual members attempted to reconcile and justify their need for both organizations to compliment one another. Because of their incongruous core philosophies and purpose, the research demonstrates the success California masons had in ousting the Klan from freemasonry in California. This success came from the Klan’s own insistence that it was a ‘fraternal society’ while it did little to eschew its subversive activities, or its hateful and notorious past. Therefore, the Klan’s subterfuge stood in contrast to every mason’s promise to submit to the rule of the law of his country.

Re-membering Black Greeks: Racial Memory and Identity in Stomp the Yard

Critical sociological analysis suggests that the film Stomp the Yard immerses its audience in a myopic legend of African American fraternities and sororities. Combining historical photos of Civil Rights leaders, traditions of ‘stepping’, tales of meritocratic social uplift, and romanticized aspects of historically black college or university (HBCU) culture, Stomp the Yard reveals a hyper-individualistic, conservative, and politically blunted form of historiography. Specifically, five ideological mythologies ground the film’s construction of Civil Rights memory and racialized identities. These mythologies decisively fail to interrogate the complexity of black fraternities and sororities. In so doing, they invite a critical blindness to these organizations’ role in past Civil Rights struggles as well as their intersection with contemporary issues such as classism, hazing, and resistance to contemporary forms of racism and racial inequality.

The Company He Keeps (review)

Reviewed by: The Company He Keeps Edward G. Whipple Nicholas L. Syrett. The Company He Keeps. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 432 pp. Cloth: $30.00. ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-3253-0. In The Company He Keeps, Nicholas Syrett focused on fraternity men and their role on American college campuses since the first social fraternity was founded almost 200 years ago. More specifically, this book is about the history of gender and about how men in fraternities promote their masculinity and behave accordingly. It is also a book about power and prestige where fraternity men must rely upon their Whiteness, socio-economic status, masculinity, and heterosexuality to prove themselves to one another and to women. Syrett's research information came from archival analyses conducted at 12 different colleges and universities across the United States and from more than 20 national fraternities. He chose to focus on fraternity men in this study of gender because of their significance in higher education and society. Syrett wrote that men who join fraternities have been a force over the years primarily due to their views on masculinity. He traced the archetypes of masculinity throughout the history of the college fraternity and advanced three opinions. First, Syrett argued that fraternity men gain prestige and respect from other men by displaying excessive traits and behaviors portraying their masculinity. Second, he determined that American higher education culture promulgates a culture in which men who get the most respect on campuses are those perceived as the most masculine by their referent peer groups. And third, Syrett wrote that some men have struggled with understanding or accepting the standards which were determined to define a masculine man on college campuses. In addition, this book is about how fraternity men influence other men, how these men behave on a daily basis, and how fraternities structure men's college lives. Syrett asserts a connection between fraternity members' current flagrant misbehaviors and the exclusive, secretive, and masculine-oriented culture of White college fraternities since their beginnings. These flagrant misbehaviors centered on their mistreatment of women and their homophobic nature. In addition, Syrett emphasized that social class status and race were important determinants in the perception of the exclusivity of White fraternities. As he traced the history, Syrett posited that, by the 1900s, the changing roles of women and the emergence of homosexuality also impacted the exclusiveness of fraternities. The majority of his book actually focused on this exclusivity, the relationship of fraternity men towards women, and the critical need for fraternity members to prove their masculinity. Syrett provided caveats that not all fraternities are as bad as those portrayed in his book. He briefly commented on the masculine ideals and standards of fraternity men found in the printed materials of national organizations. He also indicated that not all fraternity life is bad or negative and that the versions of masculinity, as written about in the book were not just limited to those affiliated with fraternities. Syrett's research and subsequent findings targeted White, Protestant fraternities, not fraternities that were primarily multicultural, such as National Pan-Hellenic Conference organizations, chapters from the National Association of Latino Fraternal Organizations, or even gay fraternities. The book is arranged chronologically, beginning with the history of the American fraternity movement, and highlights their homogeneity, based on the fact that college enrollment was restricted to White men from upper-class society until after the Civil War. The initial culture of secrecy, coupled with competitive collegiate environments caused by literary debate clubs oncampus in the 1800s has continued, according to Syrett, to influence fraternity members' behaviors almost 200 years later. Throughout fraternity history, Syrett traced the development of the culture of secrecy; the rising social class system, the role of women as "objects" with which to impress others; the addition of formal membership clauses to constitutions that excluded Blacks, Catholics, and Jews; and the increasing preoccupation of fraternity men with their masculinity as proved by athletic prowess and sexual conquests. He concluded that fraternity men today distance themselves from appearing to be less masculine through behavior such as drinking to excess, hazing, and sexually abusing women—all of which allegedly connote being "a...

The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities (review)

Reviewed by: The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities Bryce Traister The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities. By Nicholas L. Syrett. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2009. Even before I reached the stunning conclusion to Nicholas L. Syrett's The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities, I had already found it to be one of the finest "masculinity histories" I had ever read. Although positioning itself within the recent historiography of American masculinity, the book deftly evades some of the pitfalls so often found in masculinity studies, particularly the tedious insistence on male anxiety (whether performance related or otherwise), or the repetitive claim that American men are always or have always been in some sort of crisis or another. The problem particularly with the latter thesis is that we have ended up with a raft of books which retell American history as men's history, albeit an anxious one. In six substantive, chronologically ordered chapters, Syrett tells the story of how American men fashioned their identities within the fraternity systems that emerged within American colleges and universities between about 1820 and today. The larger story Syrett tells is how fraternities influenced, and were influenced by, trends in American higher education, and how the fraternity experience connected to larger cultural and historical movements (muscular Christianity) and events (the Civil War, World War II). Syrett deftly reads his archive in relation to the interactions of class, economics, social order, racial identity, religion and gender. From its beginnings in secretive obscurity and intellectual clubiness, the white, mostly Protestant, American fraternity experience has come to define not just one, but possibly the defining character of the American man at college. Antebellum fraternity brothers engaged in literary debate and encouraged intellectual ambition; "frat boys" in the post-World War II partied in the "Animal House" and pursued careers in date-rape and anti-gay bigotry. How on earth did this happen? Syrett begins in the early antebellum period, with the establishment, in 1825, of a secret society at Union College in upstate New York. He suggest that, in this period, fraternities provided its members with bonds of loyalty and friendship in an age that was increasingly coming to value competition and rivalry as the key terms of American male identity. In this early period as well, the antagonistic relationship between a faculty charged with disciplining its students provided the occasion for fraternities to shelter its [End Page 151] members from hostile male authority, as well as to stage acts of rebellion against the institution itself. The theme of rebelliousness carries over into subsequent chapters as well. Indeed, if I have a criticism of the book as a whole, it is that Syrett does not consider the self-fashioned rebelliousness of American fraternity life in relation to the national myth America's revolutionary personality. Chapter two describes the divergence of a secularized definition of manliness from the clerical or sacred manliness that had defined the earlier fraternal organizations and higher education ethos more generally. Fraternity men increasingly demanded that colleges and universities prepare them for lives outside of ministry; fraternities provided wealthier collegians an opportunity to define themselves apart from poorer and also pious classmates. Chapter three details how fraternities went national over the course of the middle-years of the nineteenth century. "Membership in a national organization," Syrett finds, created the "imagined fraternity" which in turn provided men from disparate regions and backgrounds the opportunity to define themselves as the natural leaders of the nation and embodiment of its best values. (118-119) The books next and possibly best chapter details the emergence of a recognizably modern fraternity man, one defined increasingly through class and economic advantage, athletic achievement, and "a properly enacted masculinity" (181) defined increasingly in terms of sexual achievement and white Protestant superiority. With the increasing numbers of American women pursuing higher education, the hitherto secondary role of sexual identity and performance becomes a strikingly visible feature of fraternal identity in the 20th century, arguably the measure of fraternal "success" in the 20th century. (228) Chapter six and the book's conclusion return us to a terrain familiar enough from...

Brotherhood or brothers in the ‘hood’? Debunking the ‘educated gang’ thesis as black fraternity and sorority slander

In this article the author explores the controversial thesis that African American Collegiate Fraternities and Sororities, also known as Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs), are ‘educated gangs’. First, the author examines this polemic as a ‘truth claim’ and compares BGLOs and gangs through: (1) hazing; (2) rape and substance abuse; (3) social constructions of black masculinity and femininity; (4) social structure; and (5) cultural aesthetics. Second, the author finds the legitimacy of the ‘educated gangs’ thesis untenable due to the racist nature of the discourse itself. Third, the author argues that BGLOs are deemed ‘educated gangs’ via a nouveau ‘culture of poverty’ ideology, the exaction of ‘symbolic violence’, and the propagation and protection of a normative and pure whiteness that is constructed relationally to a demonized and vilified blackness.

Virtual (Br)others and (Re)sisters

Recently, the Internet has become the focus of immense speculation regarding the social construction of identity and cultural “authenticity.” However, examinations of virtual communities such as blogs, multiuser domains, and chat rooms have largely ignored nonwhite, especially African American, virtual communities (VCs). Through participant observation, content analysis, and personal interviews, this article analyzes a VC dedicated to members of African American fraternities and sororities, generally referred to as black Greek letter organizations (BGLOs). Findings show that BGLO virtual authenticity is accomplished via (1) the making of “brothers” and “others” based on symbolic boundaries of exclusion and inclusion and (2) the deployment of themes of resistance based on emotions of both sufferance and success. Implications suggest that interrogations of how virtuality constrains and enables processes of “authentic” racial identity formation as well as configurations of racist narratives and ideologies can yield added insights regarding the raced character of structure/agency, symbolic boundaries, and the social use of emotions.

Book Review: What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality, by Theda Skocpol, Ariana Liazos, and Marshall Ganz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. 310 pp. $27.95

Book Review: What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality, by Theda Skocpol, Ariana Liazos, and Marshall Ganz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. 310 pp. $27.95

Paddling and the Repression of the Feminine in Male Hazing

Despite a nearly two decades' long war on high school and college hazing, the traditional practice of paddling male pledges on the buttocks persists as a physical and psychological test of worthiness for membership in certain all-male organizations. In its elements of nudity, homoeroticim, and stylized sadomasochism, this ritual condenses a great many of the psychological processes essential to male bonding in groups. An application of Freud's insights in his 1919 essay, A Child Is Being Beaten, to the puzzle of posterior paddling reveals a complex psychological process by which the pledge is feminized by the paddling, represses the feminine part of his self, and is initiated into the status of a brother among other heterosexual males. Keywords: initiation, hazing, homoerotic, psychoanalytic Some time ago, in the midst of my ethnographic research on the Boy Scouts of America (Mechling, 2001), I corresponded with a sociologist who had written an essay recounting the hazing and initiation ritual he and his fellow Scouts had invented as a means of bringing boys into that male friendship group. Not at all surprising to me, the hazing involved brief nudity, a common feature of male adolescent hazing in American fraternities, athletic teams, and similar male friendship groups. Male friendship in the United States very often has a homorerotic element, and the nudity found so often in male play simultaneously draws on the energy of that homoreroticism and affirms the players' heterosexuality. The male friends can be nude in each other's presence precisely because they are not real sexual objects to one another. My correspondent's essay reminded me of a similar invented hazing ritual in my own Boy Scout troop as a youth, a test of courage and trust that also involved brief nudity. In both cases (occurring in the late 1950s and 1960s) these informal folk inventions took place quite apart from the surveillance of adult leaders on the campout. These customs must have been common in other troops and at other camps because the Youth Protection Program, created by the Boy Scouts of America in the 1990s in response to worries about sexual exploitation and abuse in the organization, specifically prohibits nudity (for example, skinny dipping), hazing, and secret of kind (http://www.scouting.org/nav/enter jsp?s=xx&c=yp). Adults may prohibit, but youths initiate their peers nonetheless. Nature provides the male with a body, sex organs, and hormones, though we know that these vary more than the simple male/female binary would suggest. Bodies are not fixed, so the changing male body is real enough, though even biological development has great variation and, in case, it is up to the group to define the meaning of the changes. So whatever their biological substrate, male initiation rituals are deeply cultural in their shapes and meanings. Janssen (2007) shows how complicated are generalizations about these practices since they seem to vary considerably. Moreover, as Janssen warns, scholarly reports and analyses of these rituals carry many unstated assumptions by the scholars about the key categories involved (for example, man, boy, mature), about the functions of these rituals (for example, the psychocultural necessity of the rites and cultural notions of progressive development), and about their symbolic meanings. In what follows, I aim to keep my own assumptions and claims as transparent as scholar can. My focus here is on the United States and on a particularly interesting and puzzling male initiation practice: paddling the often-bare buttocks of the initiate. Paddling is seen by insiders and outsiders alike as a form of hazing, and while it is most common in fraternities-the formal, exclusive, and often secretive social organizations for men at universities and colleges-this hazing practice sometimes appears in other male friendship groups. The Fraternity Executives Association defines hazing as any action taken or situation created intentionally, whether on or off fraternity premises, to produce mental or physical discomfort, embarrassment, harassment or ridicule (Nuwer, 1999, p. …

What a mighty power we can be: African American fraternal groups and the struggle for racial equality

List of Illustrations vii List of Tables ix Preface xi CHAPTER ONE: African American Fraternalism: A Missing Chapter in the Story of U.S. Civic Democracy 1 CHAPTER TWO: The Panorama of African American Fraternal Federations with the assistance of Jennifer Lynn Oser 21 CHAPTER THREE: African American Fraternals as Schools for Democracy 61 CHAPTER FOUR: Proprietors, Helpmates, and Pilgrims in Black and White Fraternal Rituals by Bayliss Camp and Orit Kent 95 CHAPTER FIVE: Defending the Legal Right to Organize 135 CHAPTER SIX: Black Fraternalists and the Mid-Twentieth-Century Movement for Civil Rights 174 CHAPTER SEVEN: The Achievements of African American Fraternalism 214 Notes 229 References 265 Index 283

African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision

The first African American fraternities and sororities were established at the turn of the twentieth century to encourage leadership, racial pride, and academic excellence among black college students confronting the legacy of slavery and the indignities of Jim Crow segregation. Black Greek letter organizations were also created to foster a sense of community among African American students on college campuses, and among their ranks are legendary artists, politicians, theologians, inventors, intellectuals, educators, civil rights leaders, and athletes. Nikki Giovanni, Cornell West, Martin Luther King Jr., Shaquille O'Neal, Toni Morrison, Bill Cosby, and W.E.B. DuBois were all members of black fraternities and sororities, and these groups continue to have a strong presence on campuses today. Offering a comprehensive overview of the historical, cultural, political, and social circumstances that propelled the creation of these groups, this collection of original essays references the profound contributions that black Greek letter organizations and their members have made to American history. The contributors also examine current black Greek life and culture, addressing issues such as hazing and branding that are, perhaps unfairly, often at the forefront of discussions about these organizations. African American Fraternities and Sororities is the authoritative history of these influential and sometimes controversial organizations.

From Defining Characteristic to Vitiation of Principle: The History of the Odd Fellows' Stipulated Sick Benefit and Its Implications for Studying American Fraternalism

From Defining Characteristic to Vitiation of Principle: The History of the Odd Fellows' Stipulated Sick Benefit and Its Implications for Studying American Fraternalism

Improvising masculinity: African American fraternity membership in the construction of a black masculinity

Begun as an exploration of the meaning and function of fraternity membership in the lives of African American men on a predominantly white campus, the interview data revealed the important role the fraternity played in the construction of a unique masculine identity. This identity is connected both to Connell’s (1997) model of hegemonic masculinity and to the model of Afrocentric socialization found in Akbar (1990) and W. Oliver (1989), among others. The content of this identity forms a sort of amalgamation masculinity which incorporates the sometimes contradictory social locations (race, class, and gender) of the fraternity members.

Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775–1995

Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 Maurice O. Wallace. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Constructing the Black Masculine provides a fascinating, thought-provoking look at conceptions of black masculine identity have come to formed by the monocularistic (flat, dissociative, fixed) of Western whites. From the earliest black American fraternities of the eighteenth century to thoroughly modern twentiethcentury images, Wallace traces the construction of black masculine identity through such varied media as photography, autobiography, freemasonry, architecture, narrative, and dance. Along the way, he pauses to consider several figurative works of literature and infuses his analysis with the theoretical approaches of Dernda, Foucault, and Bourdieu, among others. Indeed, Wallace skillfully weaves elements of several cultural genres into an interdisciplinary study of African American masculinity. Eminently relevant and generously illustrated, this text provides an important window into vision, image, and representation have functioned to construct the black masculine and to what ends. Wallace presents what he terms an ocularcentric (5): that the black male body is at once both too little seen and too much seen. As a result, the racialist gaze fixes (or frames, in photographic terms) the black male in stereotypic representations. This inability to see black subjects clearly has vast implications, and Wallace works to illuminate how dangerously reductive, morally wounding, the machinations of colonial enframing can be (173). He insists that our ocular orientation is not inherently problematic; it is our monocular vision that results in the worst kind of representation: two-dimensional dichotomous paradigms of seeing the not-self within such binaries as master/slave, subject/ object, black/white, colonizer/colonized, either/ or (177). Wallace uses each chapter of his book to demonstrate black men have responded to the racialist gaze, noting that artistic forms such as architecture and dance can seen as weapons of protection in the psychological warfare being waged on black male identity. Leaping back and forth between examples of photographic and narrative pictorialization, Wallace applies his ocular thesis to the realms of freemasonry, autobiography, architecture, dance, and the FBI surveillance of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. …

Transportation Into Narrative Worlds: The Role of Prior Knowledge and Perceived Realism

"Transportation into a narrative world" (Green & Brock, 2000, 2002) has been identified as a mechanism of narrative impact. A transported individual is cognitively and emotionally involved in the story and may experience vivid mental images. In the study reported here, undergraduate participants (N = 152) read a narrative about a homosexual man attending his college fraternity reunion, rated their transportation into the story, rated the perceived realism of the story, and responded to statements describing story-relevant beliefs. Transportation was positively correlated with perceived realism. Furthermore, individuals with prior knowledge or experience relevant to the themes of the story (e.g., had homosexual friends or family members, were knowledgeable about American fraternities) showed greater transportation into the story. Highly transported readers showed more story-consistent beliefs, and the positive relationship between transportation and story-consistent beliefs held for those both with and without previous relevant experience.

Duty to the Race: African American Fraternal Orders and the Legal Defense of the Right to Organize

In 1904, leaders of three major white fraternal orders launched a nationally coordinated legislative and legal campaign to force their black counterparts out of existence, a struggle that spread to at least 29 states and culminated in victories for the African American groups before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1912 and 1929. The organizational structures of the black orders, usually consisting of a tripartite system of local, state, and national lodges, were critical in this successful defense of the legal right to form and operate fraternal organizations. These structures enabled fraternal members and leaders to turn local disputes into national ones, devise strategies based on the interplay of different levels of government, and sustain a discourse that facilitated internal mobilization and minimized external opposition. While most scholarship on resistance to Jim Crow has focused on local activism, the defense mounted by these orders facilitated the development of sophisticated, nationwide networks binding together local fraternal leaders and African American lawyers. These networks became a critical venue for the development of oppositional traditions, organizational infrastructures, and leadership ties that kept resistance alive under Jim Crow and laid the building blocks for future political and civil rights–related work. In particular, these fraternal lawyers, a number of whom went on to work for the NAACP, honed skills in these trials that were also central to the NAACP's legal strategy, especially in learning to tailor cases to achieve federal hearings.

Social-Capital Formation and American Fraternal Association: New Empirical Evidence

Rare membership and lodge data from a late nineteenth-century American fraternal order provide support for the existence of “bridging ties” among its members along class and neighborhood lines, though not across racial or gender lines. Lodge-related political activity centered on issues of exclusivity, such as the desirability of non-English speaking members. The order's system of government was more top-heavy and hierarchical than democratic; decisionmaking power resided with established members at the organization's national level. Overall, the data paint a picture of an American fraternal lodge unlike that represented in the contemporary literature about social-capital formation in the Golden Age of Fraternity.