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1897–PRESENT · THE COUNTY'S PARALLEL RECORD; EXCLUSION STATED, NOT EUPHEMISED
The parallel orders exist because the front door was barred: the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks was, for most of its history, an order for white men only — its membership did not open to Black men until 1973 — and the Black Elks therefore built their own order: the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, organised at Cincinnati by B. F. Howard and Arthur J. Riggs. Its founding prints with its variance whole: the order's accounts give a formal organisation in February 1897, and a first lodge meeting on 17 November 1898 at Masonic Hall on George Street in Cincinnati, the ritual copyrighted in September 1898 and the first Ohio charter in June 1899. The white order answered with a lawsuit in New York in 1912 over the very name; the Black order answered with a century of institution-building — a Civil Liberties department founded in 1926, a stand against school segregation at Gary, Indiana, in 1927, some 450,000 members by 1979, and a headquarters at Winton, North Carolina. South Bend's lodge of that order stands in its own listing today: LaSalle Landing Lodge No. 298, I.B.P.O.E.W., at 1001 West Western Avenue, active — its federal tax profile carrying a ruling date of 1942, which prints here as a ruling date and not a founding. And Howard's 1907 census, read with this article's eyes, shows the parallel pattern already standing in the county's own book, printed without comment by its author: among the Masons, St. Peter's Lodge No. 31, A.F. & A.M., listed apart from the F. & A.M. lodges; among the Odd Fellows, the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows — the Black Odd Fellows order — listed in its own line. An Afro-American Order of Owls likewise existed beside the white order the next article takes up. The pattern is the era's whole club system in miniature: every door that closed on race opened, by Black hands, into a second building. None of it stands on this ground — the parallel orders are South Bend institutions, seated in the city's Black west side — and the ground's part in the record is the census's silence, which is also a fact about who the farm townships' club age was for. The settling source for LaSalle Landing Lodge No. 298's own early record is named, as the audit directed: the Indianapolis Recorder, Indiana's Black newspaper of record, whose South Bend coverage is not reached in open form and is named here as the door a deeper pass must open.
From the I.B.P.O.E.W.'s own history and lodge listing (the Cincinnati organisation, the 1897/1898 variance, LaSalle Landing Lodge No. 298 at 1001 W. Western Ave); the standard fraternal-order references (the 1912 litigation, the 1926 Civil Liberties department, the 1927 Gary stand, the 1979 membership); the B.P.O.E. integration date, 1973, as carried in the order-history record; Howard (1907), p. 461 (St. Peter's Lodge No. 31 and the Grand United Order, in his own list). The Recorder named in the text as the settling source for the lodge's early record.