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The Color Line and the Parallel Orders

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The fraternal century's exclusion is documented here, not euphemized, and its best document is the founding order's own constitution. The Order of Owls restricted its membership by race in its organic law: the Maryland Court of Appeals, in Afro-American Order of Owls, Baltimore Nest No. 1 v. Talbot, 123 Md. 465 (1914), quoted the order's eligibility line — membership open to "any person not of African descent" — in the course of the case that records what exclusion produced. Black men who would be Owls built the parallel body: the Afro-American Order of Owls, incorporated at Baltimore on 14 March 1911 — and Talbot's order sued it over the name, which is how a South Bend order's color line came to be preserved in a Maryland appellate opinion for any record to read. The parallel-orders form is that mechanism whole: for every order that barred them, Black Americans chartered the same order again under their own hands — Prince Hall Masonry a century before the Owls, the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World beside the white Elks — and the county's own Black fraternal record stands in the clubs fragment's roster and the peoples sections at the sizes their local documentation gives. Two gaps are named at the end of this entry, as their settler would name them: the county's Black Elks lodge — the checklist's Fort Wayne instance is LaSalle Landing Lodge No. What does not await anything is the mechanism's proof, and it is complete: an order founded in South Bend wrote its exclusion into its constitution, the excluded founded their own order in Baltimore three years before the white order sued them for the name, and the whole transaction survives in a court report — the color line in the club record, documented at full size, in the founders' own words as a court preserved them.

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Source: The Color Line and the Parallel Orders, Moosed History by Project Moosed, https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/mishawaka/private-clubs/color-line-and-the-parallel-orders/