The color line, and the parallel orders

1885 — the present

What the record states: South Bend's club record carries the era's exclusions in its structure, and the structure is what the documents show. The Order of the Owls, founded in this city in 1904, opened its membership at the founding only to white males — the restriction is stated in the reference accounts of the order's own history, and the order organized women from the start in separate ladies' nests, South Bend's Ladies' Nest No. 1 meeting on Friday evenings in Howard's 1907 account. The same pattern — separate houses for women — runs through the whole 1907 census: the Rathbone Sisters beside the Knights of Pythias, the Rebekah lodges beside the Odd Fellows, the Falconettes beside the Falcons.

The parallel orders: Against the closed doors, Black South Bend built its own lodge houses, and they stand in the same record. Howard's 1907 list of the city's Odd Fellows bodies closes with the Grand United Order of the I. O. O. F. — the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, the order the state's preservation survey records as founded by African American men. The Indiana Historical Society's landmarks survey of Black fraternal buildings names a Prince Hall Masonic lodge in this city, St. Peter's Lodge, among Indiana's Prince Hall lodges. And the Elks of the World's Lodge No. 298, in the entry above, still works its hall on Western Avenue in 2026 — outlasting, in that room, most of the white orders founded beside it. No membership-restriction document specific to the South Bend Country Club or the city's other white social clubs was reached, and none is inferred; the printed record of exclusion here is the orders' own stated rules and the parallel institutions the exclusion called into being.

Sources:

1. Reference accounts of the Order of the Owls (Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Institutions and the order's standard histories) — membership at the founding open only to white males; women in separate nests.
2. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. I (1907), pp. 461–464 — Ladies' Nest No. 1 of the Owls; the Grand United Order of the I. O. O. F. in the city's Odd Fellows list; the Rathbone Sisters and Rebekah lodges.
3. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Historic Preservation & Archaeology, fraternal-organizations survey article (2023) — the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows and the Improved B.P.O.E.W. as orders founded by African American men.
4. Black History News & Notes, Indiana Historical Society (May 1994) — the landmarks survey naming St. Peter's Lodge in South Bend among Indiana's Prince Hall lodges.