Temperance And Racism by David M. Fahey

Author:David M. Fahey [Fahey, David M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Modern, 19th Century, Philanthropy & Charity
ISBN: 9780813185576
Google: 60YoEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-10-21T22:13:16+00:00

5

The Black Templars

In contrast to the abundance of information on how white Templars viewed black Templar membership, there is only skimpy evidence about the black Templars themselves and even less about how other blacks regarded the IOGT. Historians of African American organizational life almost never mention the Good Templars, and biographers of blacks who held high Templar office seldom explore this phase of their lives. The general neglect of African American fraternal societies and the black temperance movement helps explain this oversight. Moreover, much of the source material for the black Templars lies buried in British temperance newspapers, not the place where research on African American history is commonly conducted.

In recruiting black members the Templar factions were helped by prevailing African American ideologies and social organization. In the nineteenth century blacks often made the analogy between drink and slavery, temperance and freedom.1 A tradition of temperance reform among the black community in the northern states dated from pre—Civil War times. Maine’s Abyssinian Total Abstinence Society claimed 176 members in the early 1840s. The temperance movement spread to the former slave states after the abolition of slavery. In 1867, for instance, Missouri’s Colored Temperance Society held a fund-raising Independence Day picnic near Columbia. Although there were exceptions, the black men and women who joined the IOGT did so for the most part as teetotalers or moderate drinkers, not as alcoholics seeking to save themselves from a drinking problem. A Templar in Tallahassee declared himself “a Temperance young man before I joined the Order” but added “I am stronger since I joined it.”2

In the absence of well-developed African American temperance societies, the churches dominated the black temperance movement. Methodist conferences often called for restraint in drinking alcohol. A black Templar, not himself a Methodist, credited “chiefly . . . ministers of the A.M.E. Church” for the growth of the IOGT among African Americans. He added praise for a presiding elder of the A.M.E. Zion Church, the other major black Methodist denomination.3

A.M.E. clergy and laity joined the RWGL of the World in disproportionate numbers. Admittedly, some of these Templar memberships were nominal like that of the celebrated Bishop Daniel A. Payne, but other Methodists joined the IOGT to work.4 A future A.M.E. bishop was the first GWCT for the Malinites in Virginia. The Grand Lodge of South Carolina gained momentum when all the ministers at an A.M.E. conference joined a special lodge; at least three chiefs of this Grand Lodge were A.M.E. ministers. The A.M.E. weekly newspaper, the Christian Recorder, became the Malinite organ in the United States. It published a section of Templar news under the RWGL of the World seal, which displayed a black man and a white man shaking hands. Malins himself, in the United States for a meeting of the RWGL of the World in 1878, organized Fraternity lodge at the Philadelphia headquarters of the Christian Recorder, with its staff as the membership.5 At a Templar meeting in Ireland the newspaper’s editor, Dr. B.T. Tanner, rejoiced that “Good Templary brought all upon one platform.

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