Race and Ethnicity in Secret and Exclusive Social Orders

Blood and Shadow

Matthew W. Hughey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317432470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études ethniques

Secret and private organizations, in the form of Greek-letter organizations, mutual aid societies, and civic orders, together possess a storied and often-romanticized place in popular culture. While much has been made of these groups' glamorous origins and influence—such as the Freemasons' genesis in King Solomon's temple or the belief in the Illuminati's control of modern geo-politics—few have explicitly examined the role of race and ethnicity in organizing and perpetuating these cloistered orders. This volume directly addresses the inattention paid to the salience of race in secret societies. Through an examination of the Historically Black and White Fraternities and Sororities, the Ku Klux Klan in the US, the Ekpe and Abakuj secret societies of Africa and the West Indies, Gypsies in the United Kingdom, Black and White Temperance Lodges, and African American Order of the Elks, this book traces the use of racial and ethnic identity in these organizations.

This important contribution examines how such orders are both cause and consequence of colonization, segregation, and subjugation, as well as their varied roles as both catalysts and impediments to developing personal excellence, creating fictive kinship ties, and fostering racial uplift, nationalism, and cohesion.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Chasing shadows: from the power elite to a new paradigm

Matthew W. Hughey

Abstract

This article provides a brief overview of the patterns that characterize scholarship on private and secret race- and ethnic-based organizations. It begins with a pithy recount of the public fascination with secret and private organizations that is complicated by its intersection with race and ethnicity. It then moves to examine the first steps of scholarship that framed secret orders as rather one-dimensional reflections of nefarious elites. Next, it shows how recent scholarship both continues and adds nuance to that trend by demonstrating five key characteristics of modern inquiry: (1) the examination of power and elitism alongside local exigencies that inflect and modify elite agendas; (2) these groups’ simultaneous navigation of public and private identities; (3) the growing emphasis on non-US-based groups; (4) the use of new methodologies and data sets; and (5) the attentiveness of modern scholarship to the climate of fascination and distrust with secret and private organizations.

Introduction

Secret and private organizations, in the form of Greek-letter fraternities, mutual aid associations, resistive and revolutionary orders, and exclusive ethnic-based groups, possess a storied and often-romanticized place in the western world. These organizations are habitually anointed as dangerous and dark orders; many assume their membership an elite and powerful cadre that manipulates and corrupts the world from the shadows (cf. Domhoff 2005). For some on the left, secret orders represent a treasure trove of conspiratorial machinations. For others on the right, such private and elite organizations engage in an array of dysfunctional debauchery that threatens to tear down westernized systems of morality. All the while, the intersection of capitalism and popular culture relies upon the veneration, trepidation and fascination heaped upon these orders. Books like Alexandra Robbins’ The New York Times bestseller Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons and The Lost Symbol together profit off a worldwide fascination with elite and exclusionary orders like the Knights Templar and collegiate fraternal orders.

Meanwhile, a conspiratorial discourse grows around trendy video games like the Assassin’s Creed trilogy and the lyrics of hip-hop mogul Jay-Z, as if these forms of entertainment represent a covert message of allegiance to Freemasonry, the Bilderberg Group or the eighteenth-century Bavarian Illuminati. Journalistic inquiries also reflect and reproduce popular fascination with these orders. In 2011 US News & World Report released a ‘collector’s edition’ entitled Mysteries of History: Secret Societies. The issue began (Bernstein 2011, p. 6):

For as long as they have existed – which is a very long time – rumors swirling around these secret societies, a widely divergent assortment of orders, religious sects, clubs, and paramilitary, quasi-governmental and fraternal groups, with their colorful histories and purported activities, have elicited a frisson of fear (or at the very least, of lurid curiosity).

To add fuel to the fire, the sensationalist discourse surrounding secret and exclusive orders burns the more brightly when the topics of race and ethnicity are introduced. Given the already hyper-segregated and hierarchical character of race and ethnicity the world over, race and ethnicity are salient variables within the interests, ideologies, interactions and institutional workings of already private and secret social networks.

Racial- and ethnic-based secret orders are slowly recovering an image of themselves as heterogeneous rather than a simple reflection of unadulterated power and privilege. And while varied, secret and exclusive orders do stand on some common ground, Alan Axelrod (1997, p. xi) editor of The International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and Fraternal Orders, writes that racial- and ethnic-based secret orders provide three things:

One is a chance to reminisce and exchange news about “the old country.” The second is a way to preserve the culture of “the old country” in the new generation. The third is an insurance/benevolent aspect, a formalization of helping one another out.

Accordingly, Gregory S. Parks (2008) notes that racialized fraternal organizations have often pursued educational and academic excellence, fictive kinship ties and racial uplift in relation to the dominant racial groups of their socio-economic contexts.

These goals and principles are evident in the groups that are gaining slow entrée into the mainstream. For example, African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and ethnic-based black churches (e.g. West Indian, West African, etc.) have recently garnered attention due to their vociferous voices (across the political spectrum) in relation to human rights, civic participation and ‘hot button’ issues like contemporary US immigration reform (Lowenthal 1972; Premdas 1995; Axelrod 1997; Chipumuro 2011). Moreover, the rather closed and secretive world of African American fraternities and sororities (also known as ‘black Greek-letter organizations’) are now surveilled by a mainstream gaze due to recent Sony Pictures’ films Stomp the Yard (2007) and Stomp the Yard: Homecoming (2010). Also, in 2010, the National Heritage Museum in Washington DC showcased exhibitions about the African American, or ‘Prince Hall’, arm of Freemasonry, while an array of stores in neighbouring US malls proudly sold Prince Hall paraphernalia for doting members.

While many race- and ethnic-based secret orders seem oriented toward ‘progressive’ identity-based agendas to bring parity to racially stratified contexts, this trend should not be overemphasized. Many secret organizations pursue decidedly racist and exclusive interests that limit the human rights of others. For example, the Ku Klux Klan has historically served as the US’s paramount white secret order. In recent years, secretive white nationalist groups like the ‘Aryan Nations’ and ‘Christian Identity’ churches have entered the limelight after shootouts, beatings and lawsuits made the news (McClary 2006; Schneiderman 2011). Also, secretive groups like the ‘Nation of Yahweh’ from the USA (Gallagher 2004), ‘ORG’ from Denmark (Today’s Zaman 2011) and versions of Chinese ‘triads’ in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the USA, Canada, Australia and the UK (Bolton and Hutton 2000) together promote ethnic and racial purity and superiority in concert with religious, economic and political concerns that appear, at first blush, benign or racially neutral. As a whole, the public is slowly taking notice of the strange intermarriage of race and ethnicity with secret and private organizations.

Secret orders and the role of race and ethnicity

Many secret and private fraternal orders claim glamorous genealogies to enhance their sense of self and deep purpose. The Improved Order of Red Men (1834, Baltimore, MD, USA) traces itself to the Boston Tea Party, while Freemasons claim they originated in Solomon’s temple. Other societies claim more mundane beginnings but do not evade their connection with an influential and quasi-sacred purpose: from European craft guilds and hunting clubs in the fifteenth century, to secret religious societies birthed in the agrarian social orders of the Americas (Mails 1973).

The bulk of scholastic work on secret and private orders centres on the ‘golden age’ of these societies in the USA (c. 1700–1950) and focuses largely on their class distinctions and ritual underpinnings. Even though societies like the German Sons of Hermann (1852, New York City), the Irish Ancient Order of Hibernians (1836, New York City) and the Hebrew B’nai B’rith (1843, New York City) were explicitly organized around racial and ethnic boundaries – coupled with the fact that 40 per cent of all white males in America belonged to one or more of the Freemasonry societies by 1900 – the bulk of older scholarship ignored the racial components of these societies (Stevens 1966; Whalen 1966). Race and ethnicity were crucial organizing variables within various fraternal orders, even among those wishing to remain open and egalitarian. For example, in 1892 the Modern Woodmen of America were the ‘only major order that did not specify the exclusion of blacks’ (Clawson 1989, p. 134), yet they were forced by other fraternal orders to enact a ‘whites-only regulation’ after allowing a black man to join.

In the USA, the American fraternal system developed along the infamous white/non-white colour line to yield an exclusive African American fraternity system that encompasses Prince Hall masonry, Black Elks and black Greek-letter organizations. While many of these organizations were virtually ignored by mainstream social science and historians, a small group of scholars began to interrogate their underpinnings. Joseph Walkes, Jr’s (1979) Black Square and Compass – 200 years of Prince Hall Freemasonry, Charles H. Wesley’s (1954) History of Sigma Pi Phi: First of the Negro-American Greek-Letter Fraternities and Arthur Huff Fauset’s (1970) Gods of the Black Metropolis stand as vital texts that highlight black secret orders within the social, political and religious context of a young nation wrestling with the question of race. These organizations were a part of what black sociologists W. E. B. DuBois (1903) and E. Franklin Frazier (1957) believed were an integral part of black socio-economic uplift strategies, but have increasingly been critiqued as either outdated modalities of a bygone age or as little more than ‘educated gangs’ (cf. Hughey 2008).

The US colour line birthed myriad other secret orders predicated upon the propagation and protection of more nefarious racial interests, such as white nationalist fraternal orders like the Redshirts and the Ku Klux Klan. Like their US black counterparts, many of these groups were ignored until recently. Kathleen Blee’s (1992) Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s, Jerry Lee West’s (2002) The Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan in York County, South Carolina, 1865–1877 and David L. Chalmers’ (1987) Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan together interrogate the varied dimensions of gender, class and race in the Klan, while other scholarship has examined the strange intermixture of unconventional politics, whereby some blacks joined white paramilitary orders dedicated to restoring antebellum values, as discussed in Edmund L. Drago’s (1998) Hurrah for Hampton!: Black Red Shirts in South Carolina during Reconstruction.

The extant literature has done well (in encyclopedia entries, research symposiums and comparative-historical tomes) to catalogue and typologize the varied and diffuse secret orders that manifest throughout the western world. For example, various academic journals have published articles and special issues on the topic, as witnessed in Gender & Society, International Journal of Research & Method, Journal of African American Studies, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Journal of Higher Education, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of Negro Education, Race, Ethnicity & Education, Social Problems and Social Science History.

This scholarly corpus is linked by a common denominator: an examination of these organizations as reflections of what C. Wright Mills (1956) called ‘the power elite’. Most scholars’ approach to these organizations centres on how members attempt to retain (or attain) status, power and influence in society or within their specific racial/ethnic communities. Many scholars have applied various iterations of neo-Marxist analysis in articulating how power, exclusion and manipulation have been reasserted through the vehicles of organizational practices, networks, and material and symbolic resources. This overall approach thus affords a view of otherwise hidden relations of power as propagated and protected by these exclusive social orders.

A new research paradigm

The articles in the special edition represent a prescient turn in racial and ethnic scholarship on secret and private organizations. The last decade of research demonstrates the nuanced and locally specific ways in which secret and private orders labour to classify, arrange, perform and police the meanings of race and ethnicity, as well as how the dominate meanings and local structural relations of race and ethnicity come to constrain and enable such organizing. In particular, this growing body of work sees such organizations as not just the ‘power elite’ of years past, but as exclusive networks of actors who work to maintain and/or destabilize racism, elitism and democratic praxis.

The articles that follow are not the first to embark on this epistemological trajectory. Rather, they build upon key and recent works that troubles a picture of secret racial and ethnic orders as little more than vehicles of Machiavellian intent. Simultaneously, such work does not fail to highlight the reproduction of power and oppression through supposedly neutral goals and organizing methods. For example, Jason Kaufman’s (2003) For the Common Good?: American Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity examines the clubs, fraternities, militias and mutual aid societies prevalent in between the US Civil War and the First World War. While Kaufman emphasizes the ways that these organizations worked to revitalize American civil society today, he also dispels many of the myths about the curative powers of clubbing to emphasize the role that racial prejudice played in fraternal organizing. In this same vein, Nicholas L. Syrett’s (2009) The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities and Diana B. Turk’s (2004) Bound by a Mighty Vow: Sisterhood and Women’s Fraternities, 1970–1920 together serve as critical bookends: they emphasize the local dynamics of fraternalism that created opportunities for social uplift while refusing to marginalize the ways that white supremacist logic came to govern such fraternal organizations.

In another groups of scholarship, Corey D. B. Walker’s (2008) A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America and Harvard University Government. Theda Skocpol, Ariane Liazos and Marshal Gans’s (2006) What A Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality together examine how black fraternal orders arose out of a history of colonization, segregation and subjugation, in turn creating a tripartite mission developing personal excellence, creating fictive kinship ties and fostering racial uplift activity (e.g. civic action, community service and philanthropy). Together, Walker (2008) and Skocpol, Liazos and Gans (2006) show how fraternal organization existed in spite of, rather than because of, white supremacy. And in terms of a prescient time for new scholarship, Matthew W. Hughey and Gregory S. Parks’ (2011) edited volume entitled Black Greek-Letter Organizations 2.0: New Directions in the Study of African American Fraternities hit shelves in the midst of a critical time for black Greek-letter organizations – seven major organizations’ centennial anniversaries occur between 2006 and 2014. Black Greek-letter organizations are said to represent some of the strongest organizations in black America today, yet they also regularly engage in self-destructive hazing and are increasingly questioned as to their relevance today.

While the aforementioned research is heavily slanted toward a US context, scholarship that addresses the international scope of ethnicity and race in secret and private organizations is well under way. Afua Cooper’s (2007) The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal touches on the role that African fraternal orders...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Chasing shadows: from the power elite to a new paradigm
• 2. The duality of spectacle and secrecy: a case study of fraternalism in the 1920s US Ku Klux Klan
• 3. Ékpè ‘leopard’ society in Africa and the Americas: influence and values of an ancient tradition
• 4. ‘Weak power’: community and identity
• 5. Black, Greek, and read all over: newspaper coverage of African-American fraternities and sororities, 1980–2009
• 6. Fraternity life at predominantly white universities in the US: the saliency of race
• 7. Why some black lodges prospered and others failed: the Good Templars and the True Reformers
• 8. Ardent citizens: African American Elks and the fight for equal employment opportunities
• Index