This is even more interesting than the white IOOF. Black lodges started in NYC in 1843, twenty years after the white lodges.
From the Official History of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, published 1893. I’m including an unusually long quote because it’s powerful and important history.
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The free colored men residing in New York City and Philadelphia organized and maintained societies for literary improvement and social pleasures many years before the Civil War.
The leading organization in NYC was styled the Philomathean Institute; and in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Library Company and Debating Society. The thinking men in these societies soon saw the need of societies for mutual aid and protection in case of sickness and distress.
Quite naturally they turned to the “Friendly Society” of Odd Fellows, and accordingly in 1842 Patrick H. Reason, James Fields and others of New York petitioned the IOOF for a dispensation on behalf of Philomathean Institute, which had already resolved itself into an association with a view of becoming an Odd Fellows Lodge.
It is said that the petitioners were treated with contempt, and their application peremptorily refused.
However, our early brethren were not so easily repulsed but continued negotiations with some kindly disposed members of that Order who held out the vain hope that the dispensation would ultimately be granted.
Peter Ogden, a colored man, steward of the ship Patrick Henry sailing between New York and Liverpool, arrived in New York and was informed of the desire of the colored men and of the effort to obtain admission to Odd Fellowship in this country.
Peter Ogden, having already become an Odd Fellow by initiation into Victoria Lodge No 448 at Liverpool, endeavored to dissuade the men from making application to the Order in the United States. He thought it folly, a waste of time if not self-respect, to stand, hat in hand, at the foot-stool of a class of men who, professing benevolence and fraternity, were most narrow and contracted, a class of men who judged another not by principle and character, but by the shape of the nose, the curl of the hair, and the hue of the skin.
He averred that the dispensation could be secured through his Lodge in Liverpool, and that to be connected with England and the Grand United Order was to obtain Odd Fellowship in its pristine purity.
The Committee of Management [in Liverpool], being true Odd Fellows indeed, and knowing no men by color, were overjoyed at this promised extension of the Order in America and therefore promptly granted the dispensation to institute PHILOMATHEAN LODGE No 646, which was duly set apart on the first day of March 1843, and from that time we date our beginning in America.
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Note that the white IOOF started as a drinking club while the black IOOF started as a literary club.
Nuff said.
The black lodge expanded fast, first mainly in the eastern states. By 1870 it had crossed the Mississippi, and between 1870 and 1890 it expanded at the rate of 180 new lodges per year. By 1892 it was in most cities in Kansas and starting to reach Oklahoma. The book stops there, so I can’t tell what happened later.
I’ve discussed the fate of the educated black upper class before, here and here and here.
Polistra's Mill 