The Order of Galilean Fishermen sash
*The Order of Galilean Fishermen was founded on this date in 1856. They were an African American fraternal order.
The order formally began in south Baltimore, and in February 1869, it was officially incorporated as the National Grand Tabernacle of Galileans of the United States of Baltimore City. Open to both men and women, it gave members sick and death benefits. In 1911, the group was reincorporated as The Order of Galilean Fishermen. It was one of the few fraternal orders open to men and women in the nineteenth century. The order's first leader was Hemsley Nichols of John Wesley Methodist Church in Baltimore, Maryland.
Credit for founding the order was Anthony S. Perpener, a Prince Hall Freemason and Grand United Order Odd Fellow of Washington, D.C. The order claims a link to Scottish Rite Freemasonry. The organization spread to Maryland in 1869 and became one of the most prominent African American fraternal organizations there, with over 5,000 members in Maryland by 1890. A Galilean Temple was built in Rockville, Maryland, in 1903 and established as a cemetery in 1917. A marker stands at the former location of the Temple. The organization spread to Virginia in 1874 and established a bank and printing office in Hampton, Virginia, in 1901.
In 1885, the Fisherman's Hall was built in Charles Town, West Virginia, and is still a community center. In 1897, there were 56,000 members with a value of $125,000. The order was a strong proponent of civil rights, and in 1889, it raised funds to pay for the legal defense of the eighteen men convicted in the 1889 riot on Navassa Island.
Jones v. United States (1890) went to the United States Supreme Court. The case was lost, and the men were convicted of murder. Still, with the organizing of Black organizations and communities, the sentence was commuted to prison time by President Benjamin Harrison. In 1902, the Order's Tabernacle No. 47 purchased a tract of land where the first Rosenwald School in Calvert County, Maryland, would be constructed in 1921. The emblems of the order include the fish, Passion cross, rose, and INRI of the eighteenth degree of the Scottish Rite. As of 1974, it had approximately 500 members, primarily in Maryland.
