Mosaic Templars, Black Business and Brotherhood in the New South
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
In eighteen eighty-three, two men sat down in a Little Rock barbershop and began planning an institution. John E. Bush was a former slave who had educated himself after the Civil War and risen to become a federal land office official.
Chester W. Keatts was his partner in business and ambition. What they designed together was the Mosaic Templars of America, a Black fraternal order built on the model of the mutual aid societies that provided the safety net most American institutions denied to African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South.
The Mosaic Templars spread across the country with remarkable speed. By the early twentieth century it had chapters in twenty-six states and several foreign countries, with a membership of tens of thousands. The organization provided life insurance, sick benefits, burial assistance, and educational support to its members.
In an era when Black Americans were systematically excluded from white-controlled financial institutions, the Mosaic Templars effectively operated as a parallel economy. The organization's headquarters in Little Rock became a landmark. At its peak the Mosaic Templars owned a five-story building on Broadway, operated a printing press, ran a newspaper, and supported a hospital.
The institution embodied what historians call the Black metropolis ideal, the conviction that African American communities could build their own civic and economic infrastructure within a hostile surrounding society. The Depression hit the Mosaic Templars hard. Like many Black fraternal organizations, it could not absorb the mass unemployment of the nineteen thirties while continuing to pay benefits, and the organization declined through that decade.
The building changed hands, fell into disrepair, and burned to the ground in two thousand five. But the story did not end there. In two thousand and eight, the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center opened on the original site on Broadway, operated by the Arkansas State Archives.
It tells the history of African American life in Arkansas through the lens of this singular institution, founded by two men in a barbershop who decided that if the society around them would not provide for their community, they would build that provision themselves.
