Righting the past: J.T. Spann, United Order of Brotherhood founder and publisher, dead at 54
Editor’s note: This is the 18th in a series of historical obituaries written today to honor the men and women of the past who were denied the honor at the time of their death because of discrimination due to their race and/or gender.
John Thomas Spann, a longtime resident of this city who founded the United Order of Brotherhood and published the Pensacola Brotherhood newspaper, died on Sept. 30, 1918. He may have been one of Pensacola’s first casualties of the Spanish flu pandemic.
A native of Alabama, Mr. Spann was born on Aug. 23, 1864. His parents, Aaron and Mahaily Cunningham Spann, worked as farmers after the Civil War. As a teenager in Millview, Florida, he began working as a millhand and edger at the lumber mills along Perdido Bay. He married Mary Liza Pitts around 1887, and they had 10 children together, one of whom died during childhood.
In 1897, the Spanns moved to Pensacola where Mr. Spann worked as a bayman in the booming port. He soon joined with the Baymen’s Protective Association Lodge No. 2, which allied with the local Lumberman’s Association lodge to represent the labor interests of Pensacola’s Black timber and dock workers. He also became active in Republican politics through various clubs and county delegations.
On March 30, 1899, Mr. Spann founded the United Order of Brotherhood, a mutual benevolent society for African Americans that guaranteed a $100 death benefit to its members. This provided an important service at a time when many Americans did not have life insurance or monied family connections. Members who could not work due to sickness or disability could request a weekly cash payment. The Brotherhood also aimed to “ameliorate the condition of the unfortunate and illiterate through teachings and advices of the ablest minds of the country, and to encourage that harmony of feeling and good will between the races so necessary for the prosperity of both.”
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The Brotherhood received its state charter on April 6, 1899, and paid its first endowment on July 1. Over the next few years, the organization grew dramatically with dozens of subordinate lodges chartered in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana. The Brotherhood held biannual National Congresses in Pensacola (1902); Montgomery, Alabama (1904); Selma, Alabama (1906); and Millbrook, Alabama (1908). As the Brotherhood’s “Supreme Commander,” Spann was lauded at the Millbrook congress as “a true leader, bold, strong and fearless; one who has stood the test for nine years, and not only that, but has paid out thousands of dollars in hard cash in sick and death benefits.”
Under Spann’s leadership, the Brotherhood also contributed to the community’s social life. It organized Emancipation Day celebrations, picnics, speeches, musical performances and various excursions by train or steamer. Advertisements published in the Pensacola News touted “special accommodation for white people” on some of these excursions, claiming, “The public knows when the Brotherhood says they will have a good time they mean it.” Among the most popular destinations was Seaside Park, a recreational facility located in what is now Gulf Breeze. Managed by Melvin A. Fowler, Seaside Park was one of the first private beaches that catered to Pensacola’s Black community during segregation.
In 1901, the Brotherhood began publication of a newspaper called The Brotherhood and Missionary Link, edited by Rev. J. H. Manley, featuring information about the organization and its members. By 1905 it had changed its name to the Pensacola Brotherhood, with Spann as its editor. It operated out of the same building at 502 W. Belmont St. that housed the United Order of Brotherhood. No surviving copies of the newspaper are known to exist, but historian Donald H. Bragaw has suggested that it “took a more militant view of Negro rights” than the Florida Sentinel, a competing Black newspaper in Pensacola. In August 1910, Spann and Sentinel publisher Matthew M. Lewey were among six Pensacola delegates who traveled to the New York meeting of the National Negro Business League. The Pensacola Brotherhood continued to be published at least into 1916.
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After his death from influenza in 1918, Mr. Spann was laid to rest in the A.M.E. Zion Cemetery on N. A Street. His marble tombstone bears the mark of the Mosaic Templars of America, an organization founded by two formerly enslaved Arkansans to help African Americans with funeral arrangements. While the Brotherhood’s founding documents anticipated the potential for “great loss of life of members by epidemic,” the Spanish flu pandemic’s death toll may have shaken its financial stability. The Pensacola chapter of the United Order of Brotherhood disappeared from the public record shortly after the pandemic ended.
Tragedy visited the Spann family again the following year. During the “Red Summer” of 1919, his daughter Rosebud was “dragged from her buggy to the woods” and assaulted. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) implored Florida Governor Sidney J. Catts to bring “energetic and appropriate legal action” against the “white brute” who perpetrated the assault. The petition noted that the Spanns were “one of the leading colored families of Pensacola.”
The path of J. T. Spann’s life took him from the fields of Alabama to the lumber mills of Perdido Bay and finally to the booming urban center of Pensacola. There he established a mutual society that “dried the widows’ tears by paying thousands of dollars to them, promptly and on time.” As Supreme Commander of the organization, he oversaw its growth into four neighboring states while also publishing a newspaper and providing his local community with recreation opportunities. As the Pensacola News wrote in 1901, “Everybody in Pensacola knows J. T. Spann, and respects him for his modest demeanor, his unimpeachable integrity and his great strength of character.'" Although the flu took him at an early age, he left a legacy of making the passage of death more bearable for other families.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: J. T. Spann, United Order of Brotherhood founder and publisher, dead at 54
