From Vigilance to Baseball to Oddfellows: The Needham Family and the Making of Black Civic Power in Philadelphia
- 1838 Black Metropolis
- Jan 4
- 11 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
We started researching James Needham - more specifically James Fields Needham - through our work on the students of the Institute for Colored Youth. What emerged was not only an educational story, but a family story.
And then, unexpectedly, a baseball story.
And then, beyond that, the story of one of the largest, most powerful Black fraternal organizations of the 19th century whose story seems to somehow gotten lost, even though their building still stands in plain sight.
None of this was what we set out to find, but once it opened up, we had to bring it to you.
Let’s start with the family.
James Needham
James Needham (we’ll call him ‘James Sr.’) comes into the record in the early 1800s. He was freeborn in Pennsylvania and established his life in Philadelphia as a hairdresser, in a home he owned at 25 Elizabeth Street - a street that no longer exists and is now covered by McCall Elementary School.
The Rich Black History of Elizabeth/Barclay Street
Here’s a picture of the space occupied by Elizabeth street (later called Barclay Street) - when they knocked down the block to get ready to build the McCall school.
Elizabeth Street became Barclay street in the late 1830s.
And Barclay street had a lot of history.
It was the site of the first city location of Institute for Colored Youth (ICY), a high school and college preparatory institute dedicated to training Black teachers. ICY had tried to get started outside the city and that experiment failed. So the school was moved back into the city.
This is where Harlem Renaissance Iconoclast Alain Locke’s grandfather Ishmael Locke taught night school for ICY. The night school was so successful that eventually ICY transitioned to a day school in the 1850s and moved to a new building at 716-718 Lombard street. And that is where Alain Locke’s father Pliny went to ICY.
Barclay Street was also where the Benezet Joint Stock Association had a property that they rented out, most likely at reduced rents as they were a philanthropic organization. Jacob C. White Sr. was the President and his name was on all the deeds.
Interestingly, when we look at the deed for the Needham’s home - and this most likely is where James Fields Needham was born - we can do the measurements from the deed to see that that 25 Elizabeth street had become 625 Barclay on the 1860 map (remember that house and street numbers changed after the 1854 consolidation).
The deed also says that it is right next to a house formerly owned by Jacob C. White.
James Sr. and Jacob C. White Sr. were both members of the Vigilance Committee, a group dedicated to providing immediate support for people arriving in Philly after daring escapes from enslavement. Now that we know that the treasurer of the Vigilance committee lived next door to what is most likely Benezet's Barclay property, an intriguing possibility emerges. Maybe that property may have also served as an Underground Railroad safe house and/or a place for people to begin new lives, at affordable rents, after self-emancipating.
James Needham - Institution Builder
Getting back to the family, James Sr. and his wife Martha raised their family at St. Thomas African Episcopal Church.
At St. Thomas, James Sr. was entrusted with responsibility. He served as vestryman and churchwarden, and he helped lead the Philadelphia Library Company for Colored People, which operated out of the church basement and held roughly six hundred volumes. This was a space of Black intellectual life. People like Robert Purvis and James Forten appear frequently in that orbit. James Sr. appears less often in the spotlight but when you look at governance structures, his name shows up again and again.
That pattern of trusted leadership continues across organizations. He served as treasurer of the Vigilance Committee. Holding that role meant holding the purse strings of emancipation work. He also appears in the 1838 Civil Rights movement, raising funds to publish the Appeal of the Forty Thousand. In the 1840s, he shows up as a Prince Hall Mason, and on the education committee member of the American Moral and Mental Improvement Association, a group committed to temperance, education, and what they understood as moral living.
Across all of these spaces, a picture of trust and steady governance emerges.
James Sr. was a person trusted with responsibility. He operated within organizations that required adherence to shared values and that carried public presence. He was doing freedom work, building libraries, strengthening intellectual life, and helping stabilize institutions.
It makes sense, then, that when a new fraternal organization, the Grand United Order of the Odd Fellows, began organizing in Philadelphia, he was among the early co-founders of lodges in the city and the surrounding region.
That steadiness carries into the next generation.
James Fields Needham
Excelling at ICY
We first began looking closely at James Fields Needham (we’ll call him ‘James F.’) because of our work with The Institute for Colored Youth (ICY).
Born in 1848, James F. started ICY at age eleven or twelve. He had perfect attendance and perfect marks, earning prizes for his academic record.
He excelled in mathematics - and at ICY, that meant algebra and trigonometry. This was not light coursework.
He graduated at fourteen, which is remarkable given the rigor of the curriculum.
From there, his name begins to appear in a new place: baseball.
Introducing the Excelsiors
Most people know Octavius Catto and the Pythians, often described as the first Black baseball club in Philadelphia. But in doing this research, we uncovered something else.
James F. was the secretary of the Excelsior Base Ball Club. This is a club we didn't even know existed.
In the spring of 1867, the Excelsiors won the Colored Baseball Championship against the Brooklyn Uniques, a fact reported in the newspapers. Even more interesting, the Excelsiors’ lineup included James Brister, a fellow ICY student.
That means there were two Black baseball clubs in Philadelphia, both connected to the Institute for Colored Youth.
Later in the winter of 1867, Octavius Catto applied on behalf of the Pythians to the National Association of Baseball Players and was rejected because of race. Baseball historian John Shiffert has suggested - cautiously - that the Excelsiors may have applied earlier and been accepted because the association assumed they were a white club, only realizing later that they were Black and then issuing a blanket exclusion.
Whether or not that theory holds, it raises an intriguing question: was there a strategy here?
If we think about the post Civil War period in Philadelphia (1865-1870) - the Black community was challenging systems of exclusion left and right; in education, in suffrage, in trolly car spaces.
We know that Catto and Needham were both at the Institute for Colored Youth and that many of the firsts - the first Black person to do something, to break a color line - were coming from ICY graduates.
It’s conceivable that the entry into baseball was not just for fun; it may have been an intentional way to break the color line in white athletic spaces.
Can we start thinking of the Institute for Colored Youth as a hotbed of early civil-rights strategy - where education, sport, and public presence were all part of a larger challenge to reshape who belonged in the nation’s civic and recreational life?
There is also a cultural moment that helps us see James F. taking on community responsibility very publicly. After the Excelsiors’ championship, a public concert was held in support of the club. It may have functioned as a championship celebration (recall that they beat the Uniques in the Spring) and a fundraiser.
At that event, Needham received silk flags and new caps from the women of the community on behalf of the team. He was eighteen or nineteen years old - not the player, not the pitcher - but once again, the secretary, the representative, the person trusted to stand in public on behalf of an institution.
After Reconstruction, when Philadelphia began opening civil service positions to Black workers, James Fields Needham Jr. became the first Black employee in the city’s tax office. He stayed there for the remainder of his career.
At the same time, he served as treasurer of the Pennsylvania Equal Rights League, a civil rights organization that was behind success of the desegregation of trolly cars and the lift into enfranchisement for Black men after the 15th Amendment.
This are roles that echo his father’s earlier work. There is a clear intellectual genealogy here: ensuring stability for abolition and vigilance in one generation, building stability in Black political and fraternal organizations in the next.
A Public Fist Fight
In the 1880s, we see something else - public contention. In 1884, James F. was involved in a physical altercation with Gilbert Ball, a prominent Black Republican leader, at a Black political club on Lombard Street.
Have you all ever heard of the MS Quay club? Yes, in the 1870s, there was a Black political club at 1122 Lombard Street and it was aligned to the Republican party.
It seems like the fight started because of a disagreement about masonry. We do know that Ball struck Needham, that charges were filed, and that Ball temporarily stepped down as president of the club before being reinstated.
This moment shows a Black political world diverse enough to sustain disagreement, rivalry, and public conflict. It also complicates the image of Needham as purely respectable and reserved. He was embedded in civic life deeply enough that disagreement could turn physical - and that, too, is part of human messiness.
Contention means that not everyone thinks the same way, that arguments happen, that splits occur, that Black people are not a monolith. This point is important because historiographical bias will tend to aggregate Black thought in the 19th century without giving agency to all the nuances that exist. We thank Lagarrett King for helping us remember to also highlight the contests - the contentions - in our history.
Social Leadership Manifests in Stone
All the while, Needham was rising within the Odd Fellows. Recall that James Sr. was an early co-founder. By the late 1890s, James F. had become Grand Secretary, and he played a central role in building the organization’s physical infrastructure.
This was something new. In Philadelphia, Black physical infrastructure was predominantly churches. Two attempts at halls - Pennsylvania Hall and Beneficial hall - had been victims of racist arson attacks and allowed to burn to the ground. So townhomes became converted for group use.
But in 1907, the Odd Fellows constructed their own headquarters - that still stands today.
Check it out....
By the turn of the century, the Odd Fellows - headquartered in Philadelphia in 1848 - had grown to 155,000 members and more than 3,300 lodges nationwide, making it the largest Black fraternal organization in the country.
The building at 12th and Spruce Streets stands as a highly visible and enduring marker of that collective power. It's still used by the Oddfellows to this day.
To gather the funds, to hire the builders is a massive project in and of itself. But in volunteer organizations - to align the people to build something permanent is a hard lift and it requires a special type of person. Someone who can organize without ostracizing, who can guide without ordering, someone who can manage the money and understand the contracts. We believe that James Fields Needham was that kind of person. We believe that this energy was something passed down through the Needham family: civic responsibility, public presence, and the ability to move community forward.
Here is James F. with national Oddfellowship leadership, a year after the building was built.
Moving North
By 1910, James Fields Needham was living near Ninth and Lombard with his wife Medora and their two daughters, Mary and Martha. But by 1930, at eighty years old, he lived at 2256 North 21st Street. He died in his residence. The home is still there.
There are many possible reasons for this move - newer housing, more space, neighborhood change, population growth. What it reflects more broadly is the expansion of the Black metropolis beyond its original center at Seventh and Lombard, as Black Philadelphia grew and spread northward.
James Fields Needham died in 1936 and was buried at Eden Cemetery. You can visit him there. He lived well into the 20th century and is only one generation away from the Underground Railroad work his father was doing before emancipation.
He must have seen it as a child. He must have absorbed those values somehow.
And then he spent his life turning them into institutions - in baseball, in civil service, in civil rights organizing, and finally in brick and stone.
We wanted to share this thread with you - from the beginning of the 19th century to its close, and not so far from us at all. You can still walk the city he helped shape. You can still see the Odd Fellows building. And you can still say hello at Eden.
Sources:
Benezet Joint Stock Association Minutes. Leon Gardiner Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Brooks, Charles H. The Official History and Manual of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows in America. Books for Libraries Press, 1971. Original publication date 1902. https://archive.org/details/officialhistorym0000broo/page/6/mode/2up
"Concert of the Excelsior Baseball Club". Christian Recorder. 1 June 1867, p. 32. Internet Archive,
Coppin, Fanny Jackson. Reminiscences of School Life, and Hints on Teaching. J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1913. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jacksonc/jackson.html
Data compiled in ICY Graduates Analysis spreadsheet,
"Excelsior baseball club to visit Brooklyn to play the Uniques." Brooklyn Daily Times (Brooklyn, NY). 30 Sep. 1867. Courtesy of Newspapers.com.
Dorsey, William. File on Gilbert Ball. Dorsey Collection, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania.
Institute for Colored Youth. Objects and Regulations of the Institute for Colored Youth. Merrihew & Thompson, 1860. Library Company of Philadelphia, Am 1860 Phi Ins 52832.O.
King, LaGarrett J. Teaching Black History Framework. University at Buffalo,
McBride, David, Blacks in Pennsylvania History: Research and Educational Perspectives. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1983.
“Politicians at Blows.” Philadelphia Times, 14 Aug. 1884. Courtesy of Newspapers.com.
Shiffert, John. Base Ball in Philadelphia: A History of the Early Game, 1831–1900. McFarland & Co., 2006.
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Sub-Committee of Management and Counsel of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows (1907–1908). Gift of Charles Hamilton Houston, Jr., and Dr. Rosemary Jagus, Object no. 2018.59.1,
"Sporting Items". The Brooklyn Daily Times (Brooklyn, New York) · Fri, Oct 4, 1867, Courtesy Newspapers.com
Winch, Julie. Names Database. Compilation of primary and secondary sources developed over 30 years of research. Courtesy of the author; entrusted to 1838 Black Metropolis for scholarly use. https://www.1838blackmetropolis.com/juliewinch
