Mosaic Templars of America (MTA)

MOSAIC TEMPLARS OF AMERICA (MTA) -  The Mosaic Templars of America (MTA), an African American fraternal organization offering mutual aid to the black community, was founded in Little Rock Arkansas in 1882 and incorporated in 1883 by two former slaves, John Edward Bush and Chester W. Keatts.  Taking its name from the biblical character of Moses, the organization offered illness, death, and burial insurance to African Americans at a time when white insurers refused to treat black customers equally.  The name metaphorically linked the organization’s services to African Americans and the oppressive conditions of the Jim Crow South to Moses’s leadership during the Israelites’ Exodus from slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land.  At its peak in the 1920s, the organization had an estimated membership of over 100,000 members and had chapters in twenty-six states, the Caribbean, and South and Central America.  Headquartered in Little Rock throughout its existence, the MTA exemplified a successful black-owned business enterprise.  It expanded its holdings to include the Mosaic National Building and Loan Association, the Mosaic State Hospital (which also supported a nursing school), and the Mosaic Guide (originally American Guide) newspaper.

The founding of the MTA in the late nineteenth century was part of a larger fraternal movement in which thousands of men and women (white and black) joined organizations that offered insurance benefits and camaraderie.  However, since white American fraternal organizations refused to issue charters to black groups, African-American branches were forced to obtain a charter from an organization’s European counterpart (like the Prince Hall Masons did in 1784) or create their own organizations.  The MTA is an example of the latter—an independent, African-American fraternal organization without a white parallel.

The MTA exemplified turn-of the-century fraternal values like mutualism, good moral character, self-reliance, thrift, and business training.  John E. Bush’s anecdotal origin of the MTA testifies to some of these values.  Bush’s story involved himself, along with a prominent white man and an elderly black woman.  Bush described an awkward situation as the elderly woman interrupted the two men’s conversation to ask for a donation to help pay for her husband’s burial, despite that fact that he had held a “good position” in the black community.  Bush and Keatts saw the MTA’s burial and illness insurance as a way to help members save money and alleviate poverty in a dignified way.  While the origin tale is important, the timing of the MTA’s founding in 1882 was likely linked with the events surrounding an 1881 Prudential study that showed a higher mortality rate for African Americans.  The study caused most insurance companies to raise rates or refuse African American customers.

The core operations of the Mosaic Templars consisted of several departments: endowment, monument, analysis, uniform rank, recapitulation, records, and a juvenile division.  The monument department provided every deceased member with a custom-made “Vermont marble marker” engraved with the MTA symbol.  Many of these headstones can still be found in cemeteries across Arkansas and the Southeast.