A Uniform of Their Own: Wheeling’s Colored Boys’ Brigade and the Childhood Jim Crow Could Not Contain

A Small Notice, A Larger Door

Every once in a while, a small newspaper notice opens a much larger door.

At first glance, Wheeling’s Colored Boys’ Brigade might seem like a minor footnote: a photograph, a caption, a few passing mentions in the local paper. But when those fragments are placed together, something far more meaningful begins to appear. We see Black boys in early twentieth-century Wheeling claiming structure, belonging, public presence, recreation, faith, dignity, and discipline in a city and country still shaped by segregation.

That is the kind of history the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation exists to recover. Not only the famous names. Not only the institutions that survived long enough to leave large archives. But also the smaller formations of community life: the clubs, schools, churches, benefit events, youth groups, funeral rituals, and photographs that show how Black Wheeling built its own world when much of the larger world refused to make room.

The Boys’ Brigade Comes to America

The Boys’ Brigade itself began far from Wheeling. Founded in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1883 by Sir William Alexander Smith, the Boys’ Brigade became an international Christian youth organization built around discipline, drill, recreation, religious instruction, and the shaping of boys into responsible young men.

Its motto, “Sure and Stedfast,” came from the biblical image of an anchor, and the movement spread widely across Britain, the United States, and beyond by the early twentieth century. In its original form, the Brigade blended church life, military-style order, physical activity, moral instruction, and public ceremony into a model of youth development that became influential across the English-speaking world.

But in segregated America, even a movement built around Christian citizenship could be filtered through the color line.

When the Door Was Closed

A 1994 Wheeling newspaper feature preserved a remarkable photograph of “The Boys Brigade, ca. 1913-1914,” describing it as one of many groups formed during the years of segregation. The caption explained that several organizations did not permit African Americans to join or participate, so Black citizens formed their own groups. It also referred to the organization as an offshoot of the YMCA, known locally as the YMUA.

That caption alone would have been powerful. But the newly located 1913 and 1915 newspaper clippings give the photograph a documentary backbone.

On May 13, 1913, The Wheeling Intelligencer carried a brief notice that the “Wheeling company of the Colored Boys’ Brigade of America” would give a benefit skating party at the Auditorium skating rink on Monday evening.

It is only a few lines, tucked among everyday notices, but it tells us a great deal.

A Benefit Skating Party

First, this was not merely an informal gathering of boys. The newspaper called it a “company,” using the language of the Brigade movement itself. Second, it was public enough to advertise a benefit event. Third, the location matters. A skating rink was recreation, but a benefit skating party was also fundraising, organizing, and public participation.

These boys and their adult supporters were not hidden from civic life. They were entering it on their own terms.

Imagine that scene for a moment.

Black boys in Wheeling, in 1913, stepping into a public recreational space as members of an organized youth company. Perhaps they came in uniform. Perhaps their families came with them. Perhaps their friends from Lincoln School, church, and the surrounding Black community attended. What we know for certain is that the event was public enough to be printed in the city newspaper.

That alone is significant.

The Honor of Carrying One of Their Own

Then, two years later, the Boys’ Brigade appears again, this time in a very different kind of story.

On August 2, 1915, The Wheeling Intelligencer reported that the body of William White, a Black boy who had drowned near the Suspension Bridge, had been found near Benwood.

The article is heartbreaking. White had formerly worked as a bell boy at the McLure Hotel. He was survived by his father, Leonard White; his mother, Mrs. Lillian Bingham; and two sisters. His funeral was to be held that afternoon, with interment at Riverview Cemetery in Martins Ferry.

Then comes the line that changes the meaning of the Boys’ Brigade entirely:

Members of the Colored Boys’ Brigade would act as pallbearers.

That is no small detail.

The Brigade was not just a boys’ club. It was not just drill, skating parties, or uniforms. It was a body of young Black boys entrusted with public honor. In a moment of grief, they stood beside one of their own. They carried, or helped carry, the weight of loss. They participated in the solemn ceremony by which a community says: this child mattered.

That is what makes this story so moving.

The Architecture of Black Childhood

Segregation did not only separate adults. It shaped childhood. It determined which doors Black children could enter, which clubs welcomed them, which schools they attended, where they played, how they were seen, and whether their talents were nurtured or ignored.

The Colored Boys’ Brigade was one answer to that exclusion.

If mainstream institutions would not receive Black boys fully, Black Wheeling would organize its own. And in that organizing, there was imagination.

The Brigade model gave boys structure. It gave them ceremony. It gave them a language of discipline and belonging. It gave them a public identity. It taught them that they could be part of something larger than themselves, even when the larger society tried to tell them otherwise.

Part of a Larger Wheeling Pattern

This is one of the recurring themes in Wheeling’s African American history. Again and again, we find Black institutions forming in response to exclusion, then becoming far more than substitutes.

The colored public school became Lincoln School and a center of educational pride. Black churches became spiritual homes, civic centers, organizing spaces, and guardians of memory. Fraternal orders became mutual aid networks, social anchors, and engines of leadership. Women’s auxiliaries, social clubs, Sabbath schools, athletic teams, and community associations carried forward work that official histories often overlooked.

The Colored Boys’ Brigade belongs in that same lineage.

It was part of the architecture of Black childhood in Wheeling.

A Photograph With New Meaning

The photograph becomes even more powerful in this light. It is not simply an old group photo. It is evidence of Black boys being organized, instructed, claimed, and celebrated by their own community. It is evidence of a generation being told, in the face of segregation, that they still deserved formation, joy, discipline, friendship, and public dignity.

The newspaper clippings now allow us to say more than “there was once a group.” We can say that by 1913, Wheeling had a functioning Colored Boys’ Brigade company. We can say that the group held public benefit events. We can say that by 1915, its members were trusted with one of the most solemn duties a community can give its young men.

That is a story worth preserving.

Sure and Stedfast

It is also a reminder of how much remains hidden in plain sight. A few lines in a newspaper. A photograph caption. A name attached to a forgotten youth movement. These fragments may seem small until they are placed back into the larger map of Black Wheeling.

Then they become part of a larger truth: African American life in Wheeling was never passive. It was organized, adaptive, creative, disciplined, joyful, grieving, ambitious, and deeply communal.

The Colored Boys’ Brigade gives us a rare window into that world.

It shows Black boys not merely as students, sons, or future men, but as members of a public company with obligations to one another. It shows a community refusing to let segregation define the limits of its children’s imagination. It shows Wheeling’s Black citizens doing what they had done since the first days of the colored public school: building the institutions their children deserved.

The uniforms may be gone. The rink may be gone. The boys themselves have passed into history.

But the evidence remains.

And now, so does the story.

-T

Sources and Notes

• The Wheeling Intelligencer, “News Briefs,” May 13, 1913, p. 12. Notice identifying the “Wheeling company of the Colored Boys’ Brigade of America” and its benefit skating party at the Auditorium skating rink.

• The Wheeling Intelligencer, “Drowned Boy’s Body Is Found,” August 2, 1915, p. 5. Article on the death and funeral arrangements for William White, noting that members of the Colored Boys’ Brigade would serve as pallbearers.

• Sunday News-Register, “The Boys Brigade, ca. 1913-1914,” October 23, 1994. Photograph caption describing the group as one of many organizations formed during segregation when African Americans were excluded from other institutions.

• “Boys’ Brigade,” Wikipedia, accessed September 2026, for background on the international Boys’ Brigade movement, its 1883 founding in Glasgow, Scotland, and its Christian youth-development model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys%27_Brigade