Samuel W. Starks: The West Virginian Who Built a National Movement

Long before modern civil-rights organizations, professional associations, and community foundations, Black Americans created institutions to protect families, develop leaders, build businesses, educate communities, and confront the barriers imposed by segregation.

Among the most influential of those institutions was the Colored Knights of Pythias. Its lodges were more than fraternal meeting places. They provided mutual aid, insurance, burial assistance, leadership training, social fellowship, and opportunities for collective economic action.

The Colored Knights of Pythias would become an important part of African American life in Wheeling and throughout the Upper Ohio Valley. Although Wheeling’s lodge was not named for him, the lodge across the Ohio River in Martins Ferry carried the name of one of the most consequential Black leaders West Virginia ever produced: Samuel W. Starks.

Before exploring the local lodges and the men and women who sustained them, we should first understand the extraordinary life of the man whose name reached across the river.

In subsequent posts, we will cover in depth Wheeling's Colored Knights of Pythias.

A Child of a New Era

Samuel W. Starks was born in Charleston, West Virginia, on March 10, 1866—less than a year after the Civil War ended and only three years after West Virginia became a state.

His life began at the threshold of freedom. The institution of slavery had been constitutionally abolished, but the meaning of freedom remained uncertain. Black Americans faced restricted opportunities, racial violence, political opposition, and the steady construction of what would become the Jim Crow system.

Starks nevertheless came of age believing that education, discipline, organization, economic cooperation, and moral leadership could be used to advance his people.

His beginnings were modest. As a boy, he reportedly apprenticed with a cooper, learning the trade of making wooden barrels and containers. He later worked for the railroad, initially in a low-level position. Rather than allowing that position to define his future, Starks reportedly acquired telegraph equipment with a friend and taught himself telegraphy.

He would go on to work as a railroad clerk and telegraph operator, manage a mercantile business, and become associated with the Advocate Publishing Company. He also attended Bryant & Stratton Business College in Chicago, where he studied bookkeeping and stenography.

These were not simply occupational accomplishments. For a Black man born immediately after slavery, each new skill represented another claim upon citizenship and independence.

Building the Knights of Pythias

Starks found his greatest platform in the Colored Knights of Pythias, formally known as the Knights of Pythias of North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

He helped establish Capitol City Lodge No. 1 in Charleston and became a central figure in organizing the Grand Lodge of West Virginia. He served approximately sixteen years as West Virginia’s Grand Chancellor before rising to the organization’s highest national office—Supreme Chancellor.

At the time of his death, Starks had been chosen for a fifth term in that position.

Under his leadership, the organization experienced astonishing growth. National membership reportedly increased from approximately 9,000 to nearly 150,000. Tens of thousands of women also participated through the Order of Calanthe, the women’s auxiliary associated with the Pythian movement.

But Starks was not satisfied with increasing membership for its own sake. He believed that a fraternal organization should become an engine for racial advancement.

In one of his biennial reports, reprinted following his death, Starks explained:

“My interest in the order is due to my interest in the race.”

That statement summarizes his leadership philosophy. The lodge was not an escape from the problems facing Black Americans. It was one of the instruments through which those problems could be addressed.

Starks believed that Pythianism could help Black people learn to organize, govern institutions, manage money, protect families, acquire property, and create enduring businesses. Under his leadership, the organization established the Pythian Mutual Investment Association in 1902. Its purpose was to combine the financial resources of members and assist Black entrepreneurs and property owners.

At a time when conventional financial institutions routinely denied Black citizens equal access to capital, pooling money within the community was both practical and transformative.

“We Have Learned to Organize and Unite”

Starks’s surviving words reveal a leader who measured progress through institutions rather than applause.

He pointed to the homes the organization had helped save, the widows and orphans it had assisted, the character it had developed, the financial resources it had accumulated, and the buildings its members had established in cities across the country.

“We have learned to organize and unite,” he declared.

That was no small accomplishment in an era when racial discrimination operated not only through personal prejudice but through laws, financial systems, employment practices, transportation policies, and public institutions.

Starks warned his fellow Pythians that their success should not lead to complacency:

“With all of our accomplishments we might stop and rejoice, but this would not do, for our work has hardly begun.”

He then offered a philosophy that still resonates:

“If what is called the race problem is to be solved, it must be solved by the race itself, not by making loud speeches and passing resolutions, but by plain, practical foundation work such as we are doing.”

Starks was not rejecting public advocacy. He was himself politically active and reportedly opposed efforts to impose racial segregation upon West Virginia’s public transportation. Rather, he was arguing that protest had to be accompanied by construction.

Communities needed institutions. Families needed protection. Businesses needed capital. Young people needed examples of disciplined leadership. Freedom required a foundation strong enough to survive changing political conditions.

A Historic Appointment

Starks’s leadership extended beyond the Pythian order.

In 1901, West Virginia Governor Albert B. White appointed him State Librarian. Starks became the first African American known to hold that position in the United States. Governor William M. O. Dawson later reappointed him, and Starks remained State Librarian until his death.

The appointment carried enormous symbolic importance. Only a generation removed from slavery, a Black West Virginian had been entrusted with preserving and administering the published knowledge and official intellectual resources of the state.

Yet contemporary accounts suggest that Starks did not treat the appointment as a personal trophy.

At his funeral, Governor Dawson remembered him as an able and faithful public servant—“an honor to his state and to his race.” Dawson observed that public office had not changed Starks: honors had never “turned his head,” and he allowed his work to speak for him.

Starks’s life demonstrates that service within government and leadership within Black institutions were not competing responsibilities. He used both avenues to enlarge opportunity and representation.

A State Mourns

Samuel W. Starks died in Charleston on April 3, 1908, following a sudden attack of peritonitis. He was only 42 years old.

The account of his final hours published by The Advocate described a man of remarkable composure. Despite intense pain, he remained concerned about his mother, repeatedly asking about her condition. Before undergoing surgery, he reportedly reassured his sister:

“You know I have been trusting in Him all these years. I am not likely to forget Him in such an hour.”

His death produced an extraordinary public response.

Delegations arrived in Charleston by train. Pythians, Masons, Elks, political leaders, state officials, friends, and community members joined the funeral procession. Hundreds of carriages and mourners on foot traveled toward the cemetery. Black and white residents crowded the streets and stood along the route.

The Advocate described it as one of the largest and most impressive funerals Charleston had ever witnessed. Starks’s body lay in state at First Baptist Church, where floral tributes arrived from lodges and courts across the country. Governor Dawson spoke, and national Black leaders sent messages of condolence.

Roscoe Conkling Simmons wrote that “a great light is extinguished,” while Booker T. Washington remembered Starks as a good man whose death represented a loss not only to his family and Charleston, but to the nation.

The newspaper’s editorial tribute captured the depth of Black West Virginia’s pride. Starks was not remembered merely as a man who had held an impressive title. He was remembered as a leader who had earned the confidence of his people and transformed that confidence into organized power.

In 1911, the Knights of Pythias erected a 32-foot granite monument at his grave in Charleston’s Spring Hill Cemetery. His home was later listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

From Charleston to the Upper Ohio Valley

Starks’s influence extended far beyond Charleston. The fact that a Colored Knights of Pythias lodge in Martins Ferry bore his name is evidence of how widely his leadership was respected.

The Ohio River did not divide the Black communities of Wheeling, Martins Ferry, Bridgeport, Bellaire, and the surrounding region. People crossed it for work, worship, family, business, education, entertainment, and fraternal fellowship. Ideas crossed with them.

A lodge bearing Starks’s name connected Martins Ferry to a national movement. Its members were proclaiming that their local work belonged to something larger: a network of Black men and women building security, dignity, leadership, and economic strength during an era of legalized discrimination. The S W Stark Lodge in Martins Ferry was on Hanover Street.

Wheeling’s Colored Knights of Pythias participated in that same tradition. Their story—and the story of their halls, parades, public programs, mutual-aid activities, women’s courts, and community leadership—will be explored in future installments of this series.

The Measure of Samuel W. Starks

Samuel W. Starks lived only 42 years, but the institutions he helped strengthen reached across the United States.

He rose from an apprenticeship and railroad employment to business leadership, national fraternal office, political influence, and a historic state appointment. More importantly, he used those positions to encourage Black Americans to combine their resources, protect one another, acquire property, create businesses, and prepare new generations for leadership.

His philosophy was neither passive nor abstract. It was grounded in work.

Organize.

Unite.

Educate.

Build.

Protect families.

Create institutions.

Use individual achievement to advance the larger community.

That is why his name appeared on a lodge in Martins Ferry. That is why thousands filled the streets of Charleston when he died. And that is why Samuel W. Starks belongs not only to the history of the Colored Knights of Pythias, but to the larger history of African American institution-building in West Virginia and the Upper Ohio Valley.

His work had only begun. The communities inspired by his example would carry it forward.

-T

Sources and Research Notes

Primary contemporary coverage includes The Advocate of Charleston, West Virginia, April 11, 1908, which published accounts of Starks’s death and funeral, tributes from around the country, an editorial honoring his leadership, and an excerpt from one of his biennial reports to the Knights of Pythias.

Additional biographical information was consulted through the Samuel W. Starks biography, which cites the West Virginia State Historic Preservation Office, the West Virginia Encyclopedia, West Virginia Archives and History, and other historical sources.

The identification of the Martins Ferry lodge as bearing Samuel W. Starks’s name comes from the Foundation’s ongoing research into the Colored Knights of Pythias in the Upper Ohio Valley.