Making Black America, Through the Grapevine premiered on PBS on October 4, 2022, the first of a four part series hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr and produced by McGee Media, Inkwell Media, and WETA Washington. The series traces the social networks African Americans built for themselves outside white oversight, from the Prince Hall Masons founded in 1775 through Black owned towns, historically Black colleges, and the leisure destinations and digital spaces that followed them.
The Order of the Eastern Star appears in the opening episode as part of that larger story, not as its own subject but as one thread in an argument about why Black fraternal life mattered. A contributor recalls her great grandmother's membership in Eastern Star Number 9, the white dress and gloves worn to its events, and only later learning that her great grandfather had been a Mason. Gates and his guests use that memory to make a wider point: church structures often limited what leadership roles were open to Black women, while fraternal auxiliaries like the Eastern Star let them run their own affairs, elect their own officers, and build parallel institutions of real authority.
The episode treats the Order as evidence of something larger than itself, that Black institution building in the nineteenth century was not incidental to survival but a deliberate exercise of self governance, carried out here by women whose fraternal ranks were finally their own to run.