[gentle music]
- Alex Thomason: Good evening, everyone.
- Audience: Good evening. - Alex: Thank you.
My name is Alex Thomason.
I am a member of Middleton-Ionic Lodge here.
And welcome to the Middleton Masonic Center.
We are pleased to host this event alongside members
of the Prince Hall Capitol City Lodge No. 2.
And we wanna recognize the presence of members
of the Grand Lodge of Wisconsin and of the Prince Hall--
Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge
of Wisconsin, Incorporated.
We appreciate you being here.
This is an event that we've been looking forward to.
We appreciate the time of Professor Kantrowitz.
Today, we welcome Professor Stephen Kantrowitz.
He is the Linda and Stanley Sher Professor of History,
Afro American studies,
and American Indian studies at the UW-Madison.
Professor Kantrowitz is co-editor
of All Men Free and Brethren: Essays on the History
of African American Freemasonry.
Professor Kantrowitz writes and teaches about race,
citizenship,
and Native American-settler interactions
in the 19th-century United States.
Professor Kantrowitz was born in Boston,
earned his PhD at Princeton University,
and has been teaching at UW-Madison since 1995.
He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships
for his scholarship and teaching.
Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Professor Kantrowitz.
[audience applauds]
- Stephen Kantrowitz: Thank you very much, Alex
and Alan, and I wanna thank Middleton-Ionic
and Capitol City Number 2
for the invitation to speak with you tonight.
I also want to acknowledge the variety of the audience
that I'm speaking to,
because while many of the people in the room here tonight
are familiar,
maybe intimately familiar, with Freemasonry,
there are perhaps others here
and definitely some out in the audience
that will be watching this online or on TV
that know little or nothing.
So, some of what I'm gonna say
may be too elementary for some people here,
and some may seem too esoteric for others,
but I'm gonna try and split the difference as best I can.
And I think I need to begin for some of the people
in the latter group of that audience by asking the question,
"What is Freemasonry?"
A daunting question for a person
who is not himself a Freemason to answer.
I will begin with a phrase that my friend Mark Tabbert,
who runs the George Washington National Masonic Monument,
to say that it's not so much a secret society
as a society with secrets.
And as a historian,
I wanna sort of begin in the modern beginnings of Freemasonry
in the 18th century,
when Freemasonry in its modern form
emerged as an important arena
in which men imagined themselves as brothers,
exemplars, and cosmopolitans.
Brothers.
According to the early 18th century
Constitutions of the Free-Masons,
the order aspired to be--
and I'll quote for the first, maybe not the last time--
"the means of conciliating true friendship among persons
that must else have remained at a perpetual distance."
And the lodge became a place of high drama,
with scripted rituals and secret signs,
but also, as Masonic intellectuals thought,
of innocent mirth.
Freemasons were exemplars.
Freemasonry imagined itself as a transcendent project with roots
in the Biblical past.
According to Masonic tradition,
when the builders of the Temple of King Solomon,
practical Masons, completed their work
and scattered across the world, humanity lost its common tongue.
Modern Freemasonry,
a philosophical tradition sometimes called
speculative Masonry,
promised the restoration of a common grammar
of truth and love.
That common language offered the world a model
for peaceful coexistence and the special
and select men who were drawn to Freemasonry
and accepted into it would exemplify that restored
and perfected world.
And finally, cosmopolitan.
Freemasonry explicitly welcomed men
of all nations, tongues, kindreds, and languages.
In theory, merit and character
were the only criteria for membership
in a global brotherhood of worthy and equal men.
And those men were supposed to recognize
and welcome one another wherever they found one another.
In the 18th century,
in the midst of a kind of ongoing challenge
to monarchies and kingdoms and empires,
and the growth of an idea of individual liberty
and self-determination,
the order grew and spread across Europe
and in the American colonies and beyond.
As it spread, its basic unit was the lodge, the central place
where a relatively small group of men
assembled together on a regular basis.
But each nation also had eventually its own Grand Lodge,
which oversaw and adjudicated and chartered new lodges.
It was selective and special.
It attracted leading men
who shared visions of citizenship and self-government,
and in particular,
of leadership within the new order
of self-government and self-determination.
Eventually, it included Presidents George Washington,
James Monroe, Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere, and John Hancock,
members of the United States Constitutional Convention,
and officers in the Patriot Army.
My subject tonight is the way
that that story intersected with another story:
the struggle of people of African descent
to make a place for themselves in the United States
and to make the United States a place worthy
of their loyalty.
To give that story life,
I'm gonna trace some of it through the life
of one prominent 19th-century American Freemason.
A fugitive slave, a freedom fighter,
a Civil War recruiter, a state legislator,
and a Masonic leader and intellectual: Lewis Hayden.
In fact, Lewis Hayden is how I,
an American historian who knew nothing about the order,
found Freemasonry as a subject.
I was in Boston, my hometown, working on a book
about the 19th century freedom struggle of Black Bostonians
during the Civil War era.
The book that became More than Freedom:
Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic.
And Lewis Hayden quickly emerged
as a central figure in that story.
But as I explored Lewis Hayden,
I discovered there were very few letters in his hand
or to him.
There were newspaper articles, but I went looking for anything
he might have written and published.
And when I looked-- I looked really hard.
And what I found were five pamphlets,
all of them about Freemasonry.
And I thought, "Huh, what is going on?"
Because it was not a topic that had ever occurred to me
as part of this freedom struggle,
part of the organizational matrix
that made up Black Boston in the 19th century.
And yet, this man who I'd come to really deeply admire
and found a very compelling figure
found this such an important thing
that he devoted much of his life to it.
He took it so seriously
that I had to learn to take it equally seriously.
And that led to a book that has a great deal
to do with Freemasonry, but it's not centrally about it,
but then, also, to a collaboration
with another historian, Peter Hinks,
and with a wide variety of contributors,
to the creation of this book, All Men Free and Brethren,
which includes essays on a variety of topics
having to do with African American Freemasonry.
Tonight, I'm gonna offer this talk in three parts.
First, I'm gonna explain
how Freemasonry became an important part
of 19th century African American social and political life.
Second, I'm gonna explore Black Freemasons' struggle
to break down the barriers of racial caste
and gain recognition and acceptance
by the era's white Freemasons.
And, third, I'm gonna explore how both of those projects,
the creation of a network and community
of Black Freemasons in the 19th-century United States
and their outreach to white Freemasons for recognition,
how those two projects fared during Reconstruction,
the remaking of the United States as a democracy
after the end of slavery and the Civil War.
First, how did Freemasonry become such an important place
for African Americans in the 19th century?
It became a place
where men reached toward each other, built community,
established bonds of trust,
and gained experience in self-government,
all of which were profound challenges
under the conditions of Black freedom
in a white republic.
Even free Black people in the United States--
About 250,000 Black Northerners were free
in the middle of the 19th century.
Even free Black people lived under the shadow
of slavery in this era.
They lived under the stigma of being associated
with slavery and servility.
They lived in, even in freedom,
in places that considered them not members
of the political community,
but potential threats to the political community.
They were subjects of derision and suspicion,
mockery and exclusion.
In this context,
the American Revolution offered hope and possibility.
And a Black leatherworker named Prince Hall,
born sometime in the 1730s,
became an activist in Revolutionary Boston.
He was a literate man
and the author of many letters and petitions,
one of them here, freedom for the kidnapped,
men who'd been kidnapped unlawfully into slavery,
for the admission of African Americans
into the Patriot Army,
for their admissions into schools,
and admission to the then-existing white lodges
of Freemasons in Revolutionary Boston.
But that petition was rejected.
And in 1775, Prince Hall and about 14 of his comrades
approached the members of a British lodge,
part of the British occupation force then in Boston, 1775,
who initiated them as Freemasons
and named them African Lodge No. 1.
African, being a term that in the late 18th
and early 19th century,
free Black people had adopted as a way
of establishing themselves as a people.
After the Revolution, Prince Hall and his friends
applied to the Grand Lodge of England,
the mother lodge of the lodge
that had initiated them, for a charter
as an independent lodge of Freemasons.
And the charter, it would allow them to initiate new Masons,
to march, and do other things,
and received that charter in 1787,
becoming African Lodge No. 459.
Here's some documents and artifacts
from African Lodge 459.
The lodge became a place where Black men,
excluded from the political system,
excluded from representative government,
excluded from public speaking in most instances,
could practice leadership,
could practice self-government
outside of the mocking gaze of their white conationals.
Freemasonry became a place
where they could build networks among themselves,
and eventually networks across the small
and scattered free Black populations of North America.
And in doing so, not just in a utilitarian way,
building a network,
but building a network that aspired to
and imagined itself as participating
in a transcendent project that promised universality,
something that mattered very much to people
who felt themselves very much excluded
from the mainstream of social and political
and economic and educational life.
By the 1820s,
slavery was dead or dying everywhere in the North,
and free Black communities grew and strengthened,
created new organizational networks,
new bonds of affiliation.
And as that happened, many--
I would say in many cases, most of the leading Black men
of the first half of the 19th century
found their way into Black Freemasonry.
Just to look at these men is to kind of take a tour
through the world of Black leadership
before the Civil War.
The Reverend Richard Allen, the founder of the AME Church.
David Walker, the author
of Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World,
one of the foundational texts
of Black citizenship and Black nationalism, both.
John Jones,
the leading Black activist and entrepreneur of Chicago.
Martin Delany, a physician, a journalist,
an itinerant, an organizer,
eventually the highest-ranking Black officer
in the United States Army during the Civil War.
John Mercer Langston,
the first Black elected official in Ohio in 1855,
and after the war, a Congressman from Virginia.
John S. Rock, not only a physician and organizer,
but also the first Black man admitted to the Bar
of the Supreme Court.
So, this is really an extraordinary group of people,
and this just scratches the surface of the men
who were drawn to Black Freemasonry
in the 19th century.
And this is where we turn to another man so drawn.
Back to Lewis Hayden.
Lewis Hayden was born in slavery in Kentucky.
He lost his first family to the slave trade.
Never saw them again.
He remarried to this woman, Harriet Bell,
then Harriet Hayden.
And they resolved that they would not be separated.
And so, at great risk
and with the aid of two very brave white abolitionists,
they escaped slavery and made their way to Boston,
a hotbed of radical abolitionism.
They very quickly became key figures
in Boston's Black community.
They sheltered fugitives.
They organized anti-slavery meetings.
Lewis took to the streets to rescue fugitive slaves
who'd been seized under the Fugitive Slave Law
and narrowly escaped prosecution for the death of a constable
in 1854 after an unsuccessful raid on the Boston Courthouse
to free the fugitive Anthony Burns.
This was a world of violence and conflict,
and in that world, Hayden was a Christian,
but he saw the worldly churches
as hopelessly corrupted by slavery.
He was an American, but he saw the United States
as debased by racial caste and slavery.
But Freemasonry, he believed, remained untainted.
It could bind men together,
lift them up, and offer a model to the wider world.
Hayden became a Freemason shortly after his arrival
in Boston at the then-renamed Prince Hall Grand Lodge,
and he remained a devoted member of the African Lodge of Boston
for the rest of his life.
This just raises a question.
I've just said Lewis, but what about Harriet?
Hayden and his brethren were often women's rights men.
In fact, the Black activists of the 19th-century North--
The Black male activists of the 19th-century North
were some of the very few men
who were women's rights activists
in that place and time.
But they did not-- The question then arises,
"Why did they not insist that women, too, be allowed
to join Freemasonry?"
And I think the answer is that while they believed
that women were entitled to all the rights of citizenship,
they did not understand Freemasonry as a form
of citizenship, but rather as a form of leadership.
And leadership was a role that they, too,
like virtually everyone else, belonged exclusively to men.
Eventually, the female relatives of Black Freemasons
would be able to join the Order of the Eastern Star
Masonic auxiliary.
But the brotherhood remained a brotherhood.
As the nation expanded west,
Black Freemasons needed to knit themselves together
and extend their bonds of union with one another.
And in 1847,
Hayden took part in the creation of a really ambitious project,
the formation of the National Grand Lodge,
a new form of Masonic governance that would assemble
and coordinate the work of each state's Black lodges
and allow for a regular and regulated expansion of the order
into the new territories of the West.
And expand they did.
By the time the Civil War began,
there were perhaps 6,000 or 7,000 Black Freemasons
among the roughly 250,000 free Black people
in the northern states.
This brings me to the second topic,
to Freemasonry as a world of ritual and commitment
that promised nonracial fraternity
among leading men.
While they reached-- While they reached--
While they built a national network of leading Black men,
Freemasons also reached out to their white brethren.
They were a small minority of the population
in the free states.
Again, barely a quarter million people in 1860,
amid about 20 million white people.
They lacked rights.
In many places,
they lacked the ability to move with dignity and ease
through all manner of public and private spaces.
And they knew that to secure a place of equality and dignity
and belonging required changing
at least some white people's hearts and minds.
Where could they turn in this project?
Most white-led churches segregated them,
which, indeed, had led to the formation
of independent Black churches and denominations.
Most states did not allow them to vote.
The tiny minority of white people--
and it was a tiny minority-- who were abolitionists
did not always even agree that Black people were
or could be their social equals.
These were all betrayals of universalist principles,
betrayals of the universalist principles
of the Declaration of Independence,
of the Christian Church,
and they could make the future seem bleak
and cold to Black Northerners.
Against this,
some of the leading Black men of the North
considered Freemasonry's promise
of a true meeting and conciliation of hearts and minds
without regard to origin or nation or language.
And they made repeated overtures to white Masonic bodies
for formal recognition and rapprochement.
They hoped that Black and white Masons
might someday work together to perfect the world,
and this example would help demolish the racial caste
that dominated the United States.
Black Masonic intellectuals considered Freemasonry
a powerful weapon against racial caste
because it was rooted in the natural rights tradition,
like the Declaration of Independence,
but not, crucially, in the American constitutional order,
which sanctioned and protected slavery.
It therefore offered up
a powerful potential alternative venue for claims
to inclusion and claims to belonging.
And there was some evidence that this might work.
They were encouraged by the actions of some white people,
particularly white Europeans.
John S. Rock, who later was the first,
again, the first Black man
admitted to the Bar of the Supreme Court,
described being warmly welcomed by white Freemasons
in Parisian lodges when he visited France.
And there, he said, he met Masons
from nearly every part of the globe,
and also imagined the discomfort
that his presence in those lodges was causing
the white American visitors to those lodges.
Not an unfamiliar story
if you know the history of African Americans in France,
for example.
But Britain was the key.
It was white Britons who had first extended the hand
of Masonic friendship to Prince Hall and his band.
And it was Black Freemasonry's American lineage,
its institutional descent from the Grand Lodge of England,
that allowed Black Freemasons to assert
that they stood on equal footing with white American lodges.
Black Masons also took note of how the Grand Lodge of England
had responded to the British abolition of slavery.
Crucially, the the Grand Lodge of England
had altered its criteria for Masonic membership
after that time from the old standard "freeborn"
to a new standard, "free man,"
and this acknowledged the possibility
that formerly enslaved people might be deserving
of entering the brotherhood.
Here and there,
white American Freemasons recognized their Black brethren.
Black Methodist itinerants
traveling along the Mason-Dixon Line
described white fellow Masons recognizing them,
helping them escape suspicious white mobs,
even allowing them to hold services in white Masonic halls.
Lewis Hayden claimed that it was a white Deputy U.S. Marshal
honoring their mutual brotherhood
who warned him of his impending arrest
after the failed raid on the courthouse in 1854.
Martin Delany said
that white Kentucky Masons had recognized him
as a brother in an Ohio lodge.
So, there were signs that it was possible
that this rapprochement might happen.
But at the organizational level,
white Masonic organizations continually rebuffed
Black Masons' overtures,
often denying the legitimacy of Black Freemasonry entirely.
In fact, throughout the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries,
white Masonic bodies repeatedly labeled Black Masons
counterfeit, clandestine, irregular, or fraudulent.
They refused to consider their petitions for recognition.
They questioned the legitimacy of the African Lodge's charter
from England.
They swatted down those white Masons
who dissented from that policy of exclusion.
And they returned over and over
to the restriction of membership to "freeborn" men.
They explained that this qualification extended
to those who were born slaves, but became free
quote, "on the principle that birth in a servile condition
"is accompanied by a degradation of mind
"and an abasement of spirit
"which no subsequent disenthrallment
"can so completely efface as to render the party qualified
to perform his duties as a Mason."
In other words, once a slave, always a slave.
And by the 1850s, this was a familiar refrain.
As Chief Justice Roger Taney put it
in the Dred Scott decision in 1857,
the Founders had never considered Black people
to be part of the political community.
They had no rights which the white man
or the white Mason was bound to respect.
And this brings us to part three,
what happened when slavery came to an end
and when the governing dispensation
of the United States after 1865,
and especially after 1866 and '68,
became one of nonracial democracy.
Both of Black Freemasonry's projects faced new possibilities
and new challenges after the Civil War.
The project of building community and fraternity
among Black men proceeded in complicated ways.
Lewis Hayden traveled south in 1865
to assess the condition of the freed people in Virginia
and elsewhere,
and to consider the lodges that had been established among them
during the occupation of those places by the Civil War armies.
And he wrote in tones of some skepticism and worry,
"In the emerging of nations or people
"from a state of oppression, more especially
"when the oppressor is allowed to prey upon them,
"there must be jealousies
and want of confidence in each other."
In other words, he thought,
slavery had denied Black Southerners the right
to organize their own lives, families, and communities,
and newly freed Black people
continued to face stubborn resistance from whites.
They were understandably suspicious of one another.
Freemasonry,
to succeed and prosper under these conditions,
must proceed slowly and deliberately.
And this raised a question at the core of the project.
How to balance Freemasonry's universal truths
with its functional exclusivity.
How many men should become Masons and by what means?
These became pressing issues
as the order moved into the former slave states,
where free Black people's numbers in proportion
to the population dwarfed those of the Northern cities
where Freemasonry first flourished.
The first Black Masonic lodges embraced only a few dozen men
at a time, and even in the late 1820s,
when a Boston Freemason named John T. Hilton
sought to keep the order alive under difficult circumstances,
he warned it was not time for all to be aware of Masonry.
In keeping with long-standing Masonic tradition,
he thought that men should come to the order out of conviction,
not mere curiosity.
"Someday," he said,
"when the knowledge of Masonry shall have become universal,
then will commence a new era in the moral world."
But that had to happen slowly.
And he was the mentor to Lewis Hayden,
who similarly envisioned Freemasonry's march southward
as a careful mobilization
of those already capable of what Hayden called
"united and harmonious action."
But there was another Masonic leader of this era
with a different vision.
The free Black Northerner Richard Howell Gleaves
came to this question rather differently.
Gleaves had spent--
By the time the Civil War came to an end,
Gleaves had spent two decades establishing Masonic lodges
across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and down the Mississippi Valley,
including even in New Orleans.
And he acted as though Freemasonry's future
lay in rapid expansion into the former slave states,
and that he would personally oversee this in his capacity
as the new president of the National Grand Lodge,
the Grand Master of the National Grand Lodge,
and as a man of some means,
who would fund that expansion out of his own pocket.
Gleaves, in other words, imagined forging Freemasonry
into a mass-membership organization
aimed at recruiting former slaves in large numbers
all across the former slave states.
And this project had some success.
By 1867, just two years after the Civil War,
the National Grand Lodge, under Gleaves' leadership,
reached its peak with membership boasting 20 state Grand Lodges,
including newly formed Grand Lodges
in Virginia and Missouri and Kentucky,
all former slave states.
All formed under his direct guidance,
all quickly admitted to the National Grand Lodge
essentially on his own authority.
Hayden had been a member of the National Grand Lodge
since its founding 20 years earlier,
but he did not like what he saw.
He believed that Gleaves and the National Grand Lodge
were distorting Freemasonry.
They were treating expansion as an end in itself,
rather than as a means for unification
and mutual understanding among the nation's leading Black men.
And political leaders like Gleaves,
who was, by 1872,
the lieutenant governor of Reconstruction South Carolina,
naturally sought mass constituencies,
but Masonry should have a different
and more sacred view of the responsibility of people
to one another
and the role their order was destined to play
in the perfection of human government.
A civil war began among Black Freemasons,
with Grand Lodges beginning to leave the National Grand Lodge
in protest of Gleaves' policies
and new lodges springing up in those states
that were loyal to the Grand Lodge.
Thus a conflict of legitimacy and of organizational heredity.
And it was in sadness
that Lewis Hayden himself finally forswore
and abandoned the National Grand Lodge.
While this conflict was ongoing,
Hayden and others continued to reach out--
the second part of the Reconstruction project--
reach out to white Masonic bodies.
Reconstruction brought universal national birthright citizenship,
and with it, the possibility
that racial caste might fade away,
just as slavery had.
One leading Black Masonic intellectual
foresaw "the auspicious era
"when the genius of universal Masonry shall trample
"in the dust the foul incubus of caste,
"and bring our oppressors
"to the true knowledge of the cosmopolitan
"and humanitarian ideas which embraces all
"without regard to color or race in a common union
"by the still stronger
"and more indissoluble ties of a common interest
and a common brotherhood."
That's about as strong a statement
of Reconstruction optimism and universality
as one could want or imagine.
Lewis Hayden aspired to that vision as well,
and he took hope in acts of recognition
across the color line.
For example,
the Massachusetts Republican governor's
formal praise for Black Masons' support of the Union cause
during the war.
And the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachusetts
made a petition under Lewis Hayden's hand
to the white Grand Lodge of Massachusetts
for mutual recognition and fellowship.
And that petition, by the late 1860s,
was working its way through committee
in the white Grand Lodge of Massachusetts.
Hayden believed that as public breaches
of racial caste multiplied in the postwar world,
white Masons would see the light
that they'd previously only glimpsed through the haze
of racial proscription.
The victory over the Confederacy
and over slavery had thoroughly delegitimized pro-slavery
as a political position.
Hayden thought that if white Masons
now rejected Black men
simply because they had once been slaves,
they'd be working against the emancipating spirit
of the nation and the age.
And that, it seemed to Hayden,
was to, quote, "lead the Masonic fraternity
against the government of the United States."
But unfortunately, that's what seemed to be happening.
In the late 1860s,
when a German lodge announced its plan
to recognize the National Grand Lodge,
a white New York lodge protested.
It warned that such recognition would lead to violence.
It explained that many Black Masons in the South
were former slaves
between whom and the whites "there is irreconcilable
"and eradicable repugnance to social equality.
"A persistent attempt to enforce this equality
"would be very likely to result in the destruction of Masonry
"in the United States
"or a war of races, ending in the extermination
of the Negro race."
Lewis Hayden was aghast.
Rhetoric like that constituted, he thought,
not just a prediction of racial violence,
but an incentive to it.
He asked how Masons could square this call
to violence with their principles.
But the answers lay frighteningly close to home.
In 1865, President Andrew Johnson
had made a similar prediction of race war
if Black Americans insisted on equality.
And in the years after 1865,
Johnson had betrayed freed people's hopes
that he would be Abraham Lincoln's
worthy successor.
Johnson had sided repeatedly with the former slaveholders
of the South and against freed people
and their Republican allies,
even as former Confederates rioted against freed people,
organized the Ku Klux Klan, and sought to deny political
and civil rights.
Yet in 1867,
as Johnson's intransigence neared its apex,
the white Grand Lodge of Massachusetts
hosted the president, their fellow Mason,
at the dedication of their new Boston temple.
Hayden sublimated his rage and dismay
into an apocalyptic fantasy in which white Masons
actually perpetrated a fratricidal war of races.
In a pamphlet bearing that phrase as a subtitle,
he thought back to the horrific events
of the New York City draft riots
just five years before, the pogrom against Black New Yorkers
that had left so many dead and injured.
And he imagined it as the work of the city's white Masons.
He saw their prediction or advice of a war of races
inciting low white men to a jealous rage
at Black men's progress and equality
and bringing a riot against the city's Black citizens.
And in this imagined scenario,
Hayden imagined these culpable white Masons,
the ones who'd inspired the draft riots,
leaving the lodge to engage in the contest and in their haste,
not even pausing to remove their white aprons--
emblems of purity.
Those emblems, those aprons attract the attention
of a fleeing Black Mason, who seeks their aid.
But instead of aiding him, they stab him.
Crying out, "War of races,"
the Masons murder the man and the brother's lifeblood
is wiped upon that apron
which drew him instinctively to his murderer.
Hayden was mourning more than the exclusion
from a New York lodge room.
His hope had been that white
and Black Masons would come together
to fulfill the spirit of the era and of the order,
moving the world closer to true brotherhood.
This story that he now offered in his pamphlet,
tacking back and forth between the past of the draft riot
and the horrific future imagining of a war of races,
between the lodge room and the streets,
between the words of Freemasons and the deeds of men,
all of this showed the opposite.
Masonic influence deployed
as an instrument of racial terror.
The horror of the story was not just the violence.
It was that he saw white Masons
employing the sacred institution,
its ancient signs, and its worldly influence to ends
that were precisely opposite those
of true Masonic brotherhood.
Hayden's petition
to the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts came to naught.
The brothers rejected them as irregular,
leading Hayden to protest in another pamphlet.
And here, he shared the support of a rare white dissident
against this proscription, Brother Jacob Norton,
who shared his vision of the brotherly future
and an imagination of a future
in which white and Black Freemasons would, indeed,
not just share brotherhood, but share lodge together.
But this was not to be.
Not in Lewis Hayden's lifetime.
He died in 1889,
his massive funeral procession through Boston
led by the state's Black Masonic bodies.
Frederick Douglass attended.
So did the governor of Massachusetts.
And so did the mayor of Boston.
And the Black Masons of Boston soldiered on.
In 1907, they celebrated the anniversary of Prince Hall,
their founder's, death by the erection of a monument
at Copp's Hill Burial Ground on Beacon Hill.
Freemasonry and other fraternal associations
continued to attract self-identified leading men
and increasingly, women; to bring them together in local,
state, and national bodies;
and to tie their organizational lives
more closely together.
African American Masonic orders
played important roles
in the 20th century movements for educational,
political, and civil rights.
At the state level,
Grand Lodges organized to demand better educational opportunities
and worked together with other orders
to demand access to the ballot in southern states.
From the 1920s on, leading Masons publicly demanded
federal antilynching legislation.
The first African American Congressman from the North,
Oscar De Priest, elected in 1928,
was an Illinois Mason.
In the 1950s,
Georgia Masons in particular provided space and funds
for the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
as they developed civil rights strategies.
Many leading figures in the post-World War II
Black freedom movement were lifelong Masons.
In other words, the order survived and prospered
and helped give life to the freedom dreams
of later generations.
By the late 20th century, the civil rights campaigns
Black Freemasonry had ardently supported
bore long-sought fruit-- mutual recognition
with many state-level white Masonic bodies.
By 2010, in most states,
including several in the former Confederacy,
white and Black Masonic bodies had recognized one another.
Some of the ceremonies marking these occasions
recalled the order's long history of racial division
as a way of beginning to heal those ruptures.
In Massachusetts, the birthplace of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge,
that process unfolded over generations.
In 1947, the white Grand Lodge of the commonwealth
actually voted to recognize their Black brethren,
but then, under pressure from white Grand Lodges
in many other states,
rescinded their recognition a few years later.
It was not until the mid 1990s
that they finally restored that recognition.
And then, on the morning of May 10, 2003,
the officers of the white Grand Lodge of Massachusetts
assembled with the state's Prince Hall Grand Lodge
to mark their formal reconciliation with a pair
of shared graveside observances.
First, they met at the tomb of the 18th century Mason
Paul Revere in the Old Granary Burial Ground
just off the Boston Common.
Immediately afterward, they reassembled up Beacon Hill
at Copp's Hill monument to Prince Hall himself.
During the morning's event,
the Black and white brethren initially stood
in segregated groups,
but soon, they began to mingle with one another,
and after the last ceremony was completed
at the graveside of Prince Hall,
they enthusiastically exchanged ritual handshakes
across the color line that had so often set them at odds.
I was there that day, and standing at some distance
watching these ceremonies unfold,
and at the conclusion of the graveside service
at Prince Hall's grave,
there was a great spirit of joy in the air.
And over the course of the afternoon, I had--
There was a Black man about my age.
This was quite a few years ago.
There was a Black man about my age also observing things.
And we kind of recognized one another
as belonging to the same... lodge?
We're both historians,
and we just knew, looking at each other.
And we introduced ourselves to each other,
and we sort of spent the day following the Freemasons around
as they performed these ceremonies of recognition.
And so, he and I were standing together
as the ceremonies concluded on Copp's Hill.
And as they did, Freemasons were exchanging grips
and they were extremely excited
about what had just taken place between them,
and looking around for more people to greet
and celebrate with.
And one man,
an elderly Black man in Masonic regalia,
smiled, looked, and saw the two of us and approached us.
And as he got close, he realized, "Oh, not Masons,"
smiled, and turned around, and my friend and I--
My new friend and I looked at each other
and realized, like, the issue was not--
The issue was not Black and white here.
The issue was, we weren't Freemasons.
And we considered-- Both of us considered that
the great triumph of this moment.
And so, with that, I just want to leave you
where Lewis Hayden wanted to leave you.
"Yours for the rights of man."
And I'm very happy to take your questions.
Thank you.
[audience applauds]