Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1997
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 1997, pp. 35-47.
Abstract
On 6 March 1775, a British military lodge of Freemasons initiated Prince Hall (his name, not a title) and fourteen other African Americans after the white colonial lodge at Boston had rejected their petition. Independence did not alter the attitude of white American Masons; thus, a separate black Masons' organization evolved. Hall secured a charter from the "mother" grand lodge in England and reconstituted his group as the African Grand Lodge of North America. Following his death in 1807 the fraternal order renamed itself in his honor.
Prior to the abolition of slavery Prince Hall Masonry spread slowly among the free black population in the northern and border states. The fraternity established a confederation structure in which each state could create a sovereign grand lodge. After the Civil War membership mushroomed and migrating African Americans carried the institution to the trans-Missouri West. Prince Hall Masons affiliated with the Missouri Grand Lodge organized the first blue (subordinate) lodge in Nebraska at Omaha in 1875. By the end of the century blue lodges also existed in Lincoln, Hastings, Grand Island, Alliance, and Scottsbluff. The Great Migration of World War I increased the membership significantly, making it feasible for four Omaha lodges to join with those in the other five towns to form the independent Prince Hall Mason Grand Lodge of Nebraska in 1919.
Existing scholarship argues that Masonry among blacks was a middle-class phenomenon that produced class strife in the African American community. Unril recently in the post civil rights era, the delineation of classes within the segregated black caste in the United States has produced conflicting hierarchical schemes and controversy. Nonetheless, the titles of William A. Muraskin's Middle-class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America and Loretta J. Williams's Black Freemasonry and Middle-Class Realities announce their socioeconomic interpretations.1 The charter members of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Nebraska, however, exhibited a wide range of wealth, incomes, and occupations. The Nebraska story demonstrates the impact and the persistence of regional diversity in American history in general and in African-American history in particular. The desire for a sovereign grand lodge and the relatively small African- American population precluded elitist class-based exclusion. Prince Hall Masonry in Nebraska was not the overwhelmingly middleclass institution described by previous scholars; it was a multi-class fraternity consisting of individuals who accepted a Christian code of values (allegorically cast in reference to the craft of stone masons), who demanded moral and ethical conduct, and who promoted "selfhelp" and "racial uplift" for the entire black community.
Comments
Copyright 1997 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln