Foreword

By Margaret C. Jacob, Ph.D.

When the first lodges opened their doors in Paris, in the first decade of their existence, the 1740s, there were in attendance merchants, army officers, women, a priest or two, and, not least, a black musketeer from the King’s Guard. Reading that evidence for the first time in the 1980s and knowing the tortured history of race relations in American Freemasonry, the historian could only be amazed and heartened. It did not, however, augur the future for lodges in the colonies of the European powers. Anyone who has ever lectured to an audience of Freemasons in the contemporary American South would notice immediately the sea of white, male faces cordially greeting the speaker. The segregation of Freemasonry in the Americas, but particularly in the United States, is as old as the American republic. That is why the story that Cécile Révauger tells in this fascinating book about black Freemasonry is so important.

Prince Hall must have been a remarkable man who possessed a deep understanding of the evils of slavery and worked to do something about them. As this book tells us, we know so little about his life that conjecture must replace hard facts. What is clear is that he took the message about all men meeting upon the level and brought Freemasonry into the lives of free blacks living in the North. He spoke eloquently about the horrors of slavery that he knew personally. Did he think that a full integration would someday be possible?

We will never know. What we do know is that all the idealism inherent within Freemasonry could not match the virulence of American racial hatred and suspicion.

Perhaps black Freemasons were right to keep themselves apart from mainstream white Freemasonry. Certainly its structure of having a grand lodge for every state and no national umbrella grand lodge worked until very recently in favor of the segregationists and white supremacists. Lodges for blacks may have helped build community among men whose masculinity had been denied or derided. We can only hope that the separatism is no longer necessary, because it is a black mark on American Masonic history. Books like this one show us how the mark was made and bring to the subject a refreshing look by a master historian, woman, and French Freemason. We are all in her debt.

MARGARET C. JACOB, PH.D., is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. One of the world’s foremost Masonic scholars, she is considered a pioneer in the field of the history of civil society with emphasis on Masonic history. Her work in the early development of Freemasonry documents connections between early European Freemasons and the Craft as we know it today. She is the author of The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans; Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe; and The Origins of Freemasonry: Facts and Fictions.