Foreword

By Peter P. Hinks, Ph.D.

 

Freemasonry is universal, of course, but the American Freemason is first or foremost a white or a black man. . . . American Freemasonry, like a fine kaleidoscope, prefers the juxtaposition to the merger of colors.

CÉCILE RÉVAUGER

In a brilliant and provocative new study of black Freemasonry in the United States, Cécile Révauger, professor of history of the anglophone world at the University of Bordeaux, has executed a remarkable balancing act—holding before the reader the history of the troubled machinations separating black from white Masons in the United States while simultaneously delineating the surprising ways in which they actually bonded with each other. In so doing, she argues, they formed a composite American Freemasonry where race—a physiognomic distinction among humans dismissed by Freemasonry as irrelevant to the universal fellowship it extols—has played a foundational role. Unlike its role in Freemasonry anywhere else in the world, race uniquely distinguished the organization of American Freemasonry as it confounded and troubled it.

Professor Révauger recognizes that American Freemasonry was born amid a slavery and brutal racial hierarchy that almost necessarily mandated the separation of black Masons from white. While Prince Hall and his small coterie did initially seek certification from white Masons in Boston, their failure to secure a lodge charter led them by the 1780s to seek a charter from the then most powerful grand lodge in the world—the Grand Lodge of England. In 1784 it duly chartered them as African Lodge #459, readily affirming that they understood they were chartering men of African descent. With that charter in hand, the band of black Masons then knew they did not have to seek validation from white American Masons who themselves were in disarray for many years after the American Revolution. On the bedrock of that charter Prince Hall and his descendants would anchor an African American Freemasonry that grew and prospered dramatically over the following decades.

However, the growth of black Freemasonry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought more aggressive challenges to their legitimacy from white Masons, aspersions to which black Masons responded. Professor Révauger’s volume affirms the centrality of black Freemasons’ quest for recognition from the white American Masons whom they never ceased identifying as their brethren. But the author recognizes the complexities of this quest, that black Masons eschewed approaching white Masons with “cap in hand” (p. 200), and instead pursued a sort of “entente cordiale . . . a kind of establishing of diplomatic relations between equals” (p. 201). As she explains, black Masons remained throughout “sticklers” to a fault for Masonic regularity. Yet this fidelity was not followed simply out of slavish mimicry of white Masons in order to solicit their regard. While, on the one hand, it evinced that their Masonry was in no way illegitimate—or “clandestine”—as white Masons contended, this fidelity on the other hand avowed the Masonic integrity of the Prince Hall Masons by themselves. Indeed, their unflagging commitment to ultimate fellowship with their white brethren promoted—more quietly, yet crucially—that they were the better Masons, the ones more faithful to its most precious Universalist tenets.

Yet Professor Révauger’s study probes even more deeply. Amid this history of organizational conflict, she discerns that black and white Masons actually shared a commonality grounded in black Masons’ continued adherence to what she calls “the white American model” of Freemasonry. In three crucial categories—belief in God, preferably Christian and Protestant; the inadmissibility of women; and the necessity for loyalty and patriotism to the state—black and white Masons found a surprising but enduring concordance. It is important to note that black Masons did not display a Christian faith to placate white Masons. Since the founding era of Prince Hall, black Masons were deeply embedded in a Christian faith and fervency that they and numerous other African Americans had crafted in the context of their singular oppression in America. Indeed, black Masons used their Christianity precisely to witness against white Masons—and white Americans as a whole—for failing to live the fellowship to which Jesus Christ called all humans. They understood themselves as prophets, those imbued much more fully with the Holy Spirit (and thus the better Christians) than those white Masons and Americans who hypocritically upheld the wilderness of slavery and brutal racial injustice. Nevertheless, both white and black Masons heartily agreed that belief in God was fundamental to being a Mason. Moreover they both decisively excluded women from induction into the mysteries and craft of Freemasonry. Although both enthusiastically supported the Order of the Eastern Star—a female auxiliary for the wives of Masons—they concurred that induction for men only was a landmark, or cornerstone, of Freemasonry. As Professor Révauger observes, both “give their female companions a completely subaltern role . . . where they can run receptions, charity bazaars, and other good works” (p. 91, 223). Finally she emphasizes that both agreed that Masons should submit faithfully to the duly appointed authorities in their jurisdiction and not use lodges as a base for opposing them. Masonry was not about politics but rather the enlightenment and moral improvement of its individual members. “Prince Hall Masons are constantly striving to show proof of their patriotism,” she has written. While the Prince Hall Masons certainly fought against slavery and racial inequality in the political sphere, they also understood that opposition as fundamental to their enlightenment and benevolence as Masons. When the governor of Massachusetts sought troops to suppress an insurgency of aggrieved and impoverished farmers in western Massachusetts in the 1780s, Hall and his brothers were among the first to offer to enlist (see pp. 192–93). Patriotism and service to defend a state that actually oppressed them also curiously bound black Masons to white (p. 222).

Yet this very commonality—the supposed foundation of an enduring identity shared by black and white Masons—in fact created problems, Professor Révauger observes, for forwarding the very objectives, recognition and fellowship, black Masons hoped commonality would. On the one hand it actually helped to nurture a stasis in the extant organizational order, because, despite fissures over race, broad agreement over other fundamentals tended to bind them together. Moreover, Professor Révauger illuminates how this bond of commonality actually worked to isolate African American Freemasons from other Masons who condemned American white supremacy and sought to ally with their black brethren against it. Perhaps only a scholar such as Cécile Révauger, who is herself a dedicated Mason from the Grand Orient of France—which readily embraces women as Masons and does not require that its members profess a belief in God—could perceive this complicated balancing of paradox that she argues is American Freemasonry. From her French perch she illustrates how despite the longstanding opposition of the Grand Orient to white American Masons’ exclusion of blacks from their lodges—and indeed to the whole of American white supremacy—Prince Hall Masons rejected, especially in the twentieth century, the benevolent overtures of Grand Orient Masons to collaborate with them. With white Masons, they refused to recognize as legitimate the Masonry of the Grand Orient because of its supposed “atheism,” its position on women, and even for what associations it had with opposition to established civil authority since the eighteenth century. Thus, black Masons living amid the historic racial oppression of the United States rejected a fraternal—and sororal—alliance to extend Masonic Universalism in order to sustain, Professor Révauger argues, their understanding of what constitutes a true Mason in common with the very white Masons whose embrace of racial exclusion and injustice they had contested since their inception with Prince Hall. As more American historians now study the ways in which African American activists after 1945—some of whom were Prince Hall Masons—summoned the international forum to aid them in their struggle against racial injustice in America, Professor Révauger calls us to recognize this—and other—lost opportunities to forge such alliances and how they point to a conservatism among African American Freemasons that conflicted with what was also evidently progressive and even radical about them.

Such is the strange and convoluted history Professor Révauger traces as she carefully follows the contest between white and black Masons over Masonic regularity, jurisdiction, and recognition. Certainly she recognizes that America is where African American Freemasons found themselves, and it was within that troubling context that they also had of necessity to navigate and negotiate their way as faithful Masons. In an environment where they could wield so little social leverage, they did the best they could. Thus the importance of this commonality she so astutely characterizes cannot be fully appreciated and analyzed outside of the separation it also nurtured, a separation that in American Masonry simultaneously testifies to the grossest hypocrisy and the most estimable integrity and perseverance.

Cécile Révauger has graced us with an elegant and erudite volume that every person intent on understanding American Freemasonry—not just that of black Freemasons—must read.

PETER P. HINKS, PH.D., is the author of the award-winning book To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (1997). He has worked extensively in public history and served as the senior research historian for several major exhibitions at the New York Historical Society, including “Slavery in New York” (2005), “New York Divided” (2006), and “Revolutions!” (2011). With the late Professor John Blassingame and Professor John McKivigan, he coedited Frederick Douglass’s three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, for Yale University Press. With Professor McKivigan, he was the editor of the Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition (2006). He has recently coauthored with Stephen Kantrowitz All Men Free and Brethren: Essays on the History of African American Freemasonry (2013).