As late as the 1730s Continental Europeans knew very little about a British form of sociability, the Masonic lodge. All that would change quite quickly as lodges spread from Paris and The Hague to the whole of Western Europe as well as to the eastern cities of the American colonies. In Paris the Masonic notion that “all men meet upon the level” gripped the attention of a “Negro trumpeter” in the king's guard. We know about his membership from manuscript letters sent between lodge brothers. And we know that in this period Africans were recruited for European armies.

Try to imagine how this trumpeter found his way to one of these small gatherings. Did the new Freemasons seek him out? Did membership offer consolation for what could only have been a lonely existence? Or did this man find in the civic theology of Freemasonry an egalitarian message, an experience of fraternity that affirmed his sense of self. We will never know about the trumpeter for, aside from two letters, the record is silent. Two generations later and an ocean away we can begin to understand what black men in a white society could take from Freemasonry.

The expert essays in this history of African American Freemasonry give unprecedented access to an aspect of the African American struggle for equality long hidden from view. The essays move from the 1780s and 1790s and the remarkable life and philosophy of Prince Hall to a set of nineteenth-century black Masonic leaders such as Absalom Jones, Robert Allen, John Hilton, Lewis Hayden – the list could be twice as long – who spoke with deep eloquence and passion about the necessity and right of equality. Throughout the century, before and after the Civil War, they sought friendship and reconciliation with their white brothers. For decades white Freemasons refused to recognize their black brethren, denigrated them for having not been born free, and denied the validity of their Masonic constitution despite the fact that it had come from the Grand Lodge in London. It is quite frankly an appalling record, and one that persisted into the first decade of this century, when finally serious efforts were made to bring the two forms of American Freemasonry into closer contact and fellowship. It is still quite common, particularly in the southern states, to lecture at Masonic gatherings where not a black man is to be seen.

The importance of the story told by these essays lies not in the banality of white prejudice, but in the meaning that black Freemasons extracted from what Corey D. B. Walker calls the civic theology of Freemasonry. Combined with the black churches and other forms of civil society, the lodges reinforced pride, skill at governance, voting, the necessity of tithes, charity for brothers and their families who had fallen on hard times, and, not least, competence and self-confidence at public speaking. In short the lodges functioned for American blacks – just as they had for generations of Europeans – as schools of government.

Black lodges provided spaces where men could speak frankly about what they saw in American life and institutions. In 1865 Lewis Hayden told it as he saw it: “The Masons of Massachusetts, the white Masons I mean, have not yet caught the spirit of the age; they are still exclusive, intolerant and proscriptive” (108). In contrast it must be noted that various European grand lodges welcomed fellowship with black American lodges.

Such speaking of one's mind combined with active civic engagement can also be found among the female (and male) members of the Eastern Star. The leadership provided by women such as Sue M. Brown allowed the order to become a laboratory for the training of a generation of women in racial leadership roles. Yet by the 1920s tension existed about the exact role of black women within the Masonic movement, a tension that persists in both white and black Freemasonry to this day.

Like their white counterparts, black Freemasons quarreled about the nature of leadership, about excessively zealous efforts to recruit new members. A late nineteenth-century effort to form one national grand lodge, a unity to match that of the united states within the federation, led to power struggles similar to what can be seen in the eighteenth century in Europe. There the issue was social status and the role of the aristocracy. A power grab was feared in both places but as a result of very different social tensions. In short, tensions existed within the history of both black and white lodges, although, in the American case, no common cause arose to bind them together. Race trumped every other factor in the fateful segregation of American Freemasonry. We can only hope that in an earlier age our black trumpeter faced a very different set of circumstances.

Every one of these essays is revelatory. While the tone at times may be too laudatory the impulse behind the volume can only be commended. There is a massive amount of primary source material to be found in the American lodges, much of it moldering away in garages, locked cabinets, and private papers. A dedicated effort will be needed to save it so that many more fine volumes such as this one can see the scholarly light of day.