That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture

6. The Prince Hall Masons and the African American Church: The Labors of Grand Master and Bishop James Walker Hood, 1864–1918

151 In the late nineteenth century, James Walker Hood was the bishop of the North Carolina Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the grand master of the North Carolina Grand Lodge of Prince Hall Masons. In his forty-four years as a bishop, half of that time as the senior bishop of the denomination, Reverend Hood was instrumental in planting and nurturing his denomination’s churches throughout the Carolinas and Virginia. The founder of North Carolina’s denominational newspaper and college, the author of five books, including two histories of the AMEZ Church, the appointed assistant superintendent of public instruction and a magistrate in his adopted state, Hood had a career that was representative of the broad mainstream of black denominational leaders who came to the South from the North during and after the Civil War. Concurrently, he was the superintendent of the Southern Jurisdiction of the Prince Hall Masonic Grand Lodge of New York and a moving force behind the creation of the region’s black Masonic lodges— often founding them in the same places as his fledgling churches. At his death in 1918, the Masonic Quarterly Review hailed Hood as “one of the strong pillars of our foundation.”1 If Bishop Hood’s life was indeed, according to his biographer, “a prism through which to understand black denominational leadership in the South during the period 1860–1920,” then what does his leadership of both a Prince Hall Grand Lodge and the AMEZ Church tell us about the nexus of fraternal lodges and African American Christianity at the turn into the twentieth century?2 chapter 6 The Prince Hall Masons and the African American Church The Labors of Grand Master and Bishop James Walker Hood, 1864–1918 152 | Beyond the White, Protestant Middle Class Scholars have noted but not substantially investigated the significance of fraternal orders for African American social life. At the turn of the century, W.E.B. DuBois saw hope for the uplift of blacks through “mastery of the art of social organized life” in them.3 In 1910, Howard Odum ranked black fraternal orders equal in membership to the black church and “sometimes” more important.4 According to the 1915 Who’s Who of the Colored Race, two-thirds of the most prominent African Americans held membership in both a national fraternal order and a black church. Forty-two percent of those holding joint memberships were Prince Hall Masons, one-third of whom were clergymen or church officers .5 Subsequent research has explored the economic, class, and political importance of these orders and their influence on black masculinity while documenting their continued pervasive presence in African American society.6 Yet only recently have investigators ventured into the meaning of fraternal beliefs and rituals for African Americans or explored the relationship between fraternal orders and the black church.7 In addition to the tendency of historians to underemphasize rituals and beliefs, the study of black fraternal orders has suffered from a paucity of evidence. The otherwise prolific Bishop Hood left few references to his lodge membership. Unlike the primary materials of white lodges, which pose a problem not so much of finding as of understanding, those of Prince Hall lodges are hard to locate. This has to do partly with the scarcity of these records and partly with the still enforced secrecy of the order.8 Nevertheless, several Prince Hall histories, some state proceedings , and a scattered national array of lodge information, members’ writings, and newspaper accounts are available. In Hood’s case in particular , reading the available annual proceedings of the North Carolina Grand Lodge alongside the minutes of the AMEZ North Carolina Conference allows us to observe similarities and differences between the two organizations and the role he played in each. The activities of the Prince Hall Masons complemented the work of the AMEZ Church, this chapter argues, by providing the black community with additional symbolic, ideological, and organizational resources to resist racism and find its way through the contentious arena of American civil society. Hood’s North Carolina Prince Hall fraternity drew a considerable portion of its membership from the rolls of his North Carolina denomination. Though different in their beliefs and ritual lives, the two organizations were structurally similar. The origins of their relationship can be traced to the post-revolutionary era, when both mutual benefit societies and the black church provided seedbeds of autonomy and Prince...