African Americans on the Great Plains: An Anthology

6. A Socioeconomic Portrait of Prince Hall Masonry in Nebraska, 1900–1920

On March 6, 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.IndependencedidnotaltertheattitudeofwhiteAmericanMasons ; 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 aflliated with the Missouri Grand Lodge organized the lrst 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 signilcantly, making it feasible for four Omaha lodges to join with those in the other lve towns to form the independent Prince Hall Mason Grand Lodge of Nebraska in 1919. A Socioeconomic Portrait of Prince Hall Masonry in Nebraska, 1900–1920 dennis n. mihelich chapter 6 Prince Hall Masonry in Nebraska 145 Existing scholarship argues that Masonry among blacks was a middle-class phenomenon that produced class strife in the African American community. Until recently in the post civil rights era, the delineation of classes within the segregated black caste in the United States has produced conmicting 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 socio-economic interpretation.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. An analysis of the few rosters in the Nebraska materials for the pre-Grand Lodge years supports the multi-class interpretation and highlights the nineteenth-century origins of the characteristic. For the pre–World War I years, however, anecdotal evidence, such as stories in the black press, suggested that Prince Hall Masonry in Nebraska at the turn to the twentieth century took on an elitist aura. Obviously, news coverage stressed the entertainments of the “leading lights” of the community, meaning its professionals, politicians, and entrepreneurs. In comparison, the rosters reveal the wide variety of unskilled, skilled, and service-area jobs held by the majority of Prince Hall 146 mihelich Masons. They also reveal how specilc jobs changed labor categories as the Nebraska economy evolved and the Great Migration altered the circumstances of the black community. For example, barbering for a white clientele offered some blacks an opportunity at skilled service or entrepreneurship that largely disappeared after World War I. On the other hand, unskilled and semi-skilled industrial employment in the rapidly expanding meat-packing companies mushroomed during and after the First World War. Prince Hall Masons before 1900 The oldest roster in the Nebraska lles lists the membership of only one Omaha lodge, Rescue No. 25 (Iowa Jurisdiction) in 1899. It portrays a multi-class group, although the end-of-the-century date means it cannot necessarily be read backward to an earlier era. The occupations of seventeen of twenty-three members who could be traced included four barbers, four porters, three retired, two laborers, a postal clerk, a lreman, a waiter, and a janitor.2 These were among the survivors of the depressed 1890s that had witnessed the diminution of the black population of Omaha from 4,566 in 1890 to 3...