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John Marrant and the Meaning of Early Black Freemasonry
Peter P. Hinks
Let all my brethren Masons consider what they are called to—May God grant you an humble heart to fear God and love his commandments; then and only then you will in sincerity love your brethren: And you will be enabled ... to be kindly affectioned one to another, with brotherly love in honour preferring one another ... This we profess to believe as Christians and as Masons.1
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| On June 24, 1789, at the Feast of Saint John the Baptist, one of the most important days in the Masonic calendar, the Reverend John Marrant, chaplain of Boston's African Lodge no. 459 of Freemasons, delivered a momentous sermon at Mr. Vinal's school in the South End before an audience of black and white Masons as well as non-Masons. Marrant's oration occupies a preeminent place in the history of Freemasonry among African Americans. It was the first printed formal address before the first African Lodge and among the first printed works by an African American in the late eighteenth century. Marrant's oration broached racial prejudice and slavery in America and condemned them as the antithesis of the fellowship and benevolence Freemasons cherished. More significantly, the sermon identified and extolled the meaningfulness of the African Lodge's founding and the relationship it bore to the deepest virtues and origins of not only Freemasonry but also Christianity as well—virtues and origins that Marrant would clarify in novel contexts. Though Freemasonry commonly eschewed religious sectarianism, Marrant chose to embed it in the distinctive doctrines of benevolence advanced by proponents of neo-Edwardsian New Divinity. Though he abominated the gross exploitation of people of African descent throughout the Atlantic world, his oration was ultimately much more praise for the novel and providential founding of African Lodge no. 459 than protest against slavery and racial proscription. |
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Historians often fail to recognize that the Prince Hall Masons make up the oldest enduring black institution in America. Black Freemasonry in America began in 1775 when Prince Hall and several other Boston free blacks were initiated into a military lodge of Irish soldiers then stationed with British forces in the occupied city. After British troops evacuated Boston in March 1776, Hall and his brothers remained without an official lodge charter. Their warrant entitled them only to meet, march in public processions, and bury their dead, not to initiate new members. The black Masons finally received a charter from the Grand Lodge of England in May 1787 and were entered as African Lodge no. 459 on its rolls. Freemasonry quickly spread among black males in Boston and within the next several years into other urban centers along the northeastern seaboard, especially Providence and Philadelphia. Members of African Lodge no. 459 overstepped the authority granted in their charter by chartering new lodges in these cities. Such extralegal practices coupled with the lodge having been chartered through England led many white Masons by the early nineteenth century to consider the African Lodge clandestine, or illegitimate, particularly in light of the exclusive sovereignty claimed by the newly independent white Grand Lodge in Massachusetts. According to The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, only a grand lodge, not a local lodge, could charter new lodges.2 |
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