Who is prince hall

They formed their own lodge, African Lodge 1, when the British left. However, they were not granted full stature by the Grand Lodge of England until The actual charter arrived in , at which time Hall became the Worshipful Master.

Even though they had full stature, most white freemason lodges in America did not treat them equally. Hall helped other black Masonic lodges form.

Upon his death in , they became the Prince Hall Grand Lodges. There are 46 lodges across the United States today. Many rumors of the birth of Prince Hall have arisen. Few records and papers have been found of him either in Barbados where it was rumored that he was born, but no record of birth, by church or state, has been found there, and none in Boston.

All 11 of the counties were searched and churches with baptismal records were examined without a find of the name of Prince Hall.

The first record that we have of Prince Hall is a manumission paper filed by William Hall of Boston, and found in the Boston Athenaeum. This document tells us. Upon that account, we have given him his freedom. Prince began learning the leather tanning trade.

In , he fathered a son, Primus Hall, whose mother, Delia, was a servant in another household. A month after his birth, Primus was given to Ezra Trask of Danvers, Connecticut, who raised the boy to be a shoemaker.

In , Prince joined the Congregational Church as a full communicant, and shortly after married Sarah Ritchie, a slave. A month after the Boston Massacre in , William Hall presented Prince with his certificate of manumission, making the Barbadian-born slave a free man.

The following summer, having already buried his first wife Sarah, Prince married Flora Gibbs, a free African-American woman from Gloucester, Massachusetts. In , James Swan, a Son of Liberty involved in the Boston Tea Party, summed up the position of these abolitionists in a printed article. Yet, as a Free Black living in Boston in , he was unquestionably aware of the arguments being made. When the Revolutionary crisis in Boston called upon free men to stand against British tyranny, Prince Hall joined the ranks of the Patriots.

The myth survives that Prince participated in the Battle of Bunker Hill. Whether Prince fought as a soldier or not, his major contribution would come in politics, not on the battlefield.

Later, they were granted a temporary permit to meet as a lodge by the Society of Masons, and the lodge provided a convenient structure around which to organize the abolitionist movement. On January 13, , the African Lodge submitted to the General Court of Massachusetts a petition calling for the end of slavery. For years, he protested the lack of schools for black children and finally established one in his own home.

In his last published speech, his charge to the African Lodge in June , Hall spoke of mob violence against blacks: "Patience, I say; for were we not possessed of a great measure of it, we could not bear up under the daily insults we meet with in the streets of Boston, much more on public days of recreation. How, at such times, are we shamefully abused, and that to such a degree, that we may truly be said to carry our lives in our hands, and the arrows of death are flying about our heads A year later, his lodge honored him by changing its name to Prince Hall Grand Lodge.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Massachusetts Archives previous next.