Today marks the sixtieth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that ended racial segregation of schools. Most people know that Thurgood Marshall argued the case for the NAACP before the Supreme Court, but few people know that the long NAACP campaign for equality built on a foundation forged in part by Prince Hall Masons like George W. Crawford, an African American lawyer born in Alabama who received his legal training at Yale.
Fifty years after he graduated from law school and began his law career in 1904, including many cases that challenged segregation and work for the NAACP's civil rights division, Crawford learned of the historic victory of his younger colleague Marshall (also a Prince Hall Mason).
Soon after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision that spring in 1954, Crawford was speaking at a banquet with fellow Masons in Philadelphia. Obviously moved by the occasion, Crawford spoke eloquently of the long path to that victory. Finally a key barrier to equal education had come down. He said that through fraternal organizations, African Americans “first learned the power of a common cause.” He then put that lesson in a global context:
A Prince Hall Mason has an inescapable identification” with people of color around the world, he declared. From Greenland to Africa to India, he said, “geography cannot diminish your inevitable concern nor your inescapable attachment. You are in Little Rock, Arkansas, even though a postman leaves your mail at a street address in Pittsburgh. You are in Montgomery, Alabama even though you vote from Manhattan. You are in Johannesburg, South Africa even though a census taker registers you on the south side of Chicago… Be proud … to be a Negro American. Be proud to be a Negro Mason.
Several years ago I wrote The Lost Symbol’s Masonic Temple about a Masonic temple in Washington, DC for Smithsonian. Some time after that, I learned about another side of Freemasonry. That led me to look harder at the fraternal society that my grandfather belonged to, in black and white. That story appeared in Southern Changes.
It is the story of Hidden Powers, and how two branches of the Masons faced off, and a few men and women who challenged the established order.
African American Freemasons laid groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This is a story in that struggle.
Freemasonry started as a stoneworker's guild in the middle ages, but by the time it arrived in America it had become a men’s club for civic leadership. By 1900 one out of three American men belonged to the Masons or another fraternal society. Millions of women joined their sister organizations. The Masonic compass and sphinx were iconic parts of everyday life, as recognizable as Apple’s bitten fruit today.
But American Freemasonry is really a tale of two secret fraternities, one white and one black.
African Americans, denied access to Masonry by white Americans, chartered their own version in the 1700s and proved that Freemasonry was more than secret signs and handshakes. It opened doors to democratic institutions that were previously closed to them.
In these characters, we find a strand linking African American Masons and the challenge to oppression and inequality, using the courts and a formidable national network to end segregation.
It started with Prince Hall, a Boston freedman and veteran of Bunker Hill, who saw Freemasonry not just as a men’s club but as a forum for transforming their future, and founded the first black Masonic lodge in the 1780s. For over a century, Prince Hall Masons grew a national network.
In October 1901 the two strands of Masonry met at the White House, represented by President Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington, over a secret dinner (soon leaked).
When Washington's conciliatory approach failed, W.E.B. Du Bois, another Prince Hall Mason, launched a more straightforward assault on inequality, and founded the NAACP. Over the next half century, black Masons and the NAACP waged a legal campaign for equality.
Hidden Powers explores this fight for civil rights before the Civil Rights era through key characters, known and unknown, from Prince Hall to Thurgood Marshall, against a national backdrop of violence and unrest. George W. Crawford, a little-known figure in the fight for equality, provides a key to the story.
Watch the video for an introduction to Crawford's story and his legacy.
