A NOBLE FIGHT: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America by Corey D. B. Walker (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A NOBLE FIGHT: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America by Corey D. B. Walker Jacob Dorman A NOBLE FIGHT: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America. By Corey D. B. Walker. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2008. Corey D. B. Walker begins his book with a reference to poet and polymath James Weldon Johnson, who once referred to his initiation into “the freemasonry of the race” to describe his entry into “the best class of colored people” in Jacksonville, Florida. With roots in the Revolutionary War era, African American freemasonry has long been one of the backbones of African American society, to the point where its exclusive, privately controlled networks could not only describe Masonic lodges, but also, in Johnson’s formulation, could describe the exclusive social networks that African Americans developed amongst themselves in a variety of realms. Whether metaphorically or literally, freemasonry delineated a set of passwords and rituals that guarded Black-controlled, Black-defined spheres and facilitated a range of community- and identity-building activities. As one might imagine, the range of functions that Masonic spaces enabled has been diverse and profound. By exploring African American freemasonry, scholars in the last decade have been able to explore Black masculinity, Black community structures, and the Black public sphere as resistance to Black oppression in material and ideational terms in the more than two centuries since a Barbadian-born soldier named Prince Hall started the first all-Black lodge on American soil. Walker’s book is an authoritative and innovative contribution to our understanding of freemasonry, giving credence to Lawrence Levine’s 1977 prediction that “when their role is finally studied with the care it demands, I suspect it will become evident that they played a subversive part.” 1 Scholars of European freemasonry have long posited that the Masonic brotherhood—which at times included women and in other cases evolved women’s affiliates—served as a kind of laboratory for democracy, modeling democratic practices and training its members in the arts of debate, voting, and citizenship in [End Page 83] societies where the franchise was limited or nonexistent. By spreading the gospel of democracy and the skills needed to enact democratic citizenship, freemasonry was a crucial part of developing a public sphere in royalist European countries and in speeding the demise of the absolute rule of royals. 2 In the last decade, scholars of Black freemasonry have demonstrated that freemasonry served an analogous function among African Americans, given implicit and explicit disenfranchisement for most of U.S. history. Corey D. B. Walker has written the fullest treatment of the role of freemasonry in training African Americans in the arts of democratic citizenship thus far, “rethinking the connections between the cognitive processes and cultural practices of voluntary associations,” as he puts it (4). For Walker, as for other scholars of European and American freemasonry, the brotherhood does not reflect the logics and practices of citizenship in the larger society as much as it provides a critique that helps provoke the expansion of democracy. 3 Walker splits his text into two historical moments: the Revolutionary War era and postemancipation Charlottesville, Virginia. In the first moment, he is interested especially in what he calls the “African diasporic zone of cultural contact” with freemasonry, utilizing theories of cultural formation that recognize that although freemasonry resonated with African secret societies, asymmetries of power in the Atlantic world meant that such traditions met on a very uneven playing field that privileged European cultures and institutions. In the second moment, he illuminates the struggles for the franchise in an era of Black disenfranchisement, demonstrating that the Black public sphere, and debates about democracy, rights, and citizenship, extend deep into the associational life of Black communities, in realms that have not often been included in accounts of Black politics or Black civic engagement outside of the growing body of recent Black Masonic studies. The author argues “for a critical understanding of the culture and language of Freemasonry as a novel political space for interrogating the problems, prospects, and possibilities of the democratic project, thereby reinvigorating our attention to how material formations can reveal—both conceptually and methodologically—new...