"Are We Men?": Prince Hall, Martin Delany, and the Masculine Ideal in Black Freemasonry, 1775-1865

Abstract

There is hardly a more original experiment in social (re)production of black masculine ideal than in ritual formalizations of identity and ideality in African-American Freemasonry. Probably no other cultural movement before Civil Rights campaigns of twentieth century has been more emblematic of social and psychic drama of black masculinity in American cultural context. And yet, so little about historical and cultural impact of black Freemasonry has caught scholar's attention. Even though black Freemasonry offered African-American male his first opportunity to find himself (Crawford 18), in words of one early scholar, academic neglect of its historical and cultural impact has been rule. Through their Masonic affiliation, well-known ex-slaves and free black men like David Walker, William Wells Brown, Josiah Henson, John Marrant, Richard Allen, and Booker T. Washington, for example, were helped, as it were, along the to selfhood (Crawford 18).1 The present essay maps a course along Masonic road to self-hood which, in its aim to make men, is as determinately masculinist as it is Masonic. More specifically, I delineate how black Freemasonry in colonial and Victorian eras helped invent black masculine ideal philo-