Would-be writers will take note of some of the challenges and methods use by Walkes in writing his books.
THE HOW AND WHY OF
BLACK SQUARE AND COMPASS
BY
JOSEPH A. WALKES, JR FPS
Edited by
Tony Pope, FPS (Australia)
Note: The front cover of Black Square and Compass was done by Lee Sherman Brooks of Jamestown, New York. I had asked him to show Prince Hall Passing on Freemasonry to Blacks of the future. So you see the hand of Prince Hall passing the Constitution of Freemasonry (PHA) and the Square to modern man.
I arrived at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (USA) in August 1971, from the Republic of Korea, where I served a 18 month tour with the United States Army. I arrived at my new military station, with a footlocker full of Masonic books, reflecting my love of the literature of the Craft. In those more than a hundred books, which I carried with me was nothing on Prince Hall Freemasonry, which was always a great frustration to me, there was actually so little on the subject at that time.
One of the books that impressed me greatly, being a military career person, was “Sword and Trowel: The Story of Traveling and Military Lodges” co-authored by John Black Vrooman and Allen E. Roberts. [1]
In the book there was a facsimile of the charter of Phoenix Lodge No. 1 with the caption “Warrant granted by “Compact Grand Lodge” of New York for a Negro Military Lodge during the Civil War.”[2] According io the charter was issued in 1864 in response to a petition from the members of the “29th U. S. Colored Troops, but the authors point out:[3]
There was no 29th U S Colored Troops, but it was possible and probably the printer reversed the “9” and it should have been the 26th Colored Regiment sponsored by the Union League Club of New York. A few other Negro regimental lodges known to have existed, one being the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Militia at Fort Wagner. More recently Military Lodges have been carried on the rolls of several of the Prince Hall Grand Lodges. The Prince Hall Grand Lodge in Missouri carried three such Lodges on its register in 1920. They were Malta Military Lodge 138 at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona; Tyre Military Lodge 143, Columbus, New Mexico, and Joppa Military Camp Lodge 150, Stotsenberg Camp, Pampange, Phillipine Islands.”
I will always be grateful to Bros. Vrooman and Allen for there labor of love, in this masterful book. Years later, Allen Roberts became a great friend of mine, Vrooman would be instrumental in my joining the Philalethes Society, and I ended up with the actual warrant for Malta Military Lodge in my possession - all stranger then fiction, if I have to say so myself.
It didn’t take me long to learn that Fort Leavenworth was the home of what is known as The Command and General Staff College, a substantial military school that trained field- grade officers, of all branches of the American Armed Forces, and International Officers from many countries around the world. I was also to learn that it had a massive library geared to the military, and I was authorized to use it.
What follows is a story worth telling and may be hard for some to fully understand, it is there that I learned the spirit, if not the advantage of true Masonic research. I took the Vrooman/Roberts book to the military library, and within a few minutes found to my delight that there was a book on the 55th Massachusetts by a Captain Luis F. Emilio, a Caucasian officer serving in that ground-breaking Black unit, and had written the history of that civil war contingent. [4] In it I discovered these mesmerizing lines:
“First Sergeant Gray of Company C had received a Masonic Charter and organized a Lodge on Morris Island. The Meeting place was a dry spot in the marsh near our camp, where boards were set up to shelter the members.” [5]
I was astonished! I had hit the “Mother Lode” in my initial research, as the writers words jumped out at me from the pages and the pen of Captain Emilo; it was indeed a blessing; that would take on a life of its own, which I later titled “Prince Hall Masonry in the Civil War”.
It was a find that had a major impact in the writing of “Black Square and Compass”. I later find a book on the history of the 29th Regiment Connecticut Colored Infantry, the correct designation of the unit, in the library. Both books had photographs which turned out to be members of the two Lodges. Using the research facilities of the Library, I was to begin my search to learn all I could of the members of both Lodges, who they were and what role Masonry play in there lives. Captain Emilo was without a doubt a Freemason from the statements that he wrote in several passages throughout his book. Using the military records of the National Archives in Washington, DC, I was able to receive copies of the military records of all those Prince Hall Brethren that made up both units.
It was dramatic and historic for me to learn that Black Prince Hall Freemasons were actually holding Lodge within the battle lines of the Civil War or the “War of the Rebellion”, as the military called it.
It was during this period, living in the barracks alone at the time, that I learned how to do proper research. One thing I quickly learned that it only took a determination to seek after the information I needed, and that one thing would lead to another, furthermore as I was dealing with Black history I learned the first cardinal rule, to verify, verify, verify - not to leave anything to chance, leaving no stones unturned, as “they” (meaning Whites) would do everything in their power to discredit ones research, if it dealt with Prince Hall Freemasonry, as they always did, or so I believed. Nevertheless I learned that research, especially Masonic research, really had little to do with race, although race alone kept Freemasonry apart in the United States.
I had signed up for a English course at the post, as my command of English grammar left much to be desired , I was no Oscar Wilde who called himself a lord of the language in his painful De Profundis. He had a command of the English language, a genius that I did not have, as I felt it would help me in the writing of my book. His stories, poetry, essays and letters had always left me amazed, at his daring and range of beauty. I often thought of his prose as I worked on Black Square and Compass.
My teacher was a Mrs. Virginia Ehlers of McLouth, Kansas, a very kind and dedicated women who was White. She would later take time after work to come to my home (I had since been married) and go over the manuscript with me, correcting my many grammatical errors. For her efforts I will always be grateful. I also received a book that had been published in my childhood, I had remembered when it was released for sale, but never had a chance to read, so I had some book- finders locate the book for me, it was, Kenneth Roberts “I Wanted to Write.” [6] He was one of my most inspiring authors in my youth, and it was to have a major impact on my writing. Years later I mentioned the significance of the name to the son of my friend Allen Roberts Kenneth D.Robets (a Lewis), who would later publish one of my books. There was no other book that had such an impact on my work on Black Square and Compass, as that dedicated book, which described the almost unbelievable efforts that Kenneth Roberts took in researching his subjects, if nothing else it taught me, to re-write, re-write and re-write again, a point that I was to learn very well.[7]
There was one other aspect to my book. In Leavenworth, the first city of Kansas, outside of Fort Leavenworth, both being named for the same individual, I discovered the men who were called Buffalo Soldiers. The town had quite a number of them. They were old men, but to listen to their stories, was for a soldier like myself, paradise enow , as the poem goes. I met these men and sat at their feet, as they spoke of their lives in the military, when it had two armies: one White the other Black. I had discovered that my Grand Lodge, the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Missouri, had in fact chartered a number of Lodges attached to the Buffalo solders, of the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiment. I would write “the Black soldier brought with him not only his religion and his desire for true freedom, but his Masonry as well.” I called these brave men “Magnificent”, thus the title of chapter five of my book, “Those Magnificent Masonic Buffalo Soldiers”. Listening to their exploits and finding them still alive, while not being recognized for the heroes that they were, also had a major impact on my writing that chapter.
I began something perhaps that most Freemason’s do not attempt. I was determined to find copies of my Grand Lodge Proceedings, all of them, and I began to search old Black books stores all over the country seeking them. I sent letters across the United States looking for copies of them. It took a while and was for the most part expensive, but an expression of my love for Masonry in general, Prince Hall Freemasonry in particular, and my own Grand Lodge. As I located the books, I was to discover a couple of photographs of the Buffalo Soldiers in military uniform and in Masonic regalia, a find of historical importance. What a discovery for this writer! Words alone can not express my joy, which gave me the will and the drive to continue with my research. I had already taken two years, to research the life and times of our “patron saint” Prince Hall, of which I began my opening chapters with his inspiring history. I had searched all over the state of Massachusetts seeking copies of documents concerning Prince Hall. It was a difficult task, not being able to go in person where the material was filed. However with determination, and my eye on the prize – plus a few postage stamps – I was able to accomplish the needed research. I began the Chapter with “One cannot begin a serious work on Prince Hall Freemasonry without first presenting some facts concerning the man and the legend, responsible for the creation of the fraternity that bears his name.” Prince Hall became my hero, and I think it showed in my book.
I was to later learn that Prince Hall Freemasons played a major role in the building of Black America and what ever Black America became was due in part to those who were members of the Craft. A point that I would always stress, which I stressed in Black Square and Compass and which originally kept the book from being published is:
The idea is simple, but the implications are profound and require a rethinking of the time-line of Black America which began with the black pioneers and not the white founding fathers. The white founding fathers were not the black founding fathers; the white constitutional convention was not the black constitutional convention; the white beginning was not the black beginning. For, as everybody knows, the white fathers defined the white beginning as a black negation. To them, and too many who came after them, America was a white place defined negatively by the absence of blackness. The Puritans’ celebrated dream of a City on the Hill was a dream of a white city. The vision of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, all slave holders, was a vision of white. The hypocrisy of patriots who wrote liberty and lived slavery. [8]
I had to remind myself at each step in the process a quotation from Bro. W. E. B. Dubois “Throughout history the powers of single black men flash, here and there, like a falling star, and die, sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brilliance.”[9]
I ran into a nasty incident within the pages of my Grand Lodge Proceedings, which emphasized the hypocrisy of hatred toward my race, and I placed it in my book for all to see. I named it after its title found within the Proceedings, became one of the most overly criticized portion of the entire book - I called it “Niggerdom in Regalia!” It dealt with a man who was the Masonic editor of a newspaper in New York, and a news dispatch from Natchez, Mississippi, concerning a Prince Hall Lodge named after the first Black United States Senator, Bro. H. R. Revels, and formed under dispensation from Grand Master Alexander Clark of Missouri. Senator Revels had been a minister of a Church in my newly adopted home town of Leavenworth, a Mason from my Grand Lodge of Missouri, and in 1858 gave a Masonic lecture to the brethren of Prince Hall Lodge No. 10 (now No. 1) in St. Louis, Missouri and said:
We so far, with such historical data as we at present can reach, can see no essential difference between the course of our colored Lodges and the primary American Grand Lodges of our pale brethren. If, therefore, they cannot affiliate with us, we beg of them not hastily to condemn us. We feel that while they condemn us, they must condemn themselves, to a great degree. We believe too, that in time a spirit less marked by prejudice will prevail toward us, which we hope to merit and to earn by a close adherence to the ancient pattern of most honorable Masons, and by our personal efforts to improve in all the moral and social qualities so ennobling to human nature.
It was a prophetic statement that saw what we find today, the recognition of Prince Hall Freemasonry throughout most of Universal Freemasonry.
I searched the Proceedings of the white Grand Lodge of Mississippi concerning the “Niggerdom in Regalia”this incident. I was shocked at the hatred I found, by those who were called Freemasons. As I followed the story, I was disgusted at the attitude of those from that Grand Lodge who were involved. While the newspaper article tried to hide the name of the Worshipful Master of the Lodge that called the Prince Hall Grand Master “a bastard, spurious and illegitimate Masons”, I published his name so history would record what a vile individual he was. His name E. George De Lap, and while I wanted to find out more about this individual, I did not have the time, and I cast him off as a non-person, too gross to be important - a Mason who was not a Mason, who represented what I found wrong in Freemasonry in America, and the thing I had decided to use my skill as a writer and researcher to fight.
Prince Hall Freemason, Dr. W. E. B. Dubois would write:
One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner, or that Thomas Jefferson had Mulatto children, or that Alexander had (Black) blood, and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty of course with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.[10]
I began the “Niggerdom in Regalia” chapter with a apt quotation from Shakespeare:
The man who steals my purse, steals trash;
Twas mine, tis his, and may be slave to thousands.
But he who pilfers from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
But makes me poor indeed
In contrast, I told the story of the German Masonic writer and scholar Joseph G. Findel, who was made an honorary Prince Hall Grand Master; it was a history worth telling, of a dedicated true Freemason who fought for the recognition of Prince Hall Freemasonry in his day. I came across the Masonic jewelry that was given to Bro. Findel by the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, exhibited in the Masonic Museum of the Grand Lodge Zur Sonne (the Sun) in Bayreuth, Bavaria, and then found a photograph of members of a Prince Hall Military Lodge in Germany visiting that Museum caused me to write:
And so, a small portion of Prince Hall Masonry is preserved, thousand of miles from the country of Prince Hall, and within the glass case are the jewels of a Grand Master, symbols of the legendary Lewis Hayden and the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. They represent the true stature of European Freemasons, Bro Findel, and others who were true and just to the spirit of Freemasonry. The jewels represent the struggle of Prince Hall Freemasonry to be accorded its rightful place in the Masonic community. They symbolize the fight against American racism as practiced by the Caucasian Grand Lodges then, as they practice today, and against the fascism of Hitlerism against Freemasonry in Europe.[11]
As I look back on it today, these thoughts touched my soul, and were very meaningful to me, as it represented and came from every fiber of my body: my true love of Freemasonry and the abuse I saw within, what some one would call, the gently Craft.
Then I discovered Martin R. Delany whom I called the “Militant Master Mason”. In him I found myself. In writing about him, I was writing about myself. Here was a Black man, as black as tar, that found joy in his blackness, an individual who was proud and arrogant, a Prince Hall Freemason who labored beyond the call of duty for the race. I recorded one of his most famous quotes, which he made in answer to the newly enacted Fugitive Slave Act which gave slave owners the right to seek runaway slaves where ever they thought they might be:
Honorable Mayor, whatever ideas of liberty I may have, have been received form reading the lives of your revolutionary fathers. I have learned that a man has a right to defend his castle with his life, even unto taking a life. Sir, my house in my castle, in that castle are none but my wife and my children, as free as the angels of heaven, and whose liberty is as scared as the pillars of God. If any man approaches that house in search of a slave, I care not who he may be, whether constable or sheriff, magistrate or even judge of the Supreme Court – nay, let it be who sanctioned this act to become a law, surrounded by his cabinet as his body guard, with the Declaration of Independence waving above his head as his banner, and the constitution of his country upon his breast as his shield, - if he crosses the threshold of my door, and I do not lay him a lifeless corpse at my feet, I hope the grave may refuse my body a resting place, and righteous Heaven my spirit a home. No! He cannot enter that house and we both live.[12]
It was as if I was speaking, it came from the very soul of us both, a fire inside, an abhorrence, as Bennett would write, “that was publicly held forth, this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy to be recorded and remembered in succeeding ages.”[13]
This was the gist of my work, my Black Square and Compass, my very soul! I wanted to show again in the words of Dr. Du Boies:
… the African-American is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelations of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, an African-American; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
As I saw it, a Freemason and a Prince Hall Freemason, two souls two thoughts, in a divided Freemasonry, not in harmony with this world wide fraternity. To paraphrase Dr. Duboiss as student of Freemasonry, to paraphrase Dr. Dubois:
I want to be fair and judicial; to let no searing of the memory by intolerable insult and cruelty make me fail to sympathize with human frailties and contradiction, in the eternal paradox of good and evil. But armed and warned by all this, and fortified by long study of the facts, I stand aghast at what American Masonic historians have done in this field.
When the book was finished, I sent the manuscript to Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply Company in Richmond, Virginia seeking to have it published. They read it and turned it down, with a statement that they didn’t like what I wrote about George Washington, being a slave owner. But nevertheless the statement was true, so I in turn published the book myself, and it began to sell off of the book shelves. It was a “hit,” and Macoy would later come back to me, and ask to publish it, which they have done up to the present time, some twenty odd years ago.
However, as soon as it came out it was attacked by a number of Caucasian Freemasons, so called Masonic scholars, Harold V. B. Voorhis, Alphonse Cerza, Henry Wilson Coil, and John Sherman who wrote: “The subtitle of this book is ‘200 Years of Prince Hall Freemasonry’ and is misleading because it is not a history of the Prince Hall Organization. While the book has many items of interest for Prince Hall members, it has little of any value for others.”[14]
William Shakespeare had Marc Antony say “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.”
John Sherman the Grand Lodge Historian, Grand Lodge of Massachusetts which claims its founding in 1733, however George Draffen writes that it is in reality 1792 [15], and its own member Jacob Norton[16] stated it was formed by “Revolution and Assumption” not regular. Harold V. B. Voorhis of the Grand Lodge of New Jersey, which was founded by only one lodge not the required three,[17] and Alphonse Cerza, of the Grand Lodge of Illinois, a Grand Lodge that died several times and gave rebirth to itself,[18] yet these men would sit in judgment of Prince Hall Freemasonry. There is something wrong with that picture!
Today, most of Prince Hall Freemasonry has joined the family of universal Freemasonry, as most of the Grand Lodges - including the “Mother” Grand Lodge of Prince Hall, England, have accepted Prince Hall Freemasonry as a part of the family, and those who hated us, are spinning in their graves. May they rest in peace, or eternal damnation, what ever is there due!
In the words of the late Prince Hall Sovereign Grand Commander George W. Crawford: “Never, in the annuals of Freemasonry in the world has there been published such a vile and vicious attack directed at Prince Hall Freemasonry “[19] I add to this list published by the Missouri Research Lodge that criticized my Black Square and Compass, (and Prince Hall Freemasonry as well), that such a work brings sorrow and shame to Freemasonry in America.
I will close with another quote from Brother Crawford that spells out my feelings: “The Negro Mason is not interested in the vindication of his Legitimacy merely as a means of justifying a claim to recognition by white Masons of America. A man would be interested in removing the stigma of bastardly, not so much because it might bar his reception into polite society, but to vindicate himself in the eyes of his own self respect.”[20]
So Mote It Be!
[1] Sword and trowel: The Story of Traveling and Military Lodges, compiled by John Black Vrooman and Allen E. Roberts (Missouri Lodge of Research, 1964)
[2] Ibid, p. 100.
[3] Ibid, P 101
[4] Emilio L. F: A History of the Fify-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry 1863-1865, Boston 1868. Boston Book Company.
[5] Ibid, p. 129.
[6] I wanted to Write by Kenneth Roberts (New York, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1949)
[7] The Rubaiyatt of Omar Kayyam (Ghias uddin Abul Fath Omar ibn Ibrajom-al-Khayyam)
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
Besides me singing in the Wilderness –
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
[8] The Shaping of Black America by Lerone Bennett, Jr. (Chicago, Johnson Publishing Company, 1975) p/ 115.
[9] Great Black Men in Masonry: Qaalitative Black Achievers who were Freemasons by Joseph Mason Andrew Cox (NY, Blue Diamond Press, 1982)
[10]
[11] Black Square and Compass.p. 107.
[12] Ibid, p 118
[13] Bennett, op cit, p. 142.
[14] A Documentary Account of Prince Hall and Other Black Fraternal Orders (The Missouri Lodge of Research, l982) p. 88. I exchanged considerable amount of communications with these three men, and our differences was a barrier to a deeper appreciation of each other.
[15] A Register of Grand Lodges Active and Extinct, by George Draffen Of Newington. Who writes: Original Provincial St. John’s Grand, under the Grand Lodge of England (30 Jul 1733); Massachusetts Provincial Grand Lodge under Scotland (27 Dec 1769; became Masschusetts Independence Grand Lodge (8 March 1777) and the two united to form the present Grand Lodge (19 Mar 1792. Bro Draffen was placed into the Phylaxis Society Masonic Hall of Fame for his support of Prince Hall Freemasony
[16] Bro Jacob Norton, a Jewish Freemason was placed in the Masonic Hall of Fame by the Phylaxis Society
[17] Formed by members of Lodges under the Grand Lodges of Pennsylvania and New York (18 Dec 1768), Draffen, op cit.
[18] Formed by eight lodges under Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Pennsylvania , became extinct in 1827 during the Morgan affair. (9 Dec 1822). Formed again by six Lodges under Kentucky and Missouri (6 Apr 1840)
[19] The History of the United Supreme Council, NJ by Joseph A. Walkes, Jr. , 1998) p. 135
[20] ibid, p. 137