Famous Black Freemasons

Black Freemasonry begins with Prince Hall, a free Black abolitionist and Revolutionary veteran in Boston. In 1775, refused admission by the white St. John’s Lodge, Hall and fourteen other free Black men were initiated into the Craft by an Irish military lodge attached to the British forces in Boston. After the Revolution, Hall petitioned the Grand Lodge of England, and on September 29, 1784, it chartered African Lodge No. 459, the first lodge of Black Freemasons and the founding document of the tradition that bears his name.

Hall used the lodge as an instrument of his wider cause, petitioning the Massachusetts legislature against slavery and for the education of Black children. Excluded from the white grand lodges, Black Masons built a parallel and fully regular system of their own, and during segregation the Prince Hall lodge was one of the few institutions where African Americans could organize freely. The full institutional history is set out in our guide to Prince Hall Freemasonry.

Prince Hall Freemasonry became a forum for Black political and professional life, and many of the leading figures of the long civil rights struggle were members. Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice of the Supreme Court, was a Prince Hall Mason, and his lodge brethren helped fund the legal defense behind Brown v. Board of Education. The scholars and organizers W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington were active members by the turn of the twentieth century, and the tradition carried into the movement itself through Congressman John Lewis, a Mason in Georgia for more than two decades, and Medgar Evers, the NAACP organizer and Scottish Rite Mason who was assassinated in 1963.

The reach was wide. Alex Haley, the author of Roots, was a thirty-third degree Mason, and Martin Luther King Sr., the father of the civil rights leader, belonged to a lodge in Atlanta, as did his own father before him. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was headquartered for years inside the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Georgia, and figures such as Andrew Young, Benjamin Hooks, and the labor leader A. Philip Randolph all came up through the Craft. For these men the lodge was both a fraternity and a base of operations.

The Prince Hall lineage in music is so rich that a leading history of Black Freemasonry is subtitled from Prince Hall to the giants of jazz. Duke Ellington belonged to Social Lodge No. 1 in Washington, and Count Basie to Wisdom Lodge No. 102 in Chicago. W.C. Handy, the father of the blues, was a Mason, and so was Louis Armstrong, recorded in Montgomery Lodge No. 18 in New Orleans. The tradition carried into the postwar era through the singers Nat King Cole and Al Green, and onto the stage through Richard Pryor, who joined Henry Brown Lodge No. 22 in Peoria, Illinois, in 1981.

Some of the greatest names in American sport were Prince Hall Masons. Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, belonged to King David Lodge No. 100 in Chicago, and the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, often called the finest pound for pound fighter in history, was a member of Joppa Lodge No. 55 in New York. The heavyweight champion Jack Johnson was a Prince Hall Mason a generation earlier. In the modern era, Shaquille O’Neal was made a Mason at sight in 2011 and belongs to Widow’s Son Lodge No. 28 in Boston, and the basketball star Scottie Pippen came up through Unity Lodge No. 454 in Arkansas.

No. Martin Luther King Jr. is widely assumed to have been a Mason, and he was not. The Grand Master of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Georgia stated plainly that Dr. King was never a member, and that no one can be made a Freemason after death. The assumption is understandable, because Freemasonry surrounded him: his father, Martin Luther King Sr., and his grandfather, the Reverend A.D. Williams, were Masons, and so were close associates including John Lewis, Andrew Young, Julian Bond, and Hosea Williams.

King moved among Masons, met in Masonic buildings, and led a movement supported by Prince Hall lodges, but he never took the degrees himself. As with the celebrity and founding-father lists, being surrounded by the Craft is not the same as belonging to it, and the honest record says he did not.