What Is Prince Hall Freemasonry?

Prince Hall Freemasonry begins with a single lodge in Revolutionary-era Boston. On March 6, 1775, Prince Hall and fourteen other free Black men were initiated into Freemasonry in a lodge attached to a British army regiment then stationed in the city, Lodge No. 441, which worked under an Irish warrant. They were the first documented African American Freemasons.

When the British garrison left Boston in 1776, the new Masons were granted a limited permit that allowed them to meet and to bury their dead, but not to confer degrees or admit new members. Under that permit they organized as African Lodge No. 1 and continued for nearly a decade.

Prince Hall sought a full charter. In 1784 he petitioned the Grand Lodge of England, and on September 29, 1784, that body granted a charter constituting African Lodge No. 459. The charter reached Boston in 1787, and the lodge began work as a regular Masonic lodge on May 6, 1787. African Lodge No. 459 holds a distinction that Prince Hall historians have long emphasized: it received its charter directly from the Grand Lodge of England, the premier grand lodge of the era.

From that single chartered lodge grew a national fraternity. In 1791 Prince Hall was appointed a Provincial Grand Master, and African Lodge No. 459 became a mother lodge with the standing to establish others. In 1797 Prince Hall organized lodges in Philadelphia and in Providence, Rhode Island, under its charter.

Prince Hall died on December 4, 1807. The following year, in 1808, representatives of the Boston, Philadelphia, and Providence lodges met and organized the African Grand Lodge, the body from which every Prince Hall grand lodge in the United States descends. After the 1813 union of the two rival English grand lodges, African Lodge was dropped from the English register for lack of recent contact, and in the years that followed the American body operated as an independent grand lodge. In 1847, in honor of its founder, the African Grand Lodge took the name it carries today: the Prince Hall Grand Lodge.

The network expanded steadily. The Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania was established in 1815; New York, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia followed in 1848; and a major wave of new grand lodges formed across the South after the Civil War, with Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee all organizing in 1870.

For most of its history, Prince Hall Freemasonry was treated by mainstream American grand lodges as outside the recognized fold, despite holding a charter from the same Grand Lodge of England that those grand lodges traced their own legitimacy to. That exclusion followed the color line rather than any defect in Prince Hall’s Masonic descent, and it persisted well into the twentieth century.

Recognition, when it came, arrived through two separate mechanisms that are easy to confuse.

The first is recognition by the United Grand Lodge of England, conferred from London and regarded internationally as the standard of Masonic regularity. UGLE recognized the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachusetts in 1994, setting a precedent that other jurisdictions followed.

The second is mutual recognition between a mainstream grand lodge and the Prince Hall grand lodge operating in the same state or province. This is agreed locally, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and it allows members of the two grand lodges to visit one another’s lodges. Connecticut, in 1989, became the first United States mainstream grand lodge to extend mutual recognition to its Prince Hall counterpart, and it has since spread to 37 jurisdictions.

From its earliest years, Prince Hall Freemasonry was more than a fraternity. Prince Hall himself petitioned the Massachusetts legislature against slavery and for the education of Black children in Boston. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Prince Hall lodges served as centers of mutual aid and civic organizing, and during the segregation era they were among the few institutions where Black Americans could gather and organize on their own terms.

Its membership rolls reflect that civic weight. Verified Prince Hall Masons include:

Today Prince Hall Freemasonry is the oldest and largest predominantly African American fraternity in the United States, with more than 300,000 members and some 5,000 lodges that trace their lineage to African Lodge No. 459. More than forty independent Prince Hall grand lodges operate across the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean.

American Freemasons covers Prince Hall grand lodges with the same depth, source rigor, and prominence as their mainstream counterparts. In each state, province, and country where a Prince Hall grand lodge operates, its history and recognition status appear alongside the mainstream grand lodge on that jurisdiction’s page.