1. “Bishop James W. Hood,” The Masonic Quarterly 1 (1919): 3.Google Scholar

2. Martin, Sandy Dwayne, “Biblical Interpretation, Ecclesiology, and Black Southern Religious Leaders, 1860–1920: A Case Study of AMEZ Bishop James Walker Hood” in “Ain't Gonna Lay My ‘Ligion Down”: African American Religion in the South, eds. Johnson, Alonzo and Jerslid, Paul (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 111.Google ScholarI am indebted to Martin's fine recent biography of Hood for providing me with a great deal of information on Hood's life and career: For God and Race: The Religious and Political Leadership of AMEZ Bishop James Walker Hood (Columbia, S. G.: University of South Carolina Press, 1999).Google Scholar

3. DuBois, W. E. B., The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899), 221–24.Google Scholar

4. Odum, Howard W., Social and Mental Traits of the Negro: Research into the Conditions of the Negro in Southern Towns (New York: Columbia University Press, 1910), 267.Google ScholarWashington, Booker T. praised secret societies for teaching black businessmen how to create capital and thereby “greatly increase property in the hands of members of the race” (The Story of the Negro, 2 vols. [New York: Doubleday, 1909] 2:169).Google ScholarBy the 1930s, Woodson, Carter found that two-thirds of all black physicians and lawyers were members of fraternal orders (The Negro Professional Man and the Community with special emphasis on the Physician and the Lawyer [Washington, D.C.: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1934] chaps. 8 and 16).Google ScholarIn 1967, Franklin, John Hope asserted that the creation of independent fraternal organizations within the antebellum free black communities of the North was central to the struggle to achieve status in an evolving American society (From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 3rd ed. [New York: Knopf, 1967], 165).Google Scholar

5. Mather, Frank Lincoln, ed., Who's Who of the Colored Race (1915, reprint, Detroit, Mich.: Detroit Gale Research Company, 1976).Google Scholar

6. The most recent analysis of the economic influence of black fraternal orders is by Fahey, David M., The Black Lodge in White America: “True Reformer Brown” and His Economic Strategy (Dayton, Ohio: Wright State University Press, 1994).Google ScholarMuraskin's, William A.Middle-Class Blacks in a White Society (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1975) emphasizes class.Google ScholarOther studies that to some degree include black fraternal orders and employ an analysis that weaves together economics, class, and politics include: Lewis, Earl, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991);Google ScholarTrotter, Joe William Jr, Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia 1915–32 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 198–213;Google ScholarRachleff, Peter J., Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865–90 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984; reprinted, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989);Google ScholarGerber, David A., Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860–1915 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 162;Google Scholarand the older yet still frequently cited study by Lewis, Hylan, Blackways of Kent (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 259–76.Google Scholar

7. The one exception is Nick Salvatore's recent study of Webber, Worcester's Amos, We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber (New York: Times Books, 1996).Google Scholar

8. Bullock, Steven C., Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 321.Google Scholar

9. Walkes, Joseph A. Jr, longterm editor of the Prince Hall research journal Phylaxis, frequently laments, in its pages, the absence of comprehensive state-by-state records. More than once in my efforts to gain access to a lodge, I was told that the lodge building and whatever records were there were not available to me because they were “secret.” Nevertheless, a fairly large, though hardly comprehensive, public collection of Prince Hall materials can be found at the Iowa Masonic Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.Google Scholar

10. Minutes of the Eleventh Session of the North Carolina Annual Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in America held in New Berne, N.C., 25 November to 2 December 1874 (Raleigh, N.C.: John Nichols & Co, 1875), 37–47.Google Scholar

11. Recent studies of African American Christianity's expansion in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction include: Stowell, Daniel W., Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863–1877 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998);Google ScholarHarvey, Paul, Redeeming the South: Religious Culture and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865–1925 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997);CrossRefGoogle ScholarHildebrand, Reginald F.,The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995);CrossRefGoogle ScholarMontgomery, William E., Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865–1900 (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1993);Google ScholarDvorak, Katherine L., An African-American Exodus: The Segregation of Southern Churches (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing Company, 1991);Google Scholarand portions of Wood, Forrest G., The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

12. Minutes of the Eleventh Session, 23.Google Scholar

13. In an address to the North Carolina Grand Lodge in 1917, Hood stated that when he “was appointed by Clinton, Bishop J. J. as Superintendent of Missions for the A.M.E. Zion Church, [he] also had an appointment by Titus, M. W. G. W., Grand Master of Masons in New York, a[s] Superintendent of the Southern jurisdiction of the Grand Lodge of New York” (Proceedings of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge, Forty-Eighth Annual Communication held in Salisbury, N.C., 11–13 December 1917 (Nashville, Term.: A.M.E. Sunday School Print, 1917), 89.Google ScholarSee also Grimshaw, William, Official History of Freemasonry Among the Colored People of North America (New York, 1903; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1971), 258–59.Google Scholar

14. Proceedings of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Ancient York Masons the State of North Carolina (Raleigh, N.C.: Nichols and Gorman, 1872), 53–55; Minutes of the Eleventh Session, 37–47.Google Scholar

15. Proceedings of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge … Fifth Annual Communication (1874), 5–9.Google Scholar

16. Proceedings of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge … Fifth Annual Communication (1874), 5–9;Google Scholarthe by-laws can be found in Proceedings of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Ancient York Masons for the State of North Carolina (Raleigh, N.C.: Nichols and Gorman, 1872), 14–21.Google Scholar

17. This statistical information was compiled from the following sources: AMEZ Church: Minutes of the Eleventh Session, Minutes of the Twelfth Session of the North Carolina Annual Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (Raleigh, N.C.: John Nichols and Company, 1875), Minutes of the Thirteenth Session of the North CarolinaAnnual Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (1876), Minutes of the Fourteenth Session of the North Carolina Annual Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (1877), and Minutes of the Fifteenth Session of the North Carolina Annual Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (1878);Google ScholarPrince Hall Lodge: Proceedings of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Ancient York Masons for the State of North Carolina (Raleigh, N.C.: Nichols and Gorman, 1872),Google ScholarProceedings of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Ancient York Masons for the State of North Carolina at its Fifth Annual Communication (Raleigh, N.C.: Nichols and Gorman, 1874),Google ScholarHill, Joseph C., Right Worshipful Grand Secretary, Compiler, Proceedings of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted AncientYork Masons for the State of North Carolina, Sessions of December 1875, 1876, and 1877 (Wilmington, N.C.: Hall, 1878),Google Scholarand Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Communication of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Ancient York Masons for the State of North Carolina (Wilmington, N.C.: Warrock, 1881).Google Scholar

18. Both the conference and the Grand Lodge founded societies along the routes of the new railroads that crisscrossed the state following the Civil War. Hood often pointed to the distance from railroad stations as a reason for a church or lodge's dormant state. In his 1874 report to the Grand Lodge, for example, he explained the slow growth of Rising Sun Lodge in Columbus County as due to the Lodge being situated “six or seven miles from the nearest railroad station” (Proceedings [1874], 8). For an insightful discussion of the relationship between the expansion of southern railroads and the development of African American social institutions,Google Scholarsee Giggie, John, “God's Long Journey: African Americans, Religion, and History in the Mississippi Delta, 1875–1915” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1997), 92–137.Google Scholar

19. Minutes of the Eleventh Session (1874); Proceedings of the Grand Lodge(1874).Google Scholar

20. Proceedings (1872), 54.Google Scholar

21. Raboteau, Albert J., A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 1995), 79–102.Google ScholarSee also Nash, Gary B., Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 98–104.Google ScholarFor a broader view, see Gravely, William B. “The Rise of African Churches in America (1786–1822): Re-Examining the Contexts,” Journal of Religious Thought 41 (1984): 58–73.Google Scholar

22. Nash, , Forging Freedom, 210.Google Scholar

23. Horton, James Oliver, Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1993), 153.Google Scholar

24. Work, Monroe N., “Secret Societies as Factors in the Social and Economical Lifeof the Negro” in Democracy in Earnest, ed. McCulloch, James E. (Washington, D.C.: Southern Sociological Congress, 1918), 343.Google Scholar

25. DuBois, , The Philadelphia Negro, 222.Google Scholar

26. Browning, James B., “The Beginnings of Insurance Enterprise Among Negroes,” Journal of Negro History 22 (1937): 421–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. The African origins of these mutual benefit societies remains a field of speculation. Certainly in the South, some of these societies evolved from the hidden, “invisible” institutions and folk culture that slaves developed within their plantation communities. Melville J. Herskovitz probably extrapolated from too little evidence when he held that they could be directly linked to African secret societies. Still, it is logical to assume that prior knowledge of African mutual aid systems would have been appliedwithin the slave community.Google ScholarSee Herskovitz, Melville J., The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941). Furthermore, structural similarities have been identified between the organization and rituals of the early mutual aid societies and their African counterparts.Google ScholarSee White's, Deborah Gray study of the “female slavenetwork,” which contributed to the collective care of children, the sick, and the elderly, as suggestive of the African origins of this mutual aid system: (Ar‘n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South [New York: Norton, 1985], 119–41).Google ScholarGutman, Herbert believed that this web of social obligations reached back to family and gender responsibilities in Africa (The Black Family in Slaveryand Freedom, 1750–1925 [New York: Pantheon Books, 1976]).Google ScholarKuyk, Betty suggests an even more direct link, noting the African birth of several founders of these American societies (“The African Derivation of Black Fraternal Orders in the United States,” Comparative Studies in Societies and History 25 [1983]: 559–94).CrossRefGoogle ScholarAnd Greenbaum, Susan argues that the earliest African-American societies existed before the European organizations had much to offer in the way of a model (“A Comparison of African American and Euro-American Mutual Aid Societies in 19th CenturyAmerica,” The Journal of Ethnic Studies 19 [1991]: 111). Still, the traditional emphasis on secrecy and the need to hide organized behavior from their masters has left scant evidence of the existence of these societies among slaves. In contrast, evidence for the existence of northern societies like the Free African Society of Philadelphia is much more “visible.”Google ScholarButler's, Jon review of recent work in African American religious history, “Africans’ Religions in British America, 1650–1840,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 68 [1999]: 127–28, summarizes what we know about the persistence of African religions in the United States.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. Clawson, Mary Ann, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 131–35.Google Scholar

29. Knoop, Douglas and Jones, G. P., A Short History of Freemasonry to 1730 (Manchester, III.: Manchester University Press, 1940), chap. 1.Google Scholar

30. As fully qualified craftsmen, “free” to enjoy the rights and privileges of the guild, masons were referred to as freemasons much like other skilled tradesmen were sometimes called “free carpenters,” for example, or men granted the rights of citizenship in a town were called “freemen.” The several possible meanings of “free” include references to “freestone,” a building material found in Scotland, and “freedom” from feudal serfdom. The term might also have referred to liberality (as in the seven liberal arts), though freemanship is thepreferred meaning.Google ScholarSee Wright, Dudley, ed., Gould's History of Freemasonry Throughout the World, 6 vols (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936), 1:249–58;Google ScholarStevenson, David, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590– 1710 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 11,Google Scholarand Knoop, Douglas and Jones, G. P., The Genesis of Freemasonry, (London: Quatuor Coronati Lodge, 1978), 10–15.Google ScholarFor changing meanings of the term in later Freemasonry, see Jones, Bernard E., “‘Free’ in ‘Freemason’ and the Idea of Freedom Through Six Centuries,” in The Collected Prestonian Lectures, 1925–1960 (London: Lewis Masonic, 1983), 1: 363–76.Google Scholar

31. Clawson, , Constructing Brotherhood, 53–83.Google Scholar

32. Concerning migration to the continent, Templarism, for example, originated as an aristocratic and anticapitalist version of Freemasonry in France, but it achieved its most thorough dominance in Germany, where it developed as part of a wider reaction against the rationalist values of the Enlightenment.Google ScholarSee Epstein, Klaus, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

33. Bullock, , Revolutionary Brotherhood, 85–162.Google Scholar

34. This term was coined by Swidler, Ann to refer to a culture's “habits, skills, and styles from which people construct ‘strategies of action’ ” (“Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51 [1986]: 273).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. Nash, , Forging Freedom, 217.Google Scholar

36. See Gravely, William B., “The Dialectic of Double-Consciousness in Black American Freedom Celebrations, 1808–1863,” Journal of Negro History 67 (1982): 302–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37. Hall, Prince, “A Charge, Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797,” reprinted in Early Negro Writings, 2760–1837, ed. Porter, Dorothy (Baltimore, Md.: Black Classic, 1995), 77.Google Scholar

38. Delaney, Martin, The Origins and Objects of Ancient Masonry, Its Introduction intothe United States and Legitimacy Among Colored Men (Pittsburgh: W. S. Haven, 1853), 18;Google Scholarsee also Hall, Prince, “A Charge Delivered to the Brethren of the African Lodgeon the 25th of June, 1792,” reprinted in Early Negro Writings, 63–69.Google Scholar

39. Proceedings (1872), 27.Google Scholar

40. Grimshaw, , Official History, 84–130.Google Scholar

41. Hood, James Walker, One Hundred Years of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (New York: AME Book Concern, 1895), 85–86;Google ScholarMartin, , For God and Race,22–58.Google Scholar

42. Hood, , AMEZ History, 2–26.Google Scholar

43. Hood, , AMEZ History, 10.Google Scholar

44. Maffly-Kipp, Laurie, “Mapping the World, Mapping the Race: The Negro Race History, 1874–1915,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 64 (1995): 610–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. Hood, , AMEZ History, 27–55;Google ScholarMartin, , For God and Race, 74,134.Google Scholar

46. Grimshaw, , Official History, 305; by 1909,2,600 of 3,336 Prince Hall lodges came from the South.Google ScholarFor example, there were 340 Prince Hall lodges in Alabama compared to70 in Pennsylvania (Anderson, W. H., Anderson's Masonic Directory [Richmond, Va.: W. H. Anderson, 1909]). The order continued to grow in the twentieth century, with as many as 150,000 followers in the 1920s and 300,000 by the 1950s, before beginning to decline.Google ScholarSee Muraskin, William A., Middle-Class Blacks in a White Society (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1975), 29.Google ScholarLincoln, C. Eric and Mamiya, Lawrence confirm this decline (The Black Church in the African American Experience [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990] 152).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47. Moore, Moses Nathaniel, “Orishatukeh Faduma and the New Theology,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 63 (1994), 64–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48. Throughout his career, Hood remained committed to the belief that the Bible was the pure and infallible word of God. His commentary on the book of Revelation, for example, reflects this literalist understanding (The Plan of the Apocalypse [York, Pa: P. Anstadt & Sons, 1900]).Google ScholarHis sermon, “Creation's First Born, Or the Earliest Gospel Symbol,” takes issue with Darwinian science (in The Negro in the Christian Pulpit [Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards, Broughton and Company, 1884], 105–21).Google ScholarFor examples of Hood's understanding of the nature of the Christian church in general and the mission of the black church in particular, see The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Quarterly Review 8 (1899): 1–9;Google Scholar“The Character and Power of the Christian Religion,” The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Quarterly Review 13 (1904), 1–19;Google Scholarand Sketch of the Early History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Vol. 2 (New York: A.M.E. Book Concern, 1914), 66–69. Regarding Hood's position that Christianity is the unique pathway of salvation, see, for example, Hood, Pulpit, 105–21.Google Scholar

49. Gates, Henry Louis, “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Representations 24 (1988): 155–99.Google Scholar

50. Maffly-Kipp, , “Mapping the World,” 617–19.Google Scholar

51. Hood, , “The Negro Race” in One Hundred Years, 27–52.Google Scholar

52. Hood, , “The Negro Race,” 53–55. For a discussion of similar race histories see Laurie Maffly-Kipp's forthcoming book, African-American Communal Narratives: Religion, Race, and Memory in Nineteenth Century America.Google Scholar

53. See, for example, Tanner, Benjamin T., The Descent of the Negro (Philadelphia,1898).Google ScholarFor an insightful discussion of the influence of Darwinian science on race and manhood, see Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).Google Scholar

54. Martin, , “Biblical Interpretation,” 134.Google Scholar

55. Perry, Rufus L., The Cushite, or the Descendants of Ham (New York: Literary Union, 1887). The AME Church Review in 1899 recognized this work as fourth in a list of the most important works of the race (Life of Frederick Douglas was first). See AME Church Review 16 (1899): 631.Google Scholar

56. Star of Zion, 16 11 1893, 2.Google ScholarWashington, James Melvin believed that Perry was not only a Mason but that his history “shows signs of his Masonic influences” (Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power [Mercer, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986], 75,131).Google Scholar

57. Delaney, , The Origins and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry, 16–19.Google Scholar

58. Hood, , Christian Pulpit, 107.Google Scholar

59. Hood, James Walker, Sketch of the Early History of the African Methodist EpiscopalZion Church (Published by the author, 1914), 60,62.Google Scholar

60. Proceedings (1880), 10.Google Scholar

61. Proceedings (1880), 11.Google Scholar

62. Proceedings (1880), 12.Google Scholar

63. Proceedings (1880), 12–13.Google Scholar

64. Proceedings (1880), 12.Google Scholar

65. Proceedings (1880), 12.Google Scholar

66. In 1903, the national total for members at each degree level was: Entered Apprentice: 30,640; Fellow Craftsman: 20,482; Master Mason: 66,365; TOTAL: 117,487 (Grimshaw, Official History, 305).Google Scholar

67. Harris, Harrison L., M.D., Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Virginia, Harris’ Masonic Textbook: A Concise Historical Sketch of Masonry, And the Organization ofMasonic Grand Lodges, and especially of Masonry among Colored Men in America; Also, a Compilation of the Illustrations of Masonic Work, As drawn from the Most Reliable Authorities on the subject (Petersburg, Va.: Masonic Visitor Company, 1902), 134– 93;Google ScholarDuncan, Malcolm C., Duncan's Masonic Ritual and Monitor, 3d ed. (Philadelphia: Washington Publishing Company, 1880);Google ScholarGrimshaw, , Official History, 318–28;Google ScholarFels, Anthony, “The Square and the Compass: San Francisco's Freemasons and American Religion, 1870–1900,” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1987), 145;Google Scholarand Carnes, Mark C., Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 29.Google Scholar

68. Spencer, Reverend William Carpenter, Right Worshipful Past Grand Master Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, Rector Bridge Street A.M.E. Church, Brooklyn, N.Y., Sermon delivered to the Masons of the Second Masonic District, 16 05 1920 (Mason Quarterly Review 1 [1920]: 3).Google Scholar

69. Steven Bullock's recent study of the early years of the fraternity in America emphasizes Masonry's “multiplication of uses” which “involved Masonry inconflicting and even contradictory activities and ideas” (Revolutionary Brotherhood, 2–3). Although Mary Ann Clawson's focus is on the social construction of class and gender (Constructing Brotherhood, 11), Mark Carnes sees Masonry providing young men with rites of passage away from the female-dominated home and to the masculine workplace (Secret Ritual and Manhood, ix),Google Scholarand an earlier work by Dumenil, Lynn argues that the fraternity provided a “sacred asylum” in a rapidly changing society (Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880–1939 [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984], 32–42). All of these scholars, to differing degrees, point out that the fraternity's religious message was ambiguous.Google Scholar

70. Proceedings (1872), 34; Proceedings (1878), 27–28.Google Scholar

71. Constitutions of the Freemasons: Containing the History, Charges, Regulations, etc. of the Most Ancient and Right Worshipful Fraternity (London, 1723; reprint, Philadelphia, 1734).Google ScholarHaunch, T. O., “The Formation, 1717–1751” in Grand Lodge, 1717–1967 (Oxford: United Grand Lodge of England, 1967), 80.Google ScholarThe originsof eighteenth-century public displays, in turn, have been traced to later medieval townswhere large religious parades involving most of the townspeople brought together the many layers of the civic hierarchy. Following the Reformation, the civic ceremonies that survived were oriented toward processions of the ruling oligarchy of town leaders to church or court with the townspeople participating only as onlookers (Clark, Peter and Slack, Paul, English Towns in Transition, 1500–1700 [London, 1976], 131–71Google Scholarand Thompson, E. P., “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” Journal of Social History 7 [1973–1974], 389).Google ScholarFor an overview, see Bullock, , Revolutionary Brotherhood, 43,52–56,70,78–79,80–82.Google Scholar

72. Armstrong, Louis as quoted in Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 268–69.Google Scholar

73. Harris, Harrison L., The Masonic Visitor (08 1887), 29.Google Scholar

74. Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Communication of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge (Goldsboro N.C.: Argus Publishing Company, 1889), 87.Google Scholar

75. See, for example, Doyle, Don H., “The Social Function of Voluntary Associationsin a Nineteenth-Century Town,” Social Science History 1 (1977): 338–43CrossRefGoogle Scholaror Berthoff, Rowland, An Unsettled People: Social Order and Disorder in American History (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 273–74.Google Scholar

76. Hood, , Pulpit, 115.Google Scholar

77. The Masonic Visitor (06 and July 1887), 9.Google Scholar

78. Proceedings … Fifth Communication (1874), 7.Google Scholar

79. Proceedings (1886), 42–43.Google Scholar

80. Proceedings of the Most Worshipful Grand Lodge, Forty-Eighth Communication, Salisbury, N.C., 11–13 December 1917 (Nashville, Tenn.: A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1917), 90.Google Scholar

81. On “respectability,” see Higginbotham, , Righteous Discontent, 14–15Google Scholarand Montgomery, , Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree, 36–37.Google Scholar

82. Masonic Visitor, (06 and July 1887),9.Google Scholar

83. Jones, Charles Price, as quoted in Cobbins, Otho B., ed., History of the Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A., 1895–1965 (New York: Vantage, 1966), 18.Google Scholar

84. Martin, , For God and Race, 17–18. For Hood's evangelical and Holiness views, see his The Negro in the Christian Pulpit, esp. 33–48 and 247–59.Google ScholarOn the emergence of the Holiness movement, see Montgomery, , Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree, 345–47.Google Scholar

85. For the Holiness attack on secret societies, see Giggie, , God's Long Journey, 196–218.Google Scholar

86. Leonard, Reverend of Olivet Baptist Church, as paraphrased in an article entitled “An Immense Congregation” in the Indianapolis Freeman, 6 06 1891.Google Scholar

87. Keating, H. T., “Secret Societies Among the Negroes” The Christian Recorder (Philadelphia: African Methodist Episcopal Church) 12 04 1883.Google Scholar

88. Keating, H. T., “Secret Societies Among the Negroes.”Google Scholar

89. Coleman, S. H., “Freemasonry as a Secret Society Defended,” AME ChurchReview 14 (1898): 327,337.Google Scholar

90. Knox, G. L. as quoted in “An Immense Congregation,” Indianapolis Freeman.Google Scholar

91. See Carnes, , Secret Ritual and Manhood, 24–26, 74–76 and The History of the National Christian Association (Chicago: Ezra Cook and Co., 1875), 28–29.Google ScholarIn contrast to white Masonry, there is no evidence of an Antimasonic campaign against Prince Hall Masons, nor of a decline in membership during the 1830s. To the contrary, the 1830s was a period of growth and prosperity for the order. As one Prince Hall historian put it, “perhaps” for the Prince Hall Mason “his subordinate and inconspicuous position permitted the storm [of Antimasonry] to pass over his head” (Davis, Harry E., A History of Freemasonry Among Negroes in America [Published under the Auspices of the Scottish Rite, Northern Jurisdiction, 1946], 187–88).Google Scholar

92. Most white Masons regarded the lodge as their only religious institution. One study of late nineteenth-century San Francisco reported that an overwhelming majority of all Masons, more than two-thirds, did not belong to any religious institution (Fels, Square and Compass, 435). See also Carnes, , Secret Ritual and Manhood, 77–79.Google Scholar

93. Salvatore, , We All Got History, 262.Google ScholarSee also Horton, James Oliver, “Freedom's Yoke: Gender Conventions Among Antebellum Free Blacks,” Feminist Studies 12 (1986): 51–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

94. Montgomery, , Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree, 114–15.Google Scholar

95. Salvatore, , We All Got History, 66,162,207, 275.Google Scholar

96. Carnes, , Secret Ritual and Manhood, 79.Google Scholar

97. Grand Lodge Proceedings (1876), 29.Google Scholar

98. Late in life, Hood, stated that “[t]here are three important organizations in this State in which I have taken special interest, namely: The A.M.E. Zion Church, the Masonic Fraternity, and the Eastern Star” (Grand Lodge Proceedings [1917”, 89). In the 1920s the Prince Hall historian Harry A. Williamson remarked that “[u]nlike the whites, [his emphasis] Negroes do not appear to understand the great line of demarcation between the two [male and female orders]” (“The Adoptive Rite Ritual,” undated, Williamson Papers, Schomburg Library, New York City). Other black orders, like the True Reformers, incorporated women from the outset.Google ScholarSee Fahey, David M., “Class, Gender and Race in Fraternal Ritualism: A Review Essay,” Old Northwest 14 (1988) and The Black Lodge in White America, 7.Google Scholar

99. Martin, , “The Women's Ordination Controversy, the AMEZ Church, and Hood's Leadership,” For God and Race, 163–75.Google Scholar

100. Higginbotham, , Righteous Discontent.Google ScholarSee also Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend, “The Politics of ‘Silence’: Dual-Sex Political Systems and Women's Traditions of Conflict in African-American Religion,” in African-American Christianity: Essays in History, ed. Johnson, Paul E. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1994), 80–110.Google Scholar

101. Carnes, , Secret Ritual and Manhood, 81–89.Google Scholar

102. For the Mormon appropriation of Masonry see Brooke, John L., The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 1994).CrossRefGoogle ScholarBullock, Steven explores the Masonic male private sphere in Revolutionary Brotherhood, 239–73.Google ScholarBeyond Christianity, Soyer, Daniel has recently explored the relationship between fraternalism and American Judaism in “Entering the ‘Tent of Abraham’: Fraternal Ritual and American-Jewish Identity, 1880–1920,” Religion and American Culture 9 (1999): 159–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar