African American Secret Societies

AFRICAN AMERICAN SECRET SOCIETIES. Revolutionary secret societies and freemasonry were central to the early European radical movements, but were considered of less importance in the United States with its guarantees of free expression and free association. None of these exceptional liberties, however, applied to African Americans.

Denied the fellowship of white American freemasons, Blacks turned to their own order, Prince Hall Freemasonry. The order, founded in 1784, produced a large portion of the prominent African American leadership from the earliest years of the country through to the modern civil rights movement. Whereas the churches provided many organizational skills and venues, Prince Hall added the discipline of secrecy and strategies essential to the active subversion of the slave system.

Two Detroit members, William Lambert and George DeBaptiste, anchored an immensely successful operation for smuggling refugees from slavery safely across the international frontier into Canada. Lambert, the son of a slave father and free mother, became the public voice for the Black community while quietly building a network of hundreds that ensured freedom for thousands. George DeBaptiste joined him in 1849. Born free in Virginia, he became a barber employed as a personal servant for wealthy gentlemen on their travels. Settling in Madison, Indiana, on the Ohio river between Louisville and Cincinnati, he began using his freight business to get slaves escaping Kentucky to Cincinnati. Kentucky authorities offered a reward for his arrest, but DeBaptiste managed to continue his activities until he moved to Detroit.

Inspired by the example of the Prince Hall Masons at Cincinnati, some Louisville Blacks—slave as well as free—considered forming a lodge as early as 1850. The Methodist schoolteacher William H. Gibson had been initiated earlier at Baltimore and convinced them to locate their new Mount Moriah lodge across the river at New Albany, where they could discretely meet and do business without disturbing the Louisville slaveholders. For three years an association of African Americans, some slaves, secretly crossed the river in skiffs and hiked several miles to the site of their lodge before relocating it to Louisville, where they remained active, even after the 1859 police raid following the Harpers Ferry attack. During this same period, free and enslaved Blacks formed a local Benevolent Society (later reorganized as the “United Brothers of Friendship and Sisters of the Mysterious Ten”).

Together, Lambert and DeBaptiste launched their own quasi-masonic body, the “African-American Mysteries; the Order of the Men of Oppression.” It had a particularly strong presence at the Chatham convention in Canada that authorized John Brown’s planned blow against slavery.

A Prince Hall mason in a river city on the border, Moses Dickson worked in St. Louis as a barber and minister of the African Methodist Episcopal church. Born in Cincinnati to Virginia parents, he enjoyed a formal education and learned his trade before working along the Mississippi, where “he saw slavery in all its horrors.” With like-minded young men, Dickson agreed to review plans for an antislavery association and studied various models in his travels through Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin. He organized an antebellum Knights of Liberty (later the “International Order of Twelve of the Knights and Daughters of Tabor”), which actively engaged in the work of the Underground Railroad.

Part of the mythology of the Knights of Liberty involved a claim to origins among the builders of the oldest known constructions, the pyramids along the Nile. Long before Black Athena, masons spoke matter-of-factly about the African origins of civilization. Martin Delany, also a member and a prominent Black abolitionist, wrote a tract defending the order on the grounds of its African origins: The Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry: Its Introduction into the United States and Legitimacy Among Colored Men (1853).

African Americans became directly involved in the peculiarly Egyptian variants of freemasonry, brought to the United States in 1856 by Jacques Étienne Marconis de Négre, a Black mason snubbed by the whites. The Rite of Memphis provided grounds for ignoring the Masonic taboos imposed by the white organizations.

At the same time, another member of these fraternal societies, Dr. James McCune Smith, organized beyond abolitionism to fight racial discrimination in the North and formed the Legal Rights Association. Born to free parents, Smith had gone overseas for his medical education and returned from Scotland to take on patients of all races. He wrote under the sobriquet “Communipaw,” echoing the local legend of a multiracial community opposite Manhattan in New Jersey. His circle also functioned at the fringe of the coalition of American, Italian, French, and German radicals emerging in the 1850s and forming the core of what would become the First International after the Civil War.

Revolutionary secret societies among African Americans permitted a small group determined to resist slavery and racism to create a dynamic that pulled virtually the entire community with them. They also brought along enough white support to assist runaways. They even raised aspirations for armed rebellions that would have warmed the heart of any Blanquist and provided vital support to John Brown’s forlorn attempt to capture Harpers Ferry. Such organizing forms continued beyond emancipation and contributed to the larger public bodies such as the Equal Rights League and its successors.

Hinks, Peter P. and Kantrowitz, Stephen, eds. All Men Free and Brethren: Essays on the History of African American Freemasonry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.

Lause, Mark. A Secret Society History of the Civil War. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011.

Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.