Prince Hall Plaza: America's First Black Freemason
New York
The plaza here honors Prince Hall, one of the most consequential Black activists of post-Revolutionary America.
Hall was born around the seventeen thirties or forties, sources differ, gained his freedom in Boston, and in seventeen seventy-five was initiated into a British military lodge along with fourteen other free Black men. When white American Masonic lodges refused to grant them a charter, Hall petitioned the Grand Lodge of England directly, receiving African Lodge Number Four Fifty-Nine in seventeen eighty-four, the first Black Masonic lodge in North America.
From that platform, Hall petitioned the Massachusetts legislature against slavery and for Black children's access to public schools, anticipating the civil rights arguments of the next century by decades.
The lodge he founded took root in New York in eighteen twelve, becoming the third oldest African American organization in the city. Prince Hall Freemasonry today spans the nation, a quiet institutional network stretching back to the Revolutionary era.
