Black Masonic Pioneer Honored by Marchers

A legion of drummers and dancers, clowns and politicians, and men and women gleaming in regal sashes and glittering medals marched down 23 blocks of South Figueroa Street on Sunday to honor the memory of the man who more than 200 years ago founded America’s first black fraternal organization.

The parade, which featured more than 1,000 marchers, had another equally important purpose, its organizers said--to dedicate a newly renovated, 24,000-square-foot building that will house the California headquarters of the Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons.

“This is the first time we’ve ever had a Prince Hall Day parade” in Los Angeles, said Nathaniel Jackson, 64, who as grand master leads 15,000 members of the black Masonic organization in California and Hawaii.

“We’re trying to make the community aware of who Prince Hall was and what he did for us,” Jackson said. By founding the black Masonic movement, he said, Hall created a unique social organization that welcomed blacks and afforded them an opportunity to help others and themselves.

Although accounts differ over the circumstances of his birth and arrival in colonial America, historians agree that Prince Hall was the leader of a group of 15 blacks who, in 1775, obtained a permit from local British Freemasons to form “African Lodge No. 1” near Boston. A formal charter for the lodge from Freemasons in England was granted nine years later.

Membership in Prince Hall lodges and affiliated groups now totals about 500,000.

The principal work of the organization is charitable, said Jackson, who worked as a mechanical engineer for Los Angeles County before his retirement.

“We like to think of ourselves as taking good men and making better men out of them,” he explained.

The 24 Prince Hall lodges in the Los Angeles area sponsor scholarships, provide financial assistance to widows and, in recent years, have begun working to educate school-age youngsters about drug abuse, Jackson said.

The organization also provides an informal network through which black businessmen and politicians seek and provide support for each other’s projects, several members said.

Los Angeles City Councilman Gilbert Lindsay, 85, said Sunday that he has been a Prince Hall Mason “too long for me to remember.”

Lindsay served as grand marshal of Sunday’s parade and rode in an open car adorned with campaign posters for Los Angeles Municipal Judge Maxine Thomas, who sat beside him. Thomas is seeking election to a seat on the Superior Court.

Major Political Figures

Other prominent politicians who belong to the group are Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, City Councilman Dave Cunningham, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Billy Mills, and several members of the California congressional delegation, Lindsay said.

Of the politicians who are Prince Hall Masons, Lindsay observed: “We try to get the good ones in.”

The drummers and majorettes and regiments of Masons and black Shriners (whose organization, The Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, is related to the Prince Hall groups) paraded past a reviewing stand outside the new grand lodge at 9027 S. Figueroa St.

The single-story, gray-stucco structure, purchased and renovated with $800,000 in donations from lodges and individuals throughout the state, will form a further bridge between the Masons and the South-Central Los Angeles community, Jackson said.