Freemasonry In Barbados

[Michele Firmasyah]

The issue here for some is the fact freemasonry can be labeled a frat group with prominent and influential members i.e. judges, lawyers, politicians, bankers etc. Do we ignore what these relationships have the potential to do? Do we ignore the concern of a Tony Blair for example?

Freemasonry is for males . Female organization on par with Freemason are the Eastern Stars. This organization is for females with same rituals, symbols and the God Freemasons worship. Females cannot become Freemasons it it s male organization only.

Fundamentally, human beings are the most social of all the animals on earth. The socio-psychological desire of BELONGING is why people join various groups in the first place.This desire is as strong as the biological urge to reproduce. Even those who claimed to be unregimented or anti-authority cannot resist the temptation of belonging. Group thinking then becomes the glue that binds such association. Joining selective groups to enhance ones pedigree, prestige, and socio-economic standing through powerful networking is a very strong human trait. However, on the other hand, there are some among us who truly abhor this kind of behavior, to the very anti-social type.

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Following closely in the wake of British imperialism, the first Indian lodge was constituted in 1730, by officials of the East India Company based in Fort William, Calcutta. From there, masonic lodges started to spawn in the other urban centres and army cantonments of the fast-expanding Indian Empire. As the native elites started expressing a growing interest in joining, India became a testing ground on which freemasonry, initially an all-white organization, could experiment its universal creed. The first Indian to become a mason was Umdat-ul-Umrah Bahadur, son of the powerful Nawab of the Carnatic. Following his lead, a handful of muslim noblemen were able to gain access to the fraternity. Local masons appeared to be more willing to fraternize with the Muslim. But in the 1840s, this pattern was somehow overturned, as the Parsi community grew to become the most represented group within Indian lodges. This paper seeks to examine the foundations of this newly acquired eligibility.

Simon Deschamps is a third-year PhD student in British history at Universit de Bordeaux III, France. He was awarded a doctoral fellowship in 2010 and has been working on freemasonry and colonial power in British India.

The Prince Hall Masons are the oldest and largest group of Masons of African origin in the world. Today there are forty Grand Lodges of Prince Hall Freemasonry in the United States, Canada, the Bahamas, and Liberia. These Grand Lodges preside over more than 5,000 lodges. All of them claim descent from the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachusetts which is traced back to the African Lodge No. 459.

Prince Hall, a native of Bridgetown, Barbados, West Indies, was freeborn on September 12, 1748, the son of Thomas Prince Hall, an Englishman, and a free colored woman of French heritage. In 1765, at the age of 17, Hall worked for his passage on a ship to Boston where he became a leatherworker. Eight years later, he had acquired property and was eligible to vote.

Nine years later on March 2, 1784, Hall petitioned the Grand Lodge of England, asking for a warrant for a charter that they had been denied by the white Masons of Massachusetts. The warrant was approved and Hall established the first lodge of African American Masons in North America known as African Lodge No. 459.

Due to prevalent racism and segregation in North America, it was impossible for African Americans to join most mainstream Masonic lodges until the late 20th century. Yet, because Prince Hall Mason lodges were African American, North American Grand Lodges denounced Prince Hall Lodges and Prince Hall Masons, deeming them illegitimate and refusing to recognize their authority. Until 1865 most Prince Hall lodges were in the North, but after the Civil War, black Masonry quickly spread across the South, often led by Northern-born Masons who became active in Reconstruction politics.

From Reconstruction until 1900, Prince Hall Masonry remained a highly prestigious but small fraternity. In the early twentieth century the membership rapidly expanded, lessening its exclusivity. Although all Masonic Lodges today are theoretically racially integrated, white Grand Lodges in Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and West Virginia still do not recognize Prince Hall Grand Lodge members as legitimate Masons. Nonetheless, the Prince Hall Masons include tens of thousands of black and some non-black members throughout the United States, Canada, the Bahamas, and Liberia.

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William H. Grimshaw, Official History of Freemasonry (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969); William A. Muraskin, Middle Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America (London: University of California Press, 1975); Prince Hall Freemasonry by Bro. George Draffen, Deputy Master, Grand Lodge of Scotland, _hall_freemasonry.htm.

As well as being an age of slavery, slave-trading, slave resistance, abolitionism and eventual abolition, the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were an age of burgeoning Masonic sociability in Britain, and indeed right across the Atlantic world. The creation of the Grand Lodge of England in 1717 gave a degree of organizational co-ordination to a network of Masonic lodges that by the end of the 1730s was already embracing the Caribbean and the North American continent. Merchants, colonialists and military men, caught up in the eighteenth century's larger dramas of imperial expansion and economic exploitation, were prominent both among the agents and among the beneficiaries of this Masonic expansion. An interest is Freemasonry - in its networks of social connection, of philanthropy, of information - thus offers an intriguing prism through which to view many of the salient themes and issues in the period's history. The histories of transatlantic slavery, of abolition and emancipation, can all be illuminated from this angle.

The Library and Museum of Freemasonry, housed within the monumental premises of Freemasons Hall in London's Great Queen Street, has recently received significant Heritage Lottery Fund support for a project to catalogue (and it is hoped, in due course, to digitalize) many of its early archival holdings, and one result of this has been to add around 700 documents relating to Freemasonry in the Americas and Caribbean to the on-line catalogue. This exhibition, which forms the Library and Museum's contribution to the current bicentenary of the Act of Abolition, also seeks to showcase the kinds of benefits to historical knowledge that may arise from this cataloguing project.

Showcasing is the appropriate word. In its presentation, this is an old-fashioned exhibition, firmly constrained by its location in the central area of what is basically a Masonic research library. The exhibition features a row of horizontal display cases, mainly filled with books and documents, with none of the interactive opportunities or audio-visual effects that vie for the attention of visitors at some other bicentenary displays. It is also probably the only one of the 2007 slavery or abolition exhibitions that visitors have to sign their names twice (first at the entrance to the building and again on penetrating to the library) to get into. Such conditions of viewing may have a deterrent effect on passing trade, and some of those who persevere may be disappointed by what they find. This is not an exhibition for those who feel that presentations on this subject ought to offer imaginative evocations of the horrors of the middle passage, the backbreaking atrocities of the plantation system, or the deeper cruelties of slavery in general. Nor does if offer a strong organizing narrative for those who seek education on the historical logic and chronology of transatlantic slavery as a system, and of the movements and resistances that produced its eventual demolition. Nor does it expose or explore the legacies of slavery within contemporary society or within the global economic system. Or the multiple forms of enslaved labour persisting in the world today. It does, however, offer an unfamiliar and at times illuminating and suggestive angle of approach to the complex social histories of slavery and emancipation, and to their implications on both sides of the Atlantic.

For the most part, the insights available here are social rather than political. Many Freemasons were, of course, active as individuals in the political campaigns for and against the slave trade, and for and against the eventual emancipation of the enslaved. One section of the exhibition draws attention, for example, to the prominent role of the Duke of Sussex (son of George III and Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England from 1813-1843), first as a pro-slavery opponent of the Slave Importation Restriction Bill in 1806, and then as a supporter of anti-slavery viewpoints in later decades. The same display also highlights another royal freemason, Frederick Duke of Gloucester, whose anti-slavery opinions were reflected in his role as patron of the African Institution. The Masonic involvement of two abolitionists from the north-east of England, James Stanfield and William Hutcheson are also revealed. On the American side of the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin is cited as another whose Masonic affiliation was combined, at least in later life, with a vigorous anti-slavery commitment. Occasional documents offer hints also of a more collective kind of investment in the anti-slavery cause. The case is mentioned, for example, of lodges in Kent seeking guidance on the legitimacy of contributing to the costs of funding an anti-slavery bill, and of the Gravesend lodge whose change of name to 'Lodge of Freedom' may perhaps have been influenced by the publicity given to the abolitionist campaign. Reference is made also to the prominence of Freemasons' Hall, one of London's leading public venues, as the site of numerous meetings organized by anti-slavery organizations in the decades after abolition. But Masonic lodges were themselves debarred by their constitutions from holding or participating in political or religious controversies, and Masonic sources therefore contribute relatively little to our knowledge of the terms in which political battles over slavery were fought out, or of the political organization of pro- or anti-slavery campaigns. The handful of Masonic lodges that would later name themselves after Wilberforce would be forging a mental association between Masonic and abolitionist causes that could not have been asserted at a time when debates over slavery and abolition were the stuff of current politics.

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