MWPHGL MD THE LIGHT
PURE POLITICS “THE NEGROES WHILE THEY ARE CALLED, IN NUMBERS, THE POLITICAL POWER OF THE STATE, ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR BEING IN THIS COUNTRY,....
OR FOR OCCUPYING THE RESPONSIBLE PLACES TO WHICH THE RECENT POLITICAL AND SOCIAL REVOLUTION, IN OUR MIDST, HAS ASSIGNED THEM. THEY ARE IGNORANT, AND OUT OF THE SEVENTY THOUSAND WHO VOTED IN THE LAST ELECTION, NOT ONE HUNDRED THOUGHT OR REASONED FOR THEMSELVES, OR COULD THINK OR REASON UPON THE CONSEQUENCES, IMMEDIATE OR REMOTE, THAT MIGHT FOLLOW THE RESULT.”
As a last defiant and pathetic act to a situation they could not understand, control or immediately change, the Grand Lodge voted that the “testimony of a negro -formerly a slave could not be received in a Lodge trial: How ironic, since the only object of a Masonic trial is to seek the truth. And it is only in Masonic trial that no advantage is ever permitted to be taken of legal and verbal technicalities, as in a profane court, which often enable the guilty to escape. Yet if the truth be known by a Black, his testimony would not be permitted by this Grand Lodge. As the
Caucasian Grand Lodge of Mississippi was overreacting to events, two Black Prince Hall Freemasons were elected to high offices by the voters. Bro. (Rev.) Hiram Rhodes Revels became the first Black elected to the United States Senate, filling the unexpired term of Jefferson Davis, former President of the Confederacy and also a non-Mason, and Bro. James R. Lynch became the Secretary of State of Mississippi. Bro. Revels, a Past Grand Chaplain of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Ohio in 1856; a member of Lone Star Lodge #2, St. Louis, under the jurisdiction of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Missouri; was born in Fayetteville, N.C., of free parents. He attended Quaker seminaries in Indiana and Ohio, and Knox College in Illinois. Ordained a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1845, he taught and preached in Leavenworth, Kansas and St. Louis, Missouri. It was in St. Louis on January 28th, 1858, that he would make his famous “An address delivered to the members of the Prince Hall Lodge No. 10 F.& A.M.” (the lodge was then on the register of Ohio, is now numbered one under Missouri), During the Civil War he helped organize Black regiments, and was made Chaplain for Black troops in Mississippi, In 1866 he settled in Natchez, Mississippi, and was elected Alderman in 1868. He became a State Senator in 1870, and in the same year he was elected to the United States Senate. Bro. James R. Lynch, Worshipful Master of Lynch Lodge #28 F. & A.M., Jackson, Mississippi, was born in Baltimore on January 8th, 1839, and in his youth obtained a good education. In 1858 he joined the Presbyterian Church in New York, but soon thereafter was accepted by the African Methodist Episcopal Conference in Indiana. He transferred to Baltimore, and in 1863 went to South Carolina as a missionary to the freedman from the A.M.E. church. From 1866 to June 15, 1867, he was editor of The Christian Recorder in Philadelphia. Later he was with the Freedman’s Bureau in Mississippi and in 1871 he was elected Secretary of State. (A major speech of Bro. Lynch is recorded in The Christian Recorder for May 13, 1865.) While these events were taking place in
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