Prince Hall
The Father of Black Freemasonry

Picture of Prince Hall

Abolitionist, civic leader, caterer, leather-dresser, and founder of what would become the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, little is known of the life of Prince Hall. He is claimed by Grimshaw to have been born in Barbados, B.W.I. on September 12, 1748, although no record of this has ever been found. He is also claimed to have arrived in Boston from Africa in 1765 and sold to one William Hall who freed him in 1770. There were a number of Prince Halls in Boston at this period and the Certificate of Manumission deposited in the Boston Athenaeum Library, dated 9 April I770, cannot be positively identified as referring to Prince Hall.

In 1787, as a property owner and registered voter, he campaigned for the establishment of schools for Negro children in Boston, opened a school in his own home, and successfully petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to protect free Negroes from kidnapping and being sold into slavery. During the Revolutionary War he served in the Continental Army and is believed to have fought at Bunker Hill. In his last published speech, his charge to African Lodge in June 1797, Hall spoke of mob violence against blacks, concealing patience.

Although Grimshaw claims that Hall was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church there is no record of this, while a deposition, which is recorded in the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Register of Deeds, made by Prince Hall in August 1807, states that he was a leather-dresser by trade; that he was 'about seventy'; and that in November 1762 he had been received into the full communion of the Congregational Church. The alleged patent appointing Prince Hall as Provincial Grand Master for North America appears to have been another of Grimshaw’s inventions.

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