Chapter Three

At our last parting, it was June 29, 2002 and I was sitting in my van in the parking lot of The Prince Hall Masonic Temple on Cottage Street, home to Union Lodge #4, JW Hood Chapter 12 of the Order of the Eastern Star, and at the time, annex classroom space for the West End Day Nursery. Union Lodge #4 (formerly Union Lodge #7, in the 1800’s) was formed in 1857. It remains the lodge with the largest number of Grand Masters in the jurisdiction of Massachusetts originating from it’s membership. The current lodge was erected and completed in the 1990s. They used to have a lodge on Kempton Street which was burned down in the 1960’s during a Black Power rally, (can you say “Irony?”)where the only two buildings threatened was the temple and a Black church (Which the pastor and members persuaded the so-called revolutionaries not to burn).

The current temple looks a little like a labyrinth from the outside. I could see that the upstairs windows were open, as the curtains blew in the breeze. As I had mentioned, my Grandfather had been a member of this lodge. In fact, most of your local Wampanoags who had been Prince Hall Masons came through this lodge, including several prominent members of the New Bedford community, such as attorney’s Andrew Bush (who served as Grand Master in the 1800’s) and Edwin B. Jordain (Who was an attendee and participant in W.E.B. Dubois’ catalytic Niagara Movement meeting in 1905). This summer, the lodge is celebrating it’s 150^th anniversary (1857 to 2007).

In the two years that preceded this June morning in 2002, two of the lodges members, at different times, had told me about the lodge and discussed the consideration of membership, the first being Jibreel Khazan (meeting him the first time is an article in itself); the other being one of those strange chance meetings. From 1998 to 2001, I ran a youth theatre program in New Bedford and would often stop at the Staples in Fairhaven to make photocopies of scripts, flyers, grant proposals, etc. It seemed that each time I was in the shop; I’d meet this man who would be busy photocopying a variety of documents. We often conversed about current events, music (it turned out that we both grew up in the Bronx and have a love of Afro-Latin music), and so forth. His conversation and range of interests revealed him to be a true renaissance man.

After months of these meetings, he asked what I knew about Freemasonry. As a history buff and occasional reader of conspiracy theory literature, I knew a few things about the craft, and was particularly intrigued by the history of Prince Hall masons and the roles that the order’s members played in the advancement of disenfranchised people of color. Curiously, most of the conspiracy theorists did not include Prince Hall masonry as a part of the quest for world domination, albeit the order has had a fair number of Black nationalists among it’s membership, including Hall himself, Alexander Crummell, W.E.B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, and Elijah Poole (Muhammad). The gentleman, John Cole, gave me his phone number and after a weeks worth of contemplation, I was sitting at his dining room table, filling out an application for membership to the lodge…

The front door of the temple opened, and a large, bald-headed man with a moustache, wearing a tuxedo, beckoned me to come in.