Beschreibung:

Title: Report of the Committee on Negro Lodges to the Grand Lodge of North Carolina, 5865 - White Masons oppose Masonic lodges for freed slaves Author: Reade, E.G, H.H.Smith and Daniel Coleman Place: Raleigh, NC Publisher: Date: 1866 Description: 4 x 5.75”, 15pp. In original printed wrappers. Embossed stamp of a North Carolina lodge on rear wrapper. Writing in December 1865, just 8 months after the end of the Civil War, a committee of white Masons – including a state Supreme Court Judge and a senior University Professor – were perturbed by reports that New York Masons were sending an agent to the South to organize Masonic lodges among freed Black slaves. (The New Yorker, Masonic Grand Master Paul Drayton, was actually a “Mulatto” of such “fair complexion” that he could have passed for white, but “never did.”) They vigorously opposed the establishment of Black lodges, with an outburst of Southern racist paternalism: While there was “no prejudice against the Negro” in the Southern states – even though they “are ignorant, uneducated, immoral, untruthful and intellectually” inferior – northerners, “imbued with the spirit of fanaticism”, were wholly unqualified to protect “the best interest of the Negroes…” who were “born in our families; we have nursed them in sickness, labored with them in the field and in the shop, we have rejoiced with them when we had much and suffered with them when we had little, we have protected them because they were weak and advised them because they were ignorant...” Better it should be “left to us to determine when they are sufficiently developed” to become Masons, as “we know them better and love them better and…our benevolence toward them has been purified by the unrestrained associations of childhood and by the sorrows and joys of life, greater than the pinched up, stingy…philanthropy of presumptuous” northern “meddlers.” Lot Amendments Condition: Very good. Item number: 276197