Prince Hall, founder of the oldest Black fraternal organization in America, and Revolutionary War veteran, was born in Barbados, British West Indies. Hall was born sometime between 1735 and 1738. There is confusion about his year of birth, place of birth, parents, and marriages partly due to there being a number of “Prince Halls” during his lifetime. Hall was enslaved to Boston tanner William Hall, who taught him leatherworking. By 1765, Hall was working as a journeyman—a skilled, trusted tradesman and respected member of Boston’s free Black community. By 1770 shortly after the Boston Massacre he was a free, literate man and his certificate of manumission read that he was "no longer Reckoned a slave, but [had] always accounted as a free man."
Hall was able to read and write, and may have been self-taught or, like other enslaved people and free Blacks in New England, he may have had assistance. By age twenty-five he was able to buy real estate and was eligible to vote. Hall joined Boston's Congregational Church in 1762 at the age of 27. In Boston, Hall worked as a peddler, caterer, and leatherworker, owning his own leather shop. During the war he created five leather drumheads for an artillery regiment of Boston for the Continental army. Prince Hall encouraged enslaved and freed Blacks to serve the American colonial military. He believed that if Blacks were involved in the founding of the new nation, it would aid in the attainment of freedom for all Blacks.
Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation that guaranteed freedom to Black man, free or slave who enlisted in the British army. Once the British Army filled its ranks with Black troops, the Continental Army, headed by George Washington, reversed its decision and allowed Blacks into the military. As a patriotic citizen of Massachusetts, Prince Hall had asked the Committee of Safety for the Colonies to allow him to join the Continental Army, with George Washington as the commander-in-chief. His petition was approved, and he served in the Continental Army during the Revolution. It is believed, but not certain, that Hall was one of the six "Prince Halls" from Massachusetts to serve during the war.
Having served during the Revolutionary War, many African Americans expected, but did not receive, racial equality when the war ended. Although free, Hall faced a life of discrimination and oppression. Hall used his leadership position to organize Black activism. He hosted community events, such as educational forums and theatre events to improve the lives of Black people. In 1775, after Hall and other free Blacks tried unsuccessfully to join the city’s all-White Masonic lodge in America but was denied membership because he was a Black man. On March 6, 1775, Prince Hall and fourteen other Free African Americans who had also been rejected by established Boston lodges turned to a military lodge operating in Boston, No. 441, in their quest to become Freemasons.
When the British retreated from Boston in 1776, this Lodge, No 441, granted Prince Hall and his brethren authority to meet as African Lodge #1, the first Masonic Lodge for Negroes in America. He obtained a charter from England in 1787 for the African Lodge Number 459. This was the world's first lodge of Black Freemasonry and the first society in American history devoted to social, political, and economic improvement. Finally on March 2, 1784, Prince Hall petitioned the Grand Lodge of England, to officially chartered the group as African Lodge No. 459. The Masons were independent of the United Grand Lodge of England. They created separate jurisdictions comprised of mostly African American members. In 1791, the Prince Hall Grand Lodge was founded to govern the three then existing Black Masonic lodges with Prince Hall as its first Grand Master.
Prince Hall was involved in the "Back-to-Africa", movement where Blacks could be fully free, achieve liberty, equality and also serve as a trading partner. He approached the Massachusetts legislature to request funds for voluntary emigration to Africa. He believed, for several reasons, that giving freed slaves the opportunity to return to Africa would be in their best interest. In January 1773, Prince Hall and seventy three other Black delegates presented an emigration plea to the Massachusetts Senate. This plea, which included the contentions that African Americans are better suited to Africa's climate and lifestyle, failed. He found that there was not sufficient momentum and support for the Back-to-Africa movement to make it a reality at the time.
He fought for the abolition of slavery years before the abolitionist movement took root in New England. After the Revolutionary War, Prince Hall collaborated with others to propose legislation for equal rights. A petition to the General Court as early as January 13th, 1777 requested that enslaved people be given their freedom and held the government accountable for taking Africans from their homeland. In his efforts to obtain freedom for the enslaved, Hall is believed to have helped Belinda Sutton with her petition for reparations in 1783. He also hosted community events, such as educational forums and theatre events to improve the lives of Black people. Hall used Freemasonry as a platform to uplift Black communities socially, morally, and politically.
His subsequent bids to gain support for tax-funded schooling for Black children in Massachusetts also failed, despite the fact that taxes paid by African Americans supported White schools. Hall cited the same platform for fighting the American Revolution of "Taxation without Representation". A self-educated man and a clergyman, he recognized the value of education. Hall and other Black Bostonians wanted a separate school to distance themselves from White supremacy and create well-educated Black citizens. Hall and his co-signers bemoaned the contradiction of having to pay taxes while Black children were kept out of public schools. Although Hall's arguments were logical, his two attempts at passing legislation through the Massachusetts Congress both resulted in failure. Hall then started a school program for free Black children out of his own home in 1787, employing two Harvard University students as instructors.
On February 27, 1788, Prince Hall presented another petition to the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in an effort to end the slave trade in Massachusetts, and punishing those involved with it. It protested the kidnapping of three free African Americans who were taken to the West Indies to be sold as slaves. Hall presented an argument that the threat of being taken was keeping Black freemen from working in the shipping industry, which was one of the few professions open to them. On March 26, 1788, the Massachusetts General Court passed an act “to prevent the Slave Trade, and for granting Relief to the Families of such unhappy Persons as may be Kidnapped or decoyed away from this Commonwealth".
He is known for giving speeches and writing petitions. In his last published speech, his charge to the African Lodge in June 1797, Hall spoke of mob violence against Blacks: "Patience, I say; for were we not possessed of a great measure of it, we could not bear up under the daily insults we meet within the streets of Boston, much more on public days of recreation. How, at such times, are we shamefully abused, and that to such a degree, that we may truly be said to carry our lives in our hands, and the arrows of death are flying about our heads....tis not for want of courage in you, for they know that they dare not face you man for man, but in a mob, which we despise..."
Over the last decade of Hall’s life, he focused his efforts more on developing black institutions and community than on attempts at integration and equality. His championing of Black Freemasonry encouraged the development of other segregated lodges, chartered through his Boston lodge. After many years of service, Prince Hall died in 1807, leaving a legacy as the founder of the first African American institution in America, a champion of education, and a tireless advocate for the abolition of slavery. He used his leadership position as a Freemason and his activism to make a positive impact on the lives of African Americans in Boston. He remains an important figure in the history of the African American community and its fight for equality. In 1847, the name African Grand Lodge was changed to Prince Hall Grand Lodge after the organizer’s death in 1807.