‘Bailey’s boycott’

    

Cameron M. Bailey

The Most Worshipful Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of the State of Washington published a personal statement Sunday saying he believes it is necessary for grand lodges to withdraw fraternal recognition now from those few remaining jurisdictions that still have not established relations with their Prince Hall Affiliated neighbors.

Writing on Substack, Cameron Bailey, in an essay titled “Prince Hall Recognition: It Is Well Past Time,” says:

By recognizing as legitimate those jurisdictions that refuse to recognize their Prince Hall counterparts, the Grand Lodge of Washington, through its silence, gives its consent to an ongoing moral wrong. It stands silent as a discrimination that should have been done away with in 1897 continues in a small handful of states.

This was wrong in 1897, it is wrong today, and if we don’t do something about it, it will be wrong next year as well.

It is well past time that the Jurisdictions that do recognize their Prince Hall counterparts take positive action standing up for that which is good and right and moral.

This is no sudden outburst from the Grand Master. His opinion has been known for a long time. His reference to 1897 is a recollection of how his Grand Lodge made the extraordinary move to close the racial divide by recognizing PHA Freemasonry. At that time, the other grand lodges in the United States beat Washington into submission by withholding their recognition of that jurisdiction.

Washington tried it again in 1990, and that time the diplomacy worked, sparking the revolution that has spread across the country to all but six jurisdictions in the South.

My thoughts on this may be primitive, so please be patient. First, I don’t know that instigating less recognition is the best way to create more recognition. Maybe it would be. I do not know. Second, recognition between two parties must be mutual. I can’t say for a fact that the PHA grand lodges affected today even want the friendship of these now rogue southern grand jurisdictions. Maybe one or more or all would choose to establish mutual relations. I don’t know. (I’m one of the few who admits publicly that I don’t know things. My motto, “I drink and I don’t know things,” was co-opted and turned upside down by that dumb TV show.) Thirdly, it’s possible that progress is being made already in one or more of these southern states—say it with me: I don’t know—and an audacious provocation like this might be counterproductive.

Should make for lively conversation at the Conference of Grand Masters next February!