‘Grant dollars to benefit grand lodge historic building’

     

The headquarters of the MW Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Georgia will be the beneficiary of grant funds to assist with renovations of the historic building.

The City of Atlanta is contributing $1.5 million, raised through a segment of property taxes allocated to help non-profit organizations. Additional funds are expected from other sources. The work is expected to be completed in August.

“The Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Georgia is excited to have the City of Atlanta’s support as we restore our historic home on Auburn Avenue,” said MW Corey D. Shackleford, Sr., Grand Master on the grand lodge website. “We look forward to doing our part to sustain the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while educating the world about the vibrant, economically progressive Black community where he was born and raised.”

The result is expected to be a preserved 330 Auburn Avenue NE, where the brethren will continue to meet on the top floor, with various retail and other commercial tenants occupying the ground floor and second story.

The National Park Service will lease the basement and first floor areas to provide educational exhibits devoted to King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Read more about the building and its great significance here. Read more about the project here.

     

‘Joppa Lodge singing, performing, and informing’

     
Today is Martin Luther King Day, an apt time to tell you about Joppa Lodge 55’s upcoming special event. From the publicity:

Black History Program

Joppa Lodge 55, PHA

Saturday, February 22

3 to 5 p.m.

Masonic Temple

454 West 155th Street

New York City

Please join the Brothers of Joppa Lodge 55 as we have our annual Black History Program in our 100th year of existence. The Brothers of Joppa will be singing, performing, and informing.

This event is free of charge and open to the public. Make reservations here. We ask only that you bring one toiletry, which will be donated to a homeless shelter.
     

‘Prince Hall MLK Day program’

     

‘334 Auburn Avenue’

     

I read late into the night, and in the summer months I often return to books I had read in my youth. You’ve heard of comfort food? I like comfort comprehension. I am well into The Making of the President 1964 again, Theodore White’s second of what would become his quadrennial four-book series. These are fascinating chronicles that encapsulate many of the social and political forces that shaped those times. The reporting is not only about men campaigning for the presidency of the United States; it is a witness’ account of historic happenings contextualized with details that can make your eyes pop.

So I reach Page 176, early into Chapter Six, titled “Freedom Now: The Negro Revolution” (remember, this was published 50 years ago) which recounts the birth of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent civil disobedience campaign to end segregation in the American South, beginning in Birmingham, Alabama. Excerpted:

“Full plans were drawn up after Thanksgiving, 1962. In December the Alabama Christian Movement leaders met with King at his Atlanta headquarters in the Masonic Lodge building at 334 Auburn Avenue and decided to launch their protest just before Easter.”

I probably noticed the reference to a Masonic lodge when I had read this previously decades ago during high school because my grandfather was a Mason, but obviously that sentence appears larger to me today, and I found it odd just now that the street address would merit mention.

Gotta love Google.

A flickr.com user named Wally Gobetz posted this history two years ago:

Atlanta - Sweet Auburn:

Prince Hall Masonic Temple

Courtesy Wally Gobetz

The Prince Hall Masonic Temple, located at 334 Auburn Avenue NE, was built in 1937, with an addition in 1941, for the M.W. Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Georgia, under the leadership of prominent black leader and Grand Master John Wesley Dobbs. The Renaissance Revival building was designed by Charles Hopson and Ron Howard. The Prince Hall Masons, Georgia’s most influential black Masonic lodge, were first organized in 1871 by Frances J. Peck, the pastor of Big Bethal A.M.E.

Starting 1949, the Masonic Building’s second floor housed WERD 860AM, the first radio station owned and programmed by African-Americans. Jesse B. Blayton Sr., an accountant bank president and Atlanta University professor, purchased the station in 1949 for $50,000, and hired his son Jesse Jr. as station manager. By 1951, “Jockey Jack” Gibson had become the most popular DJ in America.

The Prince Hall Masonic Building currently houses the national offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an African-American civil rights organization. The SCLC traces its origins back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott by the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), under the direction of Martin Luther King, Jr., following Rosa Parks’ arrest in 1955. As boycotts spread across the South, leaders of the MIA met in Atlanta on in 1957 and founded the Southern Leadership Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration, which was later shortened to the Southern Leadership Conference and eventually changed to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Under the direction of its first President, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the SCLC was run out of the first floor of the Prince Hall Masonic Temple. It is said that Dr. King would bang on the ceiling of his office with a broom when he wished to address the public on WERD.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Historic District, an area bound roughly by Irwin, Randolph, Edgewood, and Auburn Avenues, was established in 1974 and later, in 1977 designated a national historic landmark, and expanded in 2001. The district encompasses the environs in which Martin Luther King, Jr., grew up, from his birth in 1929 until he left Atlanta.


I have to believe every Prince Hall Mason in the world is aware of all this, but it is news to me, and I share it here in case it’s news to you too.
     

‘A sacred retreat’

     
Honestly, it feels like it was ten years ago, but it was only in 2012 when I was guest speaker at Grand Master’s Day at DeWint House in Tappan, New York. It is an annual celebration that I enjoy attending for a variety of reasons. Earlier this week, I accidentally found the text of my remarks from that day, from which the following is excerpted for today’s Flashback Friday. When the arrangements were made originally, I was told to prepare for ten minutes; on the day of, I was told by Head Honcho Norman Moon that the schedule was tight, and I now had four minutes. Norman!

Grand Master’s Day 2014 will take place next weekend, on the 24th, and RW Norman Moon will be the much deserving honoree. I am looking forward to it. But now, a look back at two years ago, with apologies to William Wordsworth.

Temples Lie Open unto the Fields

Presented to DeWint House

On Grand Masters Day

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Most Worshipful Grand Master, Right Worshipful Deputy Grand Master, Right Worshipful District Deputy Grand Master, Trustees of the Masonic Hall and Home, distinguished brethren, friends of Freemasonry, and supporters of the DeWint House all:

Thank you for the honor of being able to speak at this place today. 2012 is the eightieth anniversary of Grand Lodge’s acquisition of the DeWint House, and is the 260th anniversary of Bro. George Washington’s initiation into Freemasonry, and is the 280th anniversary of Washington’s birth. So I was hoping the stars would align, and keep the rain away.

I have come to praise the DeWint House. I’m a New Jersey Mason, so I’m kind of looking at things from the outside, but maybe that is a better vantage point – that of a visitor – to gain added perspective. I see the DeWint House as more than a historic site, and even as more than a Masonic treasure made accessible to the public. Having attended Grand Master’s Day and other events here for several years, I recognize this special place as nothing less than a temple dedicated to the heroes and ideals that made the creation of our nation possible. Perhaps you don’t hear it often enough, but these buildings and grounds you maintain so carefully serve to inform the American citizen of so many lessons that must be understood and appreciated in order for the meaning of America to be handed down to posterity.

This land is alive. The exotic trees and beautiful plants that please our eyes are much more than decoration. They tell the visitor to the DeWint House that Freemasonry and Americanism possess a vitality that feeds on new sensory experiences. This is not a
historic site frozen in time, despite its lovingly preserved structures and artifacts. This is a place to walk. Yes, it is remembered for who and what happened here way back when, but it also is a place that looks to its tomorrows. The landscape is so enticing, I wouldn’t be surprised if newly married couples came here with their photographers for wedding pictures, making their own histories. This cannot be taken for granted.

We face a crisis in American culture in which the creators of modern memorials to America’s great heroes and remembrances seem to not know what they are doing, while simultaneously those who visit these new places appear unable to dedicate their hearts and minds, even for a moment, to the purpose of the monuments.

Just an hour’s drive to the south, at the National September 11th Memorial where the World Trade Center once stood, many visitors – apparently detached from the loss of life there – regard that place not as hallowed ground, but as another tourist spectacle on the doubledecker bus route. The September 2 edition of the New York Post puts it this way:


They’re treating it like a national playground. At the National September 11th Memorial, tourists balance coffee cups and soda bottles on the parapets bearing the names of the dead.

Parents hoist their children to sit on the bronze plaques, while other visitors splash water from the two waterfalls onto their faces to cool themselves on a hot summer day.


It hasn’t even taken one generation to reach this point. It’s been eleven years.

Last October, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial was unveiled in Washington, DC. Known for his inspiring oratory, the monument actually manages to misquote King, putting words into his mouth that he didn’t actually say. I guess fact-checkers weren’t available. Worse still, in terms of symbolism, is the fact that the sculptor hired to create the statue comes from Communist China, where any fledgling Doctor King, and many a Christian in general, would find himself at the mercy of the police state. Furthermore, in a typical Chinese insult to America, the sculptor worked only in granite imported from China. I suppose quarries in the United States are fresh out of granite.

Also in the Federal City, but still in the planning stages, is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, which will be built near the base of Capitol Hill, and in proximity to Carter-era bureaucracies the planners say were in some way inspired by Eisenhower’s
presidency. But what really catches the critical eye is a depiction of Eisenhower himself. There is to be a sculpture of Eisenhower shown as a country boy. This is to symbolize the humble beginnings and great potential of so many Americans, and of America itself, but is it proper to show the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Expeditionary Force that liberated Europe, and that introduced the Pax Americana that interrupted a thousand years of war in Europe as a kid from Kansas? It gravely misses the point of it all. And seemingly deliberately, as the likeness of a child can hardly communicate the immense importance of what Ike accomplished in humanity’s most existential crisis.

I think what these projects need is a Masonic cornerstone-laying, or some other employment of the steady hand of Freemasonry. We aren’t afraid to champion grand ideas or to celebrate the greats of our history. They are key to our education as thinking, sentient, people.

Yes, George Washington slept here. And ate here. And commanded here. His personal staff flag flies here today because it has meaning that cannot be shelved like a book, or filed like a document. What New York Freemasonry gives to its fellow citizens by providing this special place cannot even be measured in a tangible way. It is something spiritual and educational. If properly understood, the DeWint House is a living testament to the virtues and morals that are the foundations of any free society, but especially ours.

You know the story of General Benedict Arnold’s treason and Major John Andre’s espionage, and how they came to involve this historic town and this very land where we meet today. But always remember what endures beyond the historical facts of those events in September and October of 1780. (Tuesday was the 232nd anniversary of Andre’s execution.) America has elected civilian leadership of her armed forces, so that no general in pursuit of greater personal glory can be positioned to destroy the nation. Appreciate how loyalty, truth, and honor are the supports of all square dealings among citizens. No social, economic, or political life can exist without these virtues being upheld by the people. No future worth having is possible without these fundamental ethics being visible in the actions of the government and the governed.

There can be no brotherly love among peoples who are bereft of loyalty, truth, and honor. To me, everything we see here stands for something. The graves of the slaves can remind us that slavery in the civilized world is dead. The exotic trees from so many distant places almost seem to teach us that if unity is achieved from diversity, greatness will follow. And of course the many representations of George Washington speak to his principled leadership as an underdog military commander who could not have achieved his immortality without his steadfast virtue.

Arnold is remembered as a traitor, his name is even synonymous with betrayal, while Major Andre was mourned as an officer killed in the service of his country – much as Nathan Hale is remembered. His statue stands in City Hall Park in Manhattan – so there are different perspectives. And it was not entirely preordained that Andre would hang. He could have been returned to the British lines in an exchange of prisoners. Congress would have stayed the execution. But when it was time to issue the death warrant, it fell to George Washington to administer the deadly lesson in what awaits those who would betray the new nation.

Here at the DeWint House we stand upon the shoulders of giants, which allows us to benefit from the successes of America’s past, while looking ahead into the future.

I thank you for your time.
     

‘Ephemera in a cigar box’

    

As smoking customs changed so radically in the past 30 years, the venerable cigar box lost its status as the safest place for small personal items that otherwise would be jeopardized by the recidivist menace of occasional tidying. A cigar enthusiast since 1985 myself, I don’t even use cigar boxes to store stuff, but generations of smokers and non-smokers alike had their peculiar treasure chests to secret away the memories that the mind thus unaided inevitably blends into busy pastiches of reminiscence. And at some point more than 30 years ago, as shown by the ages of these items, my grandfather deposited various pieces of Masonic ephemera into this Bances box. (These cigars were “clear Havanas,” meaning they were made of Cuban tobacco, but rolled in the United States. That, and all commercial trade with Cuba, ceased in 1962.) Worshipful Brother Sidney would preside over Mt. Nebo Lodge No. 248 in 1976. The lodge and the Elizabeth Masonic Temple where it met are long gone, having been amalgamated into what now is Azure-Masada Lodge No. 22 in nearby Cranford. There were 11 lodges comprising what was the 13th Masonic District between 1967 and 1976, the period recalled by the items inside this cigar box, and all 11 are gone, absorbed into other lodges many years ago. Anyway, this cedar time capsule was excavated from my aunt’s basement last month. Being the Freemason in the family, it was given to me. Some of these items (e.g., the 32° diploma issued by the Consistory of the Valley of Newark in 1968) I knew had to be stashed away somewhere, but a few others took me entirely by surprise.

An assortment of lodge trestleboards  dominates this box. Dated from January 1968 to March 1976, there are 31 in all. Unlike the typical trestleboard seen in New Jersey today, which is a tri-fold sheet of letter-size paper, these are small (6 x 3 ½ inch) two-color, six-page booklets, seemingly tailored to fit in the shirt pocket.

Their contents are unremarkable. I had hoped for Lux ex Oriente, or even Lux ex Cathedra, but it seems Mt. Nebo was a lodge that emphasized sociability over exploring the great mysteries and philosophies of life. Makes me wonder if maybe that is partially why the lodge and its 10 neighbors are all gone. Mt. Nebo Lodge was chartered on April 24, 1924 – the same day that my original lodge was chartered as No. 249, something serendipitous that I didn’t realize at the time of my initiation 30 years after my grandfather was made a Mason.

On Wednesday, March 20, 1968, the brethren in the Level Club met at Townleys’ restaurant at 6:15 for dinner, and left an hour later to catch the Knick game at the Garden. (The visiting team was the Cincinnati Royals, yet another defunct entity.) The ’68 Knicks of course was the team of Dick Barnett, Bill Bradley, Dave DeBusschere, Walt Frazier, Willis Reed… the Hall of Famers who had their numbers retired. But get this: The brethren left Elizabeth, New Jersey at 7:15 p.m. for a game at Madison Square Garden. If you tried that today, you’d miss the game.

Total assets on Dec. 31, 1967: $25,631 (that’s $168,596 in today’s money). 1968 dues: $17.50, including the $1 Grand Lodge assessment. Junior Past Master Albert M. Pines was feted February 18 at Short Hills Caterers ($11.50 per person). 44th Anniversary Dinner-Dance at Richfield Regency Caterers on May 22. Met game on June 19. Picnic September 15 in Warinanco Park. The lodge’s major accomplishment of 1968 was its establishment of a blood bank. Sid served as Chaplain that year, his first full year in Masonry.

A booklet even smaller than the trestleboard was the lodge membership roster, like this one from 1962. Junior Warden Stan Glasser is still around; I chatted with him at a recent meeting of our Consistory. (New Jersey Consistory is the oldest Scottish Rite Consistory in New Jersey, chartered in 1867. It met in Newark when Stan and my grandfather joined, then was moved to Livingston in 1972, then to Lincoln Park in 1977, and this month it relocates yet again, this time to Union.)

And speaking of New Jersey Consistory, here is that aforementioned diploma issued May 18, 1968. Just as my grandfather’s first entrance into the lodge was 30 years before my own, so too was his initiation into the AASR. Thirty years almost to the day. Actually this copy of the diploma is what used to be the traveling paper, folded and protected in a wallet, used for identification when visiting other Scottish Rite bodies. The actual diploma (heavy paper, embossed seal, suitable for framing, etc.) remains unfound.

There were a few non-Masonic papers and objects inside the Bances box that stand out. The sterling silver kiddish cup is out of place. The Morgan silver dollar (1884, New Orleans) is an entirely typical, predictable item to find among personal effects in my family...

... but the handgun permit and sales receipt for a Colt .38 Special are not. The late ’60s was a violent time. Acres of Newark remain vacant today, 43 years after the riots of the summer of 1967. That was my family’s hometown, and while they had moved out before Newark began its rapid decay, they still resided and worked not too far away. The sales receipt for this revolver is dated April 4, 1968, coincidentally the day Martin Luther King was murdered, which precipitated more rioting.

But the Masonic journey of the late W. Sid begins with this letter from W. Joseph Bernstein, Secretary of Mt. Nebo Lodge No. 248. Dated January 24, 1967, it informs its happy recipient that his EA° would be Monday, February 13, and that the $200 balance of his initiation fee will be accepted that night. That $200 is in addition to whatever deposit accompanied the petition for membership. If the complete initiaton fee totaled $250, that would equal $1,644 in today’s money. Has your lodge kept up with inflation?

Perhaps more mementos will be found in the house. My grandfather smoked a brand of Havanas called Gold Label. I remain hopeful that a Past Master’s jewel has yet to be discovered in one of those boxes.