African Lodge No. 459

The Architecture of the Light: On Prince Hall and the Quarry of American Justice
A powerful reflection on Prince Hall, African Lodge No. 459, Black Freemasonry, brotherhood, American justice, and the unfinished labor of liberty. To be a Black man in America is to be born into a house you did not build, a house whose architects, with a terrifying and deliberate precision, omitted your name from the registry of the living. You walk through its corridors, you look at its grand, high ceilings, and you discover that you are expected to inhabit the drafts, the crawlspaces, the cellars of the American consciousness. The republic, in its agonizing, multi-century labor to define what it means by liberty, has always stumbled over the presence of the dark brother standing on the porch.