Talk:African American founding fathers of the United States

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New article[edit]

See the discussion at Talk:Founding Fathers of the United States#Include Benjamin Banneker?. Rjensen (talk) 22:16, 19 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Nikole Hannah-Jones[edit]

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a current events journalist who covers 21st century civil rights at the New York Times. She is best known as the editor of the 1619 project. her credentials as a historian are very modest (an undergraduate degree), and it significantly weakens this article to suggest that she is an expert on founding fathers or black history or constitutional history. The quoted excerpt does not summarize the article---contrast it with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall writing in the Harvard Law Review and quoted later in this article. He strongly denies that the founding fathers promised freedom to all. Rjensen (talk) 05:31, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

No worries Professor. Thanks for explaining your process but I entirely defer to your expertise. jengod (talk) 16:07, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"Evaluating the First Founders"[edit]

Could we/should we define "First Founders" versus "ongoing/continuing/latter-day founders"? I roughly get what it means but the capitalization suggests it's a significant term of art...? maybe just lowercase it if it's just a general adjective? I did a quick Google and JSTOR search and nothing jumped out at me as readily usable definition in this context. jengod (talk) 18:42, 24 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea. I changes it to "Evaluating the original Constitution" Rjensen (talk) 02:34, 25 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Prince Hall[edit]

In researching the Constitution, I came across a 1992 biography of Prince Hall that credits him as the first organizer of blacks in American history. Hall, who was freed from enslavement in 1770, was the founder of the African Lodge of the Order of Free Masons (1784), though he was active for at least a decade before that. Wikipedia's article on Hall glosses over Hall's race, limiting an account of his heritage to a somewhat ambiguous footnote. With a little "digging", I came up with the following sources for updating Hall's article and possibly including him here in the article on black founding fathers:

Petition to Massachusetts Legislature, 1777
Official History of Freemasonry Among the Colored People in North America, 1903
Prince Hall: Social Reformer, 1992
Prince Hall...Black Freemasonry, 1997
Salute to Historic Black Abolitionists, 1997
Prince Hall: Freemasonry and Genealogy, 2000
100 Greatest African Americans: Prince Hall, 2002
African American Secret Societies, 2012
Black Roots of Slavery's Abolition in Massachusetts, 2014
YouTube Lecture: Who Was Prince Hall?, 2021
The Atlantic: A Forgotten Black Founding Father, 2021
PBS Biography: Prince Hall, 2022

Note: Sources disagree on the basic details of Hall's early background. For example, the Atlantic article reports he was born in Boston, while most sources indicate Barbados. Allreet (talk) 18:05, 16 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, I came across a sentence on Prince Hall in Kate Masur's Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction, mentioned in the article, where she writes (p. 20): "African Americans in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and other places also forged ties through the Prince Hall Masons, a Freemansony organization inaugurated in 1775 by Prince Hall, a Boston-born Black man." Larry Koenigsberg (talk) 00:43, 17 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]