A Noble Fight

African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America

Corey D. B. Walker

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780252033650
• eBook ISBN: 9780252092770
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Social Sciences

A Noble Fight examines the metaphors and meanings behind the African American appropriation of the culture, ritual, and institution of freemasonry in navigating the contested terrain of American democracy. Combining cultural and political theory with extensive archival research--including the discovery of a rare collection of nineteenth-century records of an African American Freemason Lodge--Corey D. B. Walker provides an innovative perspective on American politics and society during the long transition from slavery to freedom.

With great care and detail, Walker argues that African American freemasonry provides a critical theoretical lens for understanding the distinctive ways African Americans have constructed a radically democratic political imaginary through racial solidarity and political nationalism, forcing us to reconsider much more circumspectly the complex relationship between voluntary associations and democratic politics.

Mapping the discursive logics of the language of freemasonry as a metaphoric rendering of American democracy, this study interrogates the concrete forms of an associational culture, revealing how paradoxical aspects of freemasonry such as secrecy and public association inform the production of particular ideas and expressions of democracy in America.

1. The Specter of Democracy

“I can think of nothing so important in this country at present as a rethinking of the whole problem of democracy and its implications.”

—John Dewey

“Conceive this nation, of all human peoples, engaged in a crusade to make the ‘World Safe for Democracy!’ Can you imagine the United States protesting against Turkish atrocities in Armenia, while the Turks are silent about mobs in Chicago and St. Louis; what is Louvain compared with Memphis, Waco, Washington, Dyersbury, and Estill Springs? In short, what is the black man but America’s Belgium, and how could America condemn in Germany that which she commits, just as brutally, within her own borders? A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers. Say to men, earnestly and repeatedly: ‘Honesty is best, knowledge is power; do unto others as you would be done by.’ Say this and act it and the nation must move toward it, if not to it. But say to a people: ‘The one virtue is to be white,’ and the people rush to the inevitable conclusion, ‘Kill the “nigger”!’”

—W. E. B. DuBois

“‘Democracy’ in the discourse of the ‘Free West’ does not carry the same meaning as it does when we speak of ‘popular-democratic’ struggle or of deepening the democratic content of political life. We cannot allow the term to be wholly expropriated. … Instead, we need to develop a strategy of contestation around the term itself.”

—Stuart Hall

I

Democracy in America receives one of its most searing indictments as well as one of its strongest affirmations in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.¹ Staged with the backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial and witnessed by thousands of Americans seeking to instantiate the social and political rights of African Americans, King’s speech resolutely articulates the promises and perils of the democratic experience in the United States. King fabricates an extensive rhetorical architecture in order to conceptualize the conflicted and contested political space in the United States while gesturing toward a new model of democratic existence whereby all national subjects will have the opportunity to freely and fully engage in political life. King’s strategic use and deployment of the construct of the “dream” signifies on the national symbolic, particularly as captured in the idea of “the American Dream,” while carving out a new space for a more robust articulation of the political presence and possibility of African American civic and political equality. “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy,” King emphatically announces. Overlapping the particular with the universal, the social with the economic, as well as the moral with the political enables King to develop a series of critical points of reference whereby the struggles and conflicts, the possible resolution and enhancement of American democracy can become tangible in the lives of the marginal and dispossessed. Despite this intricate complexity, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech goes beyond a rhetorical struggle over American democracy’s conflicted and contested tendencies. Indeed, although the speech does not aim to present a robust theory of democracy, it gestures toward a way of critical democratic theorizing that opens up new terrains for interrogating the ideas and practices of democracy in America.²

At first glance, King’s speech, particularly his invocation and rhetorical use of the notion of the dream, strongly suggests that his primary objective is to explain the arrested development of American democracy by reference to the condition of African Americans. He links his production of American democracy with the construction of his dream of equality ensconced within the imaginary of the American dream—“It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed—we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The dream motif facilitates the conjuring of a democratic dreamscape on which the struggle for African American political presence is staged. This dreamscape is shot through with not only the political language of rights and civic equality, but King also resituates the political within a broadly moral framework, thereby reclassifying the language of democracy as a particularly ethical and moral one. Such a maneuver has the concomitant effect of challenging the normative framework of what is properly considered the language of politics as well as the formal boundaries of the political. Although the explanatory and normative dimensions are quite prescient and suggestive, the critical import of King’s development and deployment of the notion of the dream lies elsewhere. The construct of the dream is given new critical purchase in directing our attention to a particular logic of democracy in America that frustrates a desire for a self-evident and straightforward narrative rehearsal of its rhetorical production.³ Indeed, a reconsideration of King’s invocation, the dream draws our attention to what Luce Irigaray calls in a different context “the blind spot of an old dream of symmetry.”⁴

King’s dream offers neither a utopia of democracy nor a space that is beyond conflict. What the dream introduces is a challenging idea of democracy that cannot be adequately faced within a purely analytic and normative discourse. By staging the dream within the discourse of the struggles over democracy in America, our attention is focused not on the resolution of the tensions and ambiguities of democratic politics, but instead we confront that which remains unsatisfied within the space of democracy. Although King’s dream offers visions of freedom, equality, and justice, what remains are divisions within the polity along lines of identity, social, cultural, and economic privilege, and institutional politics and practices. The dream gestures toward a logic within the democratic experience in America that cannot overcome the always already violent conditions present within the democratic experience—conditions that King so eloquently outlines in the first half of his speech and that continue to serve as foils in the articulation of his dream—while simultaneously hinting at the im/possibility of democracy guided by the normative strictures so readily embraced by political theorists. To put it another way, King’s dream of American democracy is inspired by, but not reducible to, a theological moment that itself cannot completely assimilate the full import of the dream within a nonviolent theopolitical horizon. The dream is eschatological—one that indexes the immanence and the abyss between the (violent) real and the (nonviolent) ideal while pointing toward a vanishing reference mark that places democracy within a temporality that is always and inevitably to come.

A readily transparent and masterly reading of King’s dream serves to defer the (mis)recognition of the logic of American democracy in a quest to conceptualize and realize a descriptively and analytically authentic democratic experience.⁵ In contradistinction to this desire, the repressed logic of democracy complicates the boundaries of normativity and temporality by suggesting that the dream of freedom and equality—“black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants”—can only be staged on a very violent reality in which the subjects of American democracy are all deeply mired.⁶ In other words, instead of the dream serving solely as a vision of a utopian political space, its articulation forestalls and obfuscates an encounter with the violence that continues to haunt the ideas and experiences of American democracy. In a critical sense, the dream serves as the guardian of the illusion of democracy in America. It is such an illusion that animates King’s dream but already supplies the conditions and referents to the reality and recognition of the continual state of injustice in America as well as the future project of American democracy. King’s dream of democracy in America is not clear and direct but is arrested, mystified, and deferred by a forced and continuous call to awaken to the very violent reality that was, is, and quite possibly will be American democracy. In the end, what is achieved is not so much an affirmation of a dream, but an un/conscious acknowledgement of the veritable impossibility of the American dream. And, by extension, we, along with King, are sensitized to the very trauma of American democracy.

By interrogating King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, we begin to uncover the logic of the relation of American democracy to the un/conscious fantasies and desires of national and theoretical wholeness that are constantly interrupted by the very failure of democracy. The desire for democracy in America points not to its presence and possibility inasmuch as it reminds us of its lack of presence and its impossibility. For “[i]t is not possible to desire that with which one coincides. The starting point is thus not a point but a différance. …”⁷ In light of this différance, the task that remains in the wake of the critical suggestion of King’s dream is thus one of devising a way, a strategy, a method of attempting to re(dis) cover and interrogate the moments of rupture of historical and theoretical trauma that haunt American democracy, if you will, and begin to think through the manner in which these forms of trauma are metabolized by the American body politic. Accordingly, “[w]hat is required of democratic theory,” Barbara Cruikshank argues, “is less a solution to the conundrum of the political than a way to articulate the contingency of the political that neither exhausts nor determines any efforts to reconstitute political order and the space of politics.”⁸ The challenge is thus to disrupt what can be termed the naturalization of the ideas and practices that properly constitute democracy in America by rethinking this political assemblage at its limits.⁹

With King as the starting point, this chapter proceeds to examine how a dominant political desire for wholeness is continuously disturbed by those subterranean streams of thought that challenge the asymmetries of power, privilege, and position in the American democratic experience. By disaggregating the typical tropes and themes that dominate traditional formulations and debates concerning democracy in America, we are able to read back into democracy the ambiguity between the event of democracy and the meaning(s) of democracy. The gap between the theory and the practice of democracy becomes the foundational site for analyzing the functional limits of our explanatory and normative theoretical frameworks and reveals the not so clean divides between the democratic ideal and the real of democracy in America.¹⁰ Moreover, we are able to suggest how we might think through how marginal political subjects challenge and transform relations of political power in and through the production of material and ideological counterformations. By thinking the gaps of democratic theory and experience, we may more critically gauge how African Americans develop particular associational cultures and organizations that seek to mitigate the vicissitudes of the various regimes of violence that operate within American culture and democratic politics.

We will begin this excavation by locating several points of reference within Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic text Democracy in America. To begin with Tocqueville should not be understood as a capitulation to the spirit of Tocqueville as appropriately articulated by Donald Pease: “Historians, political scientists, literary theorists, philosophers, and citizens alike have invested Tocqueville’s work with a metahistorical knowingness about U.S. democratic culture. As a consequence of this collective transference, Democracy in America has endowed U.S. democratic culture with a framework of intelligibility. Its categories, rules, and concepts have provided the metalanguage in which issues get identified, recognized, parsed, construed, ordered, and concatenated.”¹¹ Rather, this interrogatory (re)turn to Tocqueville opens up a critical theoretical terrain for reclaiming the ambiguity within the event of democracy and proffers a provisional response to the challenge of forestalling historical and theoretical closure of the issue of democracy in America. Notwithstanding the many critiques of the recent “Tocquevillan turn” in certain intellectual circles, a reconsideration of Tocqueville’s text provides recourse to a mode of analysis that foils any desire for a progressive and orderly discourse about the meaning and interpretation of democracy.¹² The mode of analysis in this (re)turn draws on a methodological and theoretical reconsideration of democracy in America through the concept of the specter—that image, moment, space, and event that cannot be absolutely represented in the theater of the political. To be sure, such an “untimely” (re)turn to Tocqueville “may have the distinct advantage of augmenting our very political possibilities, of allowing us to see different or new political ends and other political dimensions … beyond problem-solving toward a richer and less confining understanding of politics and history.”¹³

What opportunity might a spectral exploration of democracy in America leave on our conceptual, interpretative, and theoretical frameworks if we pay close attention to querying the shadows of this always already contested terrain? Just as our reading of King’s speech illuminated the gaps in American democracy, the conceptual import of the specter facilitates a process whereby our attention is focused on the entanglements of what is unspoken with the ever-present trace of the obsessions, the ideas, and the practices that disrupt the neat and tidy strategies and betray the conscious intentions and self-evident interpretations of the message. Thus, the disciplinary desire of Tocqueville—“I would therefore ask for my book to be read in the spirit in which it was written and would wish it to be judged by the general impression it leaves, just as I have formed my own judgements not for one particular reason but in conformity with a mass of evidence”—points to the shadow presence of the O/other that continually undermines his and our attempt to draw neat and stable distinctions in our production of meanings and interpretations of democracy in America.¹⁴ The trace of the O/other or, rather, the specter serves to remind us that our normative constructions of democracy are always contested and stand already over and against the normative ideal “not by creating ambiguity, but by inscribing a systematic ‘other message’ behind or through what is being said.”¹⁵

To begin to engage American democracy in light of this spectral economy gains in conceptual and theoretical import when we reconsider the associational terrain of American democracy. With the immense diversity of associations across the American democratic landscape, it would be almost impossible to render a comprehensive theory of their democratic effects. “Rather,” as Mark Warren argues, “the question of associational life provides a more modest take on democratic possibilities: it provides an opening to the domain of questions we need to ask if we are to grasp the potentials and dangers of the changing terrain of democracy.”¹⁶ The rendering of democracy in America through the logic of the specter concretely exposes the problematic of the conflicts and conquests in the relations of democracy and association as well as the aggregation of political power in a democratic society. Within these particular associative bodies—sites where the cleavages within the body politic and the contestations over the laws, rules, and regulations that are codified on an abstracted body are materialized—we are able to bring into relief the tensions over gender, class, and race within the constellation of public and private institutions that constitute conflicting blocs that attempt to substantiate specific forms of capital in gaining and maintaining political recognition. From this perspective, democracy in America is a continual struggle played out within the various associational formations in civic and political life.¹⁷

A rethinking of the politics of association in relation to the very im/possibility of democracy provides us with the necessary theoretical apparatus to begin to understand the logics of associational practices and democratic politics when the secure moorings of normative ideals that evade the divisions, ruptures, and contestations are jettisoned. Thus, the associational terrain is not just an index of the health and vitality of the democratic experience. Nor should we approach it as an isolated space, adequate for theorizing the parameters, prospects, and possibilities of civil society in relation to the democratic project.¹⁸ Instead, the associational terrain materializes the nature and effects of the continual contestations over the idea and instantiation of democracy in America.

II

The correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in 1821 provides a provocative insight into the complications confronting a fledgling democratic nation. For Jefferson, “[t]he real question, as seen in the states afflicted with this unfortunate population, is ‘Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?’”¹⁹ The precarious balance of power between the federal government and state government continued to haunt Jefferson’s “empire for liberty” as he experienced a continual anxiety over the tipping of this balance in favor of the federal government. Jefferson’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: A Note on Freemasonry
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Secret Rites, Public Power
• 1. The Specter of Democracy
• 2. A Cartography of Democracy
• 3. Ritual and Revolution
• 4. A New Political Ideology
• 5. The Democratic Uses of Ritual and Secrecy
• Epilogue: Race, Ritual, and the Struggle for Democracy in America
• Notes
• Index