Talk:African American founding fathers of the United States

Latest comment: 1 year ago by Larrykoen in topic Prince Hall

New article

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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

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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"

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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

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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:

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