Walker Lewis

Walker Lewis was an early American abolitionist, Freemason, and Mormon elder from Massachusetts.

Family and personal history

Lewis was born Friday, August 3, 1798 in Barre, Massachusetts to Peter P. Lewis and Minor Walker Lewis. His full name was Kwaku Walker Lewis, named after his maternal uncle, Kwaku Walker. (Kwaku means "boy born on Wednesday" in Ghanaian)

Lewis was one of nine children raised in an educated, socially committed, politically active, and well-connected middle-class black family. While Walker was still a young boy, Peter and Minor Lewis moved their family to Cambridge. Walker Lewis became a successful barber and earned enough money to purchase a residential and commercial building in nearby Boston.

In March 1826, Lewis married Elizabeth Lovejoy (the mixed-race daughter of Peter Lovejoy, who was black, and Lydia Greenleaf Bradford, who was white.) Their first child Enoch Lovejoy Lewis was born in June. Lewis moved his young family to Lowell, where the burgeoning industrial revolution was bringing new wealth to the state through the textile mills. In Lowell, together with his brother-in-law John Levy, Lewis opened a barbershop on Merrimack Street. Eventually they purchased a two-family home in the Centralville section of Lowell.

Freemasonry and abolitionism

While in Boston, Lewis was initiated into African Freemasonry about 1823, participating in Boston's African Lodge #459. In 1825, he became the sixth Master and a year later was its Senior Warden. After the African Lodge declared its independence from the Grand Lodge of London and became its own African Grand Lodge, Walker Lewis was the Grand Master of African Grand Lodge #1 for 1829 and 1830 (see: Prince Hall Freemasonry).

Around the time of his marriage to Elizabeth Lovejoy in 1826, Lewis and Thomas Dalton helped organize the Massachusetts General Colored Association (MGCA), the first such all-black organization in the United States. In 1829, the MGCA helped David Walker (no relation) to publish the radical, 76-page Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, which demanded unconditional and immediate emancipation of all slaves in the USA. Lewis arranged for the Boston printer who published the Articles for the African Grand Lodge, to print the controversial Appeal. In 1831, Lewis served as President of the African Humane Society in Boston, which provided funeral expenses for the poor, assisted widows, built the African School in Boston. The African Humane Society also sponsored a "settlement project" for African Americans who wanted to emigrate to settle in Liberia. When the ship sailed in 1813 its manifest contained most of the members of Hiram Lodge No. 3 of Providence, Rhode Island (chartered by Grand Master Prince Hall of African Grand Lodge in 1797).

In Lowell during 1840s and 1850s, Lewis's home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. For some time, he sheltered the escaped slave from Virginia, Nathaniel Booth, who settled in Lowell in 1844. Until 1850 Booth had a barber shop, but went to Canada after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Later he returned to Lowell.

Lewis and many of his siblings and their families were actively involved in the abolition and equal rights movement throughout Massachusetts and the Northeast.^{[citation needed]}

Conversion to Mormonism

Sometime about 1842, Lewis, who had worshipped with the Episcopal Church, officially converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It is believed he was baptized by Apostle Parley P. Pratt. One year later, in the summer of 1843, Lewis was ordained an Elder in the church by William Smith, an Apostle and brother to the founder Joseph Smith. Lewis became the third black man known to hold the Mormon priesthood. (The first two were Elijah Abel and a man only known as Black Pete).

Walker's firstborn son, Enoch Lovejoy Lewis, also joined the Church, but probably did not hold the priesthood. On September 18, 1846, Enoch married a white Mormon woman, Mary Matilda Webster, in Cambridge. They lived in Lowell, where Enoch ran a used clothing store (mainly to assist escaping slaves to change their appearances with new and better clothing). His father Walker would barber their hair into different hairstyles to further disguise them.

Priesthood ban

In 1847 William Ivers Appleby, a conservative Mormon Elder, arrived in Lowell as a missionary. He found that the most prominent Mormon was Walker Lewis, an African-American abolitionist who was ordained as an Elder. Learning that Lewis's son had married a white Mormon woman seemed to upset Appleby. He wrote to Brigham Young about it and later reported in person.

Young in 1863 said,

Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.

After settling in Utah in 1848, Young announced a ban that prohibited all men of black African descent from holding the priesthood. In addition, he prohibited Mormons of African descent from participating in Mormon temple rites, such as the Endowment or sealing. These racial restrictions remained in place until 1978, when the policy was rescinded by President of the Church Spencer W. Kimball.

Moves

In 1850 Walker Lewis decided to migrate to Utah to be with the main body of the Latter Day Saint movement. Lewis left Massachusetts at the end of March 1851 and arrived in Salt Lake City about October 1. He received his Patriarchal Blessing by the hands of Patriarch John Smith, an uncle of Joseph Smith. After arriving, he asked Jane Elizabeth Manning James, a black Mormon from Connecticut, to marry him as his polygamous wife, but she declined. Lewis was ignored by his fellow Mormons. The missionaries and Apostles who had stayed in his home and with whom he had worked so closely while in Massachusetts refused to acknowledge his presence once he was in Salt Lake City.

Two months after Walker's arrival, Brigham Young lobbied for, and the Utah Territorial Legislature (composed only of high-ranking Mormon leaders) obediently passed, the "Act in Relation to Service." This new territorial law made slavery legal in the territory of Utah, and Section Four of the statute provided punishment for "any white person... guilty of sexual intercourse with any of the African race," regardless of their being married, consenting adults. The anti-miscegenation law was not repealed in Utah until the 1960s, although enforcement had ceased well before that.

After six months in Salt Lake, Walker Lewis left with the spring thaw and returned to Lowell. His family had more difficult times; his daughter-in-law Mary Matilda Webster Lewis died from "exhaustion" just after Christmas 1852 in the State Hospital at Worcester. His son, the widower Enoch Lewis, married the African American Elisa Richardson Shorter in 1853, but Enoch was suffering from a severe mental illness.^{[citation needed]}

Death

Lewis died on October 26, 1856 in Lowell of "consumption" (tuberculosis). He was buried in the family lot in the Lowell Cemetery.

See also

• Black Mormons
• Blacks and the Latter Day Saint movement

External links

• "Quock Walker Case: End of Slavery", Massachusetts Historical Society]
• "Quock Walker Case", Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
• "Quock Walker Case", Africans in America, PBS/WGBH
• "Profiles in Courage: African Americans in Lowell" by Martha Mayo, Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusetts Lowell