Author’s Note: Courage rarely announces itself. It forms through risk, resistance, and consequence long before history chooses names to remember. The Courage They Didn’t Teach moves decade by decade from the mid 1700s onward, setting aside hero worship to focus on moments when retreat looked safer but resolve demanded sacrifice. Please note that, since these people weren't readily celebrated, historical information may be light at times.
Each entry follows one life that faced danger, opposition, or erasure and stood firm without promise of reward. Some endured violence in the open. Others absorbed pressure in silence. Together, these stories show courage as a skill shaped under strain and refined long before applause, if applause comes at all.
Prince Hall and the Work After the War
Prince Hall: 1735-1807
A well-built structure can survive a storm and still lean. The beams hold, the roof stays on. Over time, the frame shifts unless somebody squares it again.
After independence, Boston celebrated victory: Bells rang, flags waved, and words like liberty and equality filled speeches.
For many slaves, residents, and those in daily life, a harder truth holds.
The work after independence
Prince Hall supported the patriot cause during the Revolution and lived in Boston as the struggle unfolded. When the fighting stopped, he pressed for something heavier than celebration, while demanding equal protection and education under the new order.
Though Boston's schools in the 1780s did not legally bar Black children from attending, Black students found themselves at the mercy of hostile teachers and fellow students. In 1787, Prince Hall and others brought the first petition for better schools to the Massachusetts General Court. The petitioners claimed Black children: receive no benefit from the free schools in the town of Boston, which we think is a great grievance, as by woful [sic] experience we now feel the want of a common education.
This petition did not succeed, nor did a similar one in 1796. In response to these setbacks, the community set up their own private school. This early school, known as the "African School," met in 1798 in the home of Prince Hall's son, Primus Hall. By 1808, the school moved to the basement of the African Meeting House, then later to the Abiel Smith School in the mid-1830s.
In 1784, Hall secured a charter from the Grand Lodge of England for African Lodge No. 459. That document recognized one of the earliest Black Masonic lodges in America, laying the foundation for Prince Hall Freemasonry.
A lodge offered structure in a society that limited civic participation for black people, something Hall understood, where institutions shape opportunity. He organized rather than waiting for inclusion.
Hall and others petitioned the Massachusetts legislature, seeking public education, leaving people exposed and vulnerable.
Lawmakers received the request, and the document remains preserved in state records.
Hall also raised concerns about the kidnapping and illegal enslavement of free blacks. In the 1790s, he addressed legislators about enforcing the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which declared that all men were born free and equal, and words on paper meant little without application.
No dramatic courtroom duel marked Hall's career; no battlefield statue bears his name. He wrote, petitioned, and organized.
In Jan. 1777 — six months after Congress issued the Declaration of Independence — Prince Hall presented a new petition for freedom to the Massachusetts legislature on behalf of seven African Americans. Like the Declaration of Independence itself, Hall rooted his argument in a powerful vision of natural rights, arguing that slavery itself violated the “natural & inalienable right to that freedom, which the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all Mankind.”
That kind of pressure demands stamina, especially when public agitation in a young republic carried risks, especially for those without shields.
Liberty beyond celebration
Hall's timing revealed steady resolve when patriotic language still echoed across New England. He insisted leaders honor their own phrases in everyday governance. A republic weakens without invasion; it weakens when protection applies unevenly and when education narrows along racial lines.
In 1792, Hall delivered a charge to members of African Lodge, urging moral discipline, civic responsibility, and character improvement, while also framing advancement as both personal duty and communal shield against prejudice.
Dearly and well beloved Brethren of the African Lodge, as through the goodness and mercy of God, we are once more met together, in order to celebrate the Festival of St. John the Baptist; it is requisite that we should on these public days, and when we appear in form, give some reason as a foundation for our so doing, but as this has been already done, in a discourse delivered in substance by our late Reverend Brother John Marrant, and now in print,
I shall at this time endeavour to raise part of the superstructure, for howsoever good the foundation may be, yet without this it will only prove a Babel. I shall therefore endeavour to shew the duty of a Mason; and the first thing is, that he believes in one Supreme Being, that he is the great Architect of this visible world, and that he governs all things here below by his almighty power, and his watchful eye is over all our works. Again we must be good subjects to the laws of the land in which we dwell, giving honour to our lawful Governors and Magistrates, giving honour to whom honour is due; and that we have no hand in any plots or conspiracies or rebellion, or side or assist in them: for when we consider the blood shed, the devastation of towns and cities that hath been done by them, what heart can be so hard as not to pity those our distrest brethren, and keep at the greatest distance from them. However just it may be on the side of the opprest (sic), yet it doth not in the least, or rather ought not, abate that love and fellow-feeling which we ought to have for our brother fellow men.
Independent black institutions gained strength during those years. In Philadelphia, Richard Allen would establish the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1794.
While organizations responded to exclusion, the community responded to neglect.
Hall died in 1807, but his influence didn't fade. Prince Hall Masonry spread across states, forming leadership networks that endured through Reconstruction and beyond.
For years, Hall's burial site remained uncertain, but we know that he was buried in Copp's Hill Burying Ground in the Masonic tradition. A little more than a year after he died, the Masons honored him, and the Grand Lodge he was instrumental in founding was renamed the Prince Hall Masons, or the Prince Hall Lodge.
The Grand Masonic Lodge of Massachusetts didn't officially recognize the chapter until after the Civil War.
A structure framed in haste needs steady hands to keep it level. Hall was one of those hands, treating liberty as daily labor rather than festive language.
Next up in the series: Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley reached print before most Americans could imagine a formerly enslaved woman publishing poetry in London and Boston. Her final years unfolded in hardship after manumission and marriage. Applause faded. Poverty pressed in. The next entry turns to her closing chapter, where talent remained intact even as security vanished, and endurance carried a gifted mind through narrowing circumstances.
Other columns in this series
- Franklin Before the Break
- The Woman Who Printed the Names
- The Man Who Refused to Stay Quiet
- Measured by the Stars
- Courage Measured in Seconds
- Margaret Corbin’s Stand Under Fire
- Hidden in Plain Sight — Deborah Sampson
- The Man Who Listened
- A 16-Year-Old Against an Army
- The Shot That Steadied a Revolution
- Mum Bett and the Law
