a personal essay on race and the priesthood

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“A Personal Essay on Race and the Priesthood”

A four-part essay by Ahmad Corbitt, with whom I’ve been privileged to have several interactions over the years:

Part 1:  “Revelations in the Summer of 1978”

Part 2:  “Seeing as We Are Seen”

Part 3:  “He Denieth None That Come unto Him”

Part 4:  “Till We All Come in the Unity of the Faith”

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A Black Latter-day Saint’s thoughts on race, Priesthood, and the Church’s essay

Editor's Note: This is an opinion piece published in 2017 and represents the thoughts and experiences of one black Latter-day Saint. Read the Church's 2013 essay "Race and the Priesthood" to learn more.

The history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with regard to race remains one of the most difficult topics for many members to discuss.  And the discussions that do occur can often feel contentious. This is to be expected, as the topic lies at the intersection of race and religion, two of the most contentious topics in society. Unfortunately, the LDS Church is not free of these discussions, and the answers remain elusive to many. Persistent misinformation and confusion around the priesthood and temple restriction that the leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints placed upon men and women of African descent from 1852 until 1978 have been a particular stumbling block for me in my personal faith story.

The fact that we have had minimal instruction and discussion on this topic does not help matters. Before the winter of 2013, members like myself, no matter their personal heritage, were left to draw their own conclusions based upon Official Declaration 2 and the doctrine as presented in the standard works of scripture. There was also a lot of very hurtful speculation both from the lay membership and leadership floating around that fueled how many members formulated their thoughts toward African Americans. Today, this is no longer the case, as the Church has provided a Gospel Topics essay entitled “Race and the Priesthood” to help members cut through the speculation and folklore surrounding the nature of the priesthood and temple restriction. This essay has been a crucial tool, along with my study of both scripture and the words of our prophets, in helping me to overcome this stumbling block once and for all.

 Although I identify primarily as African American, I was raised primarily by my mother, a woman of largely Anglo-Saxon and Germanic Mormon pioneer stock. My mother strove to raise me with a universal love for all people, regardless of race. My father, a descendant of East Texas freedman farmers and their forebears in bondage, largely agreed with this approach, yet insisted upon me learning the realities of what it means to be a black man in the United States of America, and all of the challenges that that entails. Even though I was raised to be aware of racism, and to confront it whenever possible, my upbringing in a cosmopolitan and diverse environment such as Seattle, Washington, could not have prepared me for the racial animus that I would encounter upon moving to the state of Utah to pursue my undergraduate degree at Brigham Young University.

My mother chose to largely shield me from the knowledge of the defunct practice of priesthood and temple restriction, but my father (who did not live with us) made a few comments here and there which piqued my curiosity. These comments largely centered on how he and his siblings were treated by his Mormon classmates while growing up as one of the few Black families in Richland, Washington. Whenever I brought up these questions to my mother, she would quickly change the subject, but not without reassuring me that the Church no longer believed that way and that the justifications and speculation around the reasons and purpose for the ban were not official Church positions and that anybody who told me otherwise was speaking from their own prejudice rather than the official LDS Church position. This became a litmus test for me to determine whether or not what I was taught in Church or heard from other members was true or false. Anything that mentioned valor, or lack thereof in the pre-existence, I would disregard without a second thought. I took this attitude and this meager knowledge with me to Provo.

I had previous experience with racism within the LDS community. The first time that I was ever called the “n-word” was at my mother’s parents’ house in Hibbard, Idaho. The person who called me this word did it several times. They were the children of one of my grandparents’ neighbors. I was five years old at the time. This was my very first experience with being treated differently due to the color of my skin and the pain that that can bring with it.

While I rarely experienced such open discrimination in Provo, I saw more Confederate Battle Flags than I ever wanted to. I also ran into several people who perpetuated falsehoods and speculation around the priesthood and temple restriction. This included a BYU professor who told me one day after class almost word for word his opinion expressed in his unfortunate Washington Post interview. This opinion largely centered on the thought that God kept these blessings from people of color because we were not ready for them and lacked the spiritual and mental capacity to handle them (Jason Horowitz, Washington Post , February 28, 2012).

These incidents, combined with some other factors and inconsistency around LDS Church history would eventually drive me away from the Church during my junior year at BYU. The final straw was learning of Elijah Abel and the fact that the LDS Church had ordained men of color to the priesthood prior to 1852, and that the priesthood was never taken from these men as long as they remained faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Learning that the Church had once given the priesthood to men of color, only to take it away seemed a huge shock to me.

In addition to this, I had read many statements made from Church leaders during the period of restriction that I could not interpret as anything but racist. It felt like a direct contradiction to President Hinckley’s assertion that, “. . . no man who makes disparaging remarks concerning those of another race can consider himself a true disciple of Jesus Christ. Nor can he consider himself to be in harmony with the teachings of the Church of Christ” (“The Need for Greater Kindness,” April 2006). I didn’t see how this could be true now, and not true back when the leaders themselves had made these assertions. This led me to believe that the Church had lied to me for my entire life, and I lost faith and trust in my leaders. There remains no doubt in my mind that the policy was racist, and I felt that there was no way that God would allow His church to be led by or to engage in racist practices. So, I stopped going to church, and I started looking elsewhere for fulfilment and knowledge. Even so, in the back of my mind, I could not shake the persistent knowledge of the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Even as I lived in defiance of what I knew within my being, I could not escape it.

Eventually, it was through much prayer and study of both LDS Church history and the scriptures that I arrived at the conclusion that the gospel was still true and that I should return to church. It didn’t happen all at once, and there were several aborted attempts to return as I struggled to make the dissonant knowledge that I had of the wrongness of discrimination by skin color fit into my spiritual paradigm. I continued to struggle with the priesthood and temple restriction, however, and given my background, it wasn’t something that I felt that I should ignore. After much pondering and prayer, and discussion with other African American saints, I came to the conclusion that I should read 2 Nephi chapter 26. This scripture states:

"For none of these iniquities come of the Lord; for he doeth that which is good among the children of men; and he doeth nothing save it be plain unto the children of men; and he inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile" (The Book of Mormon, 2nd Nephi, Chapter 26, verse 33).

This scripture brought me peace. Heavenly Father has never denied those who came unto Him. Whatever the reason was for denying the blessings of the priesthood and the temple from worthy Saints due to their heritage, I do not believe it came from my Heavenly Father. I felt this as surely and as strongly as I had felt the witness that Jesus Christ was my Lord and Savior and had died for the sins of the world. I received further confirmation of this during general conference in October 2013, when President Dieter F. Uchtdorf stated the following:

"And, to be perfectly frank, there have been times when members or leaders in the Church have simply made mistakes. There may have been things said or done that were not in harmony with our values, principles, or doctrine.

"I suppose the Church would be perfect only if it were run by perfect beings. God is perfect, and His doctrine is pure. But He works through us—His imperfect children—and imperfect people make mistakes" (“Come, Join with Us”).

This rang so true to me at the time. I actually had to go back and read it again to make sure that I had heard correctly. I know that we do not believe in infallible, perfect leadership, but this was the very first time that I had heard such stated from the pulpit at general conference—by a member of the First Presidency of the Church, no less. This further validated to me the witness that the priesthood and temple restriction was not rooted in Church doctrine. I was hopeful that more general authorities would address the priesthood ban going forward. Unfortunately, the Church has only addressed its racial history one more time, but it would be significant.

In December of the same year, the Church released the first in a series of essays designed to clarify the information around several difficult topics for members regarding Church history. Simply titled, “Race and the Priesthood,” the essay sent a shockwave throughout the black LDS community. Here, in print, for the first time, on lds.org , were several concepts that many of us had arrived at through independent study and much prayer. In my personal opinion, one of the most important things that was present within this essay was the acknowledgment of the existence of multiple African American Latter-day Saint pioneers. Chief among these was Elijah Abel, who was a priesthood holder:

"During the first two decades of the Church’s existence, a few black men were ordained to the priesthood. One of these men, Elijah Abel, also participated in temple ceremonies in Kirtland, Ohio, and was later baptized as proxy for deceased relatives in Nauvoo, Illinois. There is no reliable evidence that any black men were denied the priesthood during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. In a private Church council three years after Joseph Smith’s death, Brigham Young praised Q. Walker Lewis, a black man who had been ordained to the priesthood, saying, 'We have one of the best Elders, an African'" (lds.org, Gospel Topics, Race and the Priesthood, paragraph four).

I had never before seen an official LDS Church publication acknowledging the existence of these brethren, much less a full acknowledgment of their priesthood, and in the case of Abel, the participation in temple ordinances. Here was more proof that the initial creed of the LDS Church did not prohibit priesthood or temple blessings based upon ancestry. In fact, this early practice, along with the fact that no evidence exists of the practice of denying the priesthood or temple blessings to members of African descent prior to 1852, leads me to reliably conclude that there is no doctrinal basis for excluding black men and women, and by extension, black families and extended families, from priesthood and temple blessings.

The essay then goes on to state that, “Over time, Church leaders and members advanced many theories to explain the priesthood and temple restrictions. None of these explanations is accepted today as the official doctrine of the Church” (paragraph five). Similar to what I was told by my mother growing up, there is no accepted explanation for the priesthood ban that was advanced at any point prior to 1978. This includes the oft-repeated quote from Brigham Young that the Negro had not yet had his time to receive the fullness of the blessings of the gospel in his 1852 "Speech given in Joint Session of the Utah Legislature," included in Fred Collier's The Teachings of the Prophet Brigham Young. To many, this statement is the basis of the priesthood and temple restriction. This statement by Brigham Young is also contradicted by the earlier practice of ordination of black men to the priesthood and the participation of Elijah Abel in the temple in Kirtland and Nauvoo. Furthermore, paragraph 17 states, “Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.”

These statements lead me to believe that when President Uchtdorf said that leaders of the Church made mistakes, or that things that were said or done were not in harmony with our values, principles, or doctrine, for me he was referring to those statements that would be made between 1852 and 1978 in support of denying these blessings. It makes no difference to list such things here, for Bruce R. McConkie said following the 1978 restoration of the priesthood and temple blessings to members of African descent, “Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world. . . . . We have now added a new flood of intelligence and light on this particular subject, and it erases all the darkness and all the views and all the thoughts of the past. They don't matter anymore.”

Statements attempting to explain the priesthood ban are irrelevant to my point, as they have been proven to conflict with both scripture and modern revelation on the subject. However, they are relevant to our understanding of the context of the environment which gave rise to the priesthood and temple restriction. For anyone curious to learn the history of Mormon racialization and the genesis of the priesthood and temple restriction, I would recommend reading University of Utah historian W. Paul Reeve’s excellent book, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness.

Despite the fact that the Church has made these wonderful resources available for us in our journey of faith, they remain woefully underutilized. In my discussions with both current and former members of congregations to which I have belonged, far more members subscribe to the speculations and the teachings that were disavowed than the Church’s official position as made clear with the “Race and the Priesthood" essay. There are even contradictory essays displayed on history pages discussing the growth of the Church in South Africa. This continues to allow the proliferation of speculation and deviations from the doctrine. Most members haven’t even heard of the essay, including most missionaries, who need this vital tool when having discussions with investigators of color who are aware of our history as a faith. This is a travesty and needs to change. We cannot wander about in the darkness when there is so much light available to us.

There is not, nor has there ever been any doctrinal basis for excluding people from the blessings of the temple and the priesthood based upon their ancestry. The early history of the Church, the scriptures, and the words of modern-day prophets teach us that all are alike unto God. He will deny no one who comes unto him. None of us are perfect, and it is up to all of us to work together to build God’s kingdom here.

We should recognize that there is pain in the past and work to heal it by acknowledging it and moving past it, together.  I acknowledge that this will be much easier said than done, but we need to be able to realize when others are hurting and to join with them and bear their burdens. This is a burden that African American Saints have been trying to bear alone for far too long. We need our brothers and sisters to understand that this is something that all of us must overcome at some point in our journey of faith.

A dismissal is not bearing our burdens. Telling us that it’s not important isn’t bearing our burdens. It’s not important for people who it wouldn’t have affected, but it’s important to the people who were affected and their descendants. I urge every member to take advantage of the resources we have and to work to spread the word regarding the wonderful knowledge that the Church has made available for us to dispel the darkness of ignorance with the light of knowledge.

A Faith Matters Gathering      Sep 5-7     Salt Lake City

A Faith Matters Gathering

Salt Lake City

The Latter-day Saint racial story is best understood in three phases:

Phase 1 .  Open priesthood and temples to all races. Phase 2 .  Segregated priesthood and temples. Phase 3 . Back again to open priesthood and temples for all races.

For this story to make sense one must first understand the illogical and fluid racial context within which the Restored Church was immersed.

“Whiteness” in American and among the Latter-day Saints

These three phases played out against a nineteenth century racial context which placed Anglo-Saxon “whiteness” at the top of a racial hierarchy and denigrated everyone else–including those who may have looked white but whose behaviors were viewed as deviations from Americans’ ideas of whiteness (e.g. Irish and Italian immigrants). It’s difficult to overstate how subtly pervasive this idea of “whiteness” became in 19th century America.

The overarching arc of the Latter-day Saint racial story, thus, goes from Mormons being denigrated as not white enough in the 19th century, to Latter-day Saints being perceived as too white by the 21st century.

In the 19th century Latter-day Saints felt compelled to claim whiteness for themselves. The most significant way to do so was to distance themselves from blackness. Latter-day Saint leaders thus developed racial priesthood and temple restrictions designed to distance themselves from blackness and secure their whiteness.

Racial culture’s influence on the early church

It is impossible to divorce the racial history of the church from its American context. Being white meant a person had access to social, economic, and political power that people who were deemed not white–or in the case of the Latter-day Saints, not white enough–did not have.

In 1790, for example, the very first US Congress stipulated that to be a naturalized citizen in this new nation a person had to be free and white. Thus, by happenstance of birth, a person with white skin was given access to citizenship while someone born with black or brown skin was denied citizenship. In 1848, Senator John C. Calhoun, in fact, argued on the floor of the United States Senate that “democracy is the government of a white race.” He believed that only white people were capable of democracy. Laws, supreme court decisions, and other policies and practices across the course of US history reinforced these ideas. 

Latter-day Saints initially resisted the American racial culture, but eventually began to adopt and participated in it.

Within this fraught racial culture, Joseph Smith announced a universal gospel message designed to gather into its fold peoples of all races and ethnicities, no exceptions. Joseph Smith received at least four revelations instructing him that “the gospel must be preached unto every creature, with signs following them that believe” (D&C 58:64; see also 68:8, 84:62, 112:28). “Every creature” indicated that no one was to be excluded. The Book of Mormon reinforced this idea when it described the universal reach of Jesus Christ’s atonement, “Hath he commanded any that they should not partake of his salvation? Behold I say unto you, Nay.” (2 Nephi 26:27).

At least some early Latter-day Saints took these commands seriously. The first person of Black-African descent, a formerly enslaved man named Peter , converted in 1830 in Kirtland, Ohio, and there have been Black Latter-day Saints ever since.

In 1835, William W. Phelps declared that all people were “one in Christ Jesus . . . whether it was in Africa, Asia, or Europe.” The following year Ambrose Palmer, the presiding elder at New Portage, Ohio ordained Elijah Able , the first Elder of African descent, on 25 January 1836. Joseph Smith, Jr. acknowledged the ordination with his signature two months later.

Able received washing and anointing rituals in the Kirtland temple and performed baptisms for the dead at Nauvoo. Able moved to Cincinnati before the Nauvoo temple was completed but the Nauvoo newspaper declared in 1840 that it anticipated “persons of all languages, and of every tongue, and of every color; who shall with us worship the Lord of Hosts in his holy temple, and offer up their orisons in his sanctuary.”

As late as March 1847, three years after Joseph Smith’s murder, even Brigham Young is on record as favorably aware of Black priesthood ordination. In response to complaints from Black Latter-day Saint William McCary about the racism he experienced at Winter Quarters, Brigham Young insisted, “We don’t care about the color.”  When McCary persisted, Young cited Q. Walker Lewis as evidence that Latter-day Saints did not discriminate even in priesthood ordination. “We [h]av[e] one of the best Elders[,] an African in Lowell—a barber,” Young said, referring to Lewis, a Black abolitionist ordained to the priesthood by apostle William Smith, Joseph Smith’s younger brother.

How did outsiders view the Latter-day Saints’ open racial vision?

Most outside observers at the time were convinced that Latter-day Saints were too inclusive of people whom the rest of white society knew should be segregated or even enslaved. Protestant white Americans leveled a string of allegations against Latter-day Saints that suggested that they were violating racial norms.

Mormons accepted “all nations and colours” into their religious community one newspaper complained. Other observers also noted that Mormons violated racial boundaries. One said that Mormon elders preaching in the South maintained “communion with the Indians,” and walked out with “colored women.” One outsider suggested that Mormons honored “the natural equality of mankind, without excepting the native Indians or the African race.” Worse still, Missourians protested that Mormons “opened an asylum for rogues and vagabonds and free blacks” and even promoted black “ascendancy over the whites.” These were not celebrations of Mormon diversity, but accusations that Latter-day Saints violated an established racial hierarchy.

Especially after 1852 when Latter-day Saints openly announced the practice of polygamy, outsiders imagined race mixing as one negative ramification of their “barbaric” practices. Monogamy, they argued, was the preserve of the white race. No true Anglo-Saxons would practice polygamy or surrender their free will to the despots Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Mormons therefore were deemed not white. One medical doctor even argued that polygamy was giving rise to a new degenerate race in the Great Basin. As outsiders viewed it, Mormon polygamy was not merely destroying the traditional family, it was destroying the white race and making it unfit for democracy.

Figure 1: John D. Sherwood, The Comic History of the United States, 1870. This illustration offers one of many examples of how outsiders imagined Mormon polygamy to include race mixing. Notice the African-American wife, the Asian wife and the Native American or Pacific Islander wife.

How did the priesthood and temple restrictions develop over time?

As outsiders consistently conflated Latter-day Saints with other undesirable racial groups (e.g. Black people, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants) as a way to call their whiteness into question, Latter-day Saints began to distance themselves from their own Black members. That process began under Brigham Young and was first publicly articulated in 1852 in two speeches he gave to the Utah territorial legislature. It took on a life of its own after that. Each succeeding generation of leaders was unwilling to violate the precedent Young established, even though Young had himself violated the precedent of open male ordination which Joseph Smith instituted.

In 1879 John Taylor added a temple restriction when he barred Elijah Able from receiving his endowment and being sealed to his wife, even though Taylor allowed Able’s priesthood to stand. In 1908, Joseph F. Smith solidified the restrictions in place when he falsely remembered that Joseph Smith had nullified Able’s priesthood and that the restrictions had thus been in place from the beginning.

Joseph F. Smith’s reconstituted history became the new memory for the new century. In this version of LDS racial history, priesthood and temples had always been white. Twentieth century leaders created a narrative that suggested that Mormonism’s racial priesthood and temple restrictions were in place from the beginning. God had put them there. This counterfactual narrative ignored the practice of open ordination established under Joseph Smith and effectively shrouded the priesthood and temple restrictions in the foggy mists of time, stretching back to the eternities.

Even still, it is a mistake to view the priesthood and temple restrictions as universally understood or firmly in place even after 1852. Elijah Able ’s son Moroni was ordained an elder on his deathbed in 1871 and his grandson, Elijah R. Ables , was ordained in 1935, although he had passed as white to qualify. The Elijah Able family thus included three generations of priesthood holders. Their family story demonstrates the impossibility of policing racial boundaries.

What explanations did Brigham Young offer for the restrictions?

Brigham Young offered one reason, and one reason, only for the restriction. He claimed that it originated in Cain’s killing of his brother Abel . Because Cain killed Abel, Young said, God marked him with “ the flat nose and black skin ” and cursed him from the priesthood. All of Cain’s descendants (Black people, according to Young) would have to wait until all of Abel’s descendants received the priesthood before they would be eligible for ordination. He did not draw upon the Book of Abraham, the Book of Mormon, or the Book of Moses–only a problematic reading of the Bible. His explanation also clearly violated Joseph Smith’s Second Article of Faith, that humankind would be accountable for their own sins and not for Adam’s transgression. Young’s explanation held Cain’s supposed descendants accountable for a murder in which they took no part.

As a result of the contradictions embedded in Young’s justification, some LDS leaders suggested a different explanation:  that  Black people were neutral/fence sitters/less valiant in the pre-mortal life and therefore were born into a cursed linage.

In 2013, in an official Race and the Priesthood essay , the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve Apostles adamantly disavowed all such explanations given in the past.

Why do the stories that we tell about the priesthood and temple restrictions matter today?

The stories that we tell, especially those that continue to justify the prior restrictions, matter because they continue to “arrogantly assume” as President Gordon B. Hinkley articulated it , that a white man was “eligible for the priesthood whereas another who lives a righteous life but whose skin is of a different color is ineligible.”

The stories that we tell matter because when we perpetuate a false racial history we perpetuate racism. The stories that we tell matter because evidence matters, and to suggest that the racial and temple restrictions were in place from the beginning is to argue against undeniable evidence to the contrary.

The stories that we tell matter because to argue that the racial priesthood and temple restrictions began with a revelation is simply false. Where is the revelation we are supposed to believe started the restrictions and supposedly indicate that it was God’s will? Can we read it? There is only one revelation in the LDS scriptural canon on race and priesthood, and it came to Spencer W. Kimball and the Quorum of the Twelve in June 1978. It restored the faith to its universal roots and officially ended its 130-year quest for whiteness.

The stories that we tell matter when they lead us to perpetuate a subtle form of racism. Some suggest that that the gospel was intended for “white people first and then black people” in parallel to Jesus’ New Testament injunction to preach to “Jews first and then Gentiles.” This suggestion is easily discounted.((This justification ignores the fact that Jesus healed the daughter of the Greek woman (“a Syrophenician by nation”) when she asked for the crumbs from the table (Mark 7: 24-29) and that Jesus testified to a Samaritan woman at the well that he was “the Christ.” He then stayed among the Samaritans two days and as a result “many more believed because of his teaching.” The converted Samaritans soon testified that “this is truly the Savior of the world” (John 5: 26, 40-42). More importantly, as Paul explained, the Jews had no priority in righteousness or merit, for “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). No group or ethnicity was superior to any other, “for there is no difference between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord is Lord of all” (Romans 10:12). The same was true in the 1830’s when apostle Parley P. Pratt professed his intent to preach “to all people, kindred, tongues, and nations without any exception” and included “India’s and Africa’s sultry plains” in a poetic expression of his global dream for the Latter-day Saint message. The notion that the gospel would be taken in stages—whites first then blacks, in parallel to Jews first then gentiles—is patently false and historically inaccurate.))

Others suggest that Christ, in His wisdom, knew it was “not black people’s time yet.” “They” were somehow not yet quite ready for the gospel message. Pause for a moment to realize the degree of racism embedded in the suggestion that it was not “their” time yet. It assumes that all black people are the same in some fundamental way. That for some reason, because of their skin pigmentation, they, as a group, were excluded from Joseph Smith’s declaration that the gospel was to be preached to “every creature.” Rather than seeing Black people as individual sons and daughters of God in need of Christ’s grace, this idea suggests that black people should be seen, based only on the color of their skin, as not quite capable of accepting and living the gospel. These ideas must be recognized as the very essence of racism.

These ideas also erase from history Black Latter-day Saint pioneers. These ideas ignore the fact that Black people have been a part of the Latter-day Saint movement from its founding year to the present. They ignore the fact that people of Black-African descent received the priesthood and temple rituals in the first two decades of the faith. They ignore the fact the Black Latter-day Saints, such as Jane Manning James , Green Flake , John Burton , and Oscar Crosby were 1847 pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley (Flake, Burton, and Crosby were enslaved Latter-day Saints when they entered the valley). They were not only ready to hear the gospel message but they responded to its call with baptism and then trekked across the continent enslaved to fellow church members. John Burton was born into slavery in 1797 in Virginia and is buried in Parowan, Utah, where he contributed $15.00 (a significant sum at the time) toward building the first church in that frontier community. Burton’s sacrifices matter, and to suggest that he and other Black pioneers were somehow not ready for the gospel message erases their contributions to Latter-day Saint history and it erases their faith.

The stories that we tell matter because sometimes Latter-day Saints are still more invested in protecting Brigham Young and other leaders from their statements on race than they are in defending our Black Latter-day Saint brothers and sisters against racism. Do we really believe that Brigham Young is somewhere in the eternities upset that we are not defending his racial position from 1852? Surely he knows now why the Book of Mormon so emphatically testifies that “All are alike unto God…black and white…” Surely Brother Brigham has moved well beyond his 1852 racism and is urgently hoping we will do the same.

The stories that we tell matter because skin color is not a curse, nor was it ever a curse, and to suggest otherwise is to perpetuate white supremacy. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that white is normal and other skin tones are a deterioration away from normal. The stories that we tell matter because the lives of Black people matter to Christ. As believers in Christ, it is our obligation to see the diversity of God’s family, celebrate its cultural, ethnic, and racial differences, and ensure that our brothers and sisters in Christ are treated “all . . . alike.” 

But don’t we find racial discrimination justified in scripture?

Racism is wrong no matter where it is found or who engages in it. If a prophet engages in racism, whether that be Brigham Young, Joseph F. Smith, or Nephi, it is still wrong. We need to allow prophets to be human and to learn from both their wisdom and their mistakes. Not all scripture is meant to be affirming. Some scriptures are meant to teach us the consequences of bad ideas and behavior by God’s people (the Old Testament is full of such examples).

So what about seemingly racist verses we encounter in the Book of Mormon? One approach is to read them metaphorically. Marvin Perkins and Darius Gray offer guidance in their Blacks in the Scriptures discussions.

If you are more prone to take Nephi and his references to a “skin of blackness” at face value, then consider that Nephi himself may have been demonstrating racial bias, describing his siblings in racial terms. It is possible that Lamanites had intermarried among surrounding indigenous groups and Nephi viewed such mixing as a racial and cultural deterioration away from his desire to preserve an Israelite heritage. (As the church’s official Book of Mormon and DNA Studies essay notes, “The Book of Mormon . . . does not claim that the peoples it describes were either the predominant or the exclusive inhabitants of the lands they occupied. In fact, cultural and demographic clues in its text hint at the presence of other groups.”) Even still, it is important to remember that Lehi’s family would have been of Middle Eastern origins and as a result not “white” themselves.

In any event, racism is wrong, even (perhaps especially) when a prophet engages in it. One overarching, unspoken message to be taken from the Book of Mormon (especially if you are prone to read notions of dark skin and curses literally) is that racism is a fatal sin. The Book of Mormon calls all our racial (and racist) assumptions into question. In the end, the supposedly lighter-skinned Nephites are wiped from the earth by the darker-skinned Lamanites–a fitting annihilation of self-righteous notions grounded in nationalism and white supremacy.

What purposes did the restrictions serve?

If you are still of the mindset that “God must have had his reasons” for implementing the racial priesthood and temple restrictions, then what purposes did those restrictions serve? What did they accomplish? 

The Prophet Joseph Smith said the gospel was to be preached “unto every creature,” but in 1908 Joseph F. Smith instructed missionaries to “not take the initiative in proselyting among the negro people.” In this case, the restrictions forced the church into a violation of its own scriptural imperatives. The racial temple and priesthood restrictions served to ensure that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was known as a white church. But the price of whiteness for Latter-day Saints was high–and we are still paying it.

Some people suggest that conforming to American racial norms and prejudices was necessary for the Church to survive. However, the same year, 1852, that Brigham Young articulated a racial priesthood restriction, the church openly acknowledged that its members believed in and practiced polygamy. Polygamy brought considerable scorn from the nation and did not end until the federal government nearly ground the church into dust. Yet LDS leaders willfully stood against the crush of derision for what they believed to be a divine principle. Why would conforming to racial prejudices be necessary for the Church to survive, but conforming to prevailing marital norms (monogamy) not necessary?

Latter-day Saints love to quote Joseph Smith’s Standard of Truth from the Wentworth Letter, wherein he says that “no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing.” So, no “unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing” and yet treating Black people equally would have?

The restrictions more pointedly did not even work. Sure they kept the majority of black men from priesthood ordination and black men and women from temple admission, but others slipped through the sometimes porous walls of exclusion, especially as several generations of mixed racial marriages meant that some LDS families eventually passed as white.((Sarah Ann Mode Hofheintz’s father was Black and her mother was white. She is the earliest known person of Black-African ancestry to receive temple admission. She was endowed in the Nauvoo Temple and later sealed to her white husband in Utah. Some of her white Latter-day Saint descendants in the twenty-first century still exhibit African ancestry in their DNA. See: https://exhibits.lib.utah.edu/s/century-of-black-mormons/page/hofheintz-sarah-ann-mode))

Nelson Holder Ritchie is one example. He was born into slavery and eventually converted, along with this white wife, Annie Cowan Russell, to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1909 Nelson and Annie were denied temple admission because their bishop told Nelson he had “negro blood in him.”

Annie’s and Nelson’s children, however, all received priesthood ordinations and temple admissions before June 1978 because they passed as white. Nelson’s grandson, Rex Olson played quarterback for Brigham Young University in the 1940s and his other descendants received priesthood ordinations, temple marriages, and served missions. Seventy-two of Nelson’s descendants in the twenty-first century have completed DNA tests which show African ancestry.

The priesthood and temple restrictions were meant to prevent any person with African ancestry—no matter “how remote a degree”—from temple and priesthood admissions. It was a racial policy that DNA evidence demonstrates was impossible to enforce. So, what purposes did the restrictions serve? If the one drop policy was the standard, then DNA evidence demonstrates that there has never been a period in LDS history without people of Black-African descent who held the priesthood and attended the temple.

What can we learn from all this?

Racism is intoxicating and racism mixed with religion can be particularly pernicious. The Latter-day Saint message has always included a universal foundation. “All flesh is mine” Jesus told Joseph Smith in 1831, “and I am no respecter of persons” (D&C 38:16). It also included universal male ordination which stipulated that “ every man ” who embraced the priesthood “with singleness of heart may be ordained and sent forth” (D&C 36: 7). A Savior who claimed “all flesh” as His own and flatly declared that He was “no respecter of persons” clearly would not originate racial restrictions that contradict His very nature. Yet Latter-day Saints sometimes continue to lay the racial restrictions at Jesus’ feet as if the “natural man” was never involved in their formulations and perpetuations.

It is much more profitable, in my estimation, to learn from our collective history, rather than defend or deny it. What lessons can it teach? Latter-day Saints experienced racialization at the hands of outsiders; and Latter-day Saints engaged in racism on the inside. What better people to lead out on issues of racial inequality and social justice? Rather than be hobbled by our past racism, what if we owned it and used our shared history to stand in places of empathy? What if we were willing to work against racial injustice because we experienced a soft form of it? What if we were willing to speak up and stand up against systemic racism because we engaged in it ourselves and have come to understand its consequences? What if we were willing, like Jesus, to claim “all flesh” as our own?

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Doctrine and Covenants Central

Art Credit: Anthony Sweat

Race and the priesthood | , the racist american context the church was born into.

There was a season in our church’s history when members with Black African ancestry were unevenly barred from both priesthood and temple privileges. This overtly discriminatory practice is one of the most challenging aspects of our history, and for many is one of the most difficult to understand. How could something like this happen in a church led by living prophets and apostles? It’s a fair question, and the truth is the answer is impossible to really get at without understanding the prevailing attitudes and beliefs about black Africans in the broader American culture at the time the church was established and into this century that followed. In today’s episode of Church History Matters we begin our series on race and priesthood by exploring the racial climate in antebellum America in the 1800s and probing the three major factors responsible for how it got that way.

Race and the Priesthood |

Key takeaways.

• The topic of race in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its relation to priesthood and temple privileges is challenging: It forces us to confront assumptions some of us have about prophets and apostles, like prophetic infallibility, that may not be correct. It also takes us into the racial history of America, which can be difficult to encounter.
• There are many excellent sources available, especially in recent years, that deal with this topic (see “Related Resources” below).
• As scholar Dr. Paul Reeve says, “It is impossible to divorce the racial history of the church from its American context.”
• The racial culture and context in America during the 18th and 19th centuries was very different than it is today. In 1830 the Civil War had not yet occurred, and slavery was prevalent. Racial distinctions and prejudice were not just common but customary. Incorrect ideas about race and a lack of equality between races in America were the norm. These ideas were perpetuated by slavery, prevailing scientific thought, and presumptuous interpretations of the Holy Bible.
• We need only look to the Founding Fathers of America for examples of the prevalence of slavery and of attitudes about people of black African descent—many of them owned slaves. George Washington, and almost all the founders that hailed from the southern United States, were involved in slavery.
• The popular science of 1800s America saw people of black African descent as inferior to people of white European descent. Scientists would do things like compare black Africans to apes and say their brains were smaller than whites’. Thomas Jefferson said “blacks were inferior to whites in the endowments of body and mind.” Some even said black people felt less pain and emotion and generally lacked sexual restraint because they were more closely related to animals.
• What were seen as biological differences between blacks and whites underscored concerns about race mixing, also called “racial amalgamation” or “miscegenation.” Pseudo-science supported the notion that children of black and white spouses would be infertile. Terms like “mulatto,” referencing mules, the infertile offspring of a horse and a donkey, were applied to such offspring. Such ideas were accepted by society.
• Finally, religious individuals suggested that the curse of Cain, or later the curse of Ham, spoken of in Genesis in the Holy Bible, was black skin, and that black Africans were therefore descendants of Cain or Ham and cursed by God. This idea has no explicit basis in scripture: What the mark of Cain was is not made clear by the text, and the idea that black Africans are descendants of Ham is not explicit either. Yet the idea was pervasive among Protestant Christians in America, especially those with a vested interest in slavery.
• Opinions about slavery varied widely in the 1800s, being subdivided into three main groups: those who were in support of slavery; those who were staunchly against slavery and sometimes used violent action to fight it, also called abolitionists; and those who did not support slavery but were more conservative in their expression of dissatisfaction with it than the abolitionists were. Abolitionist attitudes toward slavery in the 1800s were seen by many as seditious because of how disruptive it would be to the social and economic order of things in the US.

Related Resources

“ Race and the Priesthood ,” Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

Russell Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness

Edward L. Kimball, “ Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood ,” BYU Studies Quarterly 47:2

Edward L. Kimball, Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball

Autobiography of Jane Manning James

Scott Woodward: There was a season in our church’s history when members with Black African ancestry were unevenly barred from both priesthood and temple privileges. This overtly discriminatory practice is one of the most challenging aspects of our history, and for many is one of the most difficult to understand. How could something like this happen in a church led by living prophets and apostles? It’s a fair question, and the truth is the answer is impossible to really get at without understanding the prevailing attitudes and beliefs about black Africans in the broader American culture at the time the church was established and into this century that followed. In today’s episode of Church History Matters we begin our series on race and priesthood by exploring the racial climate in antebellum America in the 1800s and probing the three major factors responsible for how it got that way. I’m Scott Woodward, a managing director at Scripture Central, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, also a managing director at Scripture Central. And today, Casey and I dive into our first episode in this series dealing with race and priesthood. Now, let’s get into it. Hi, Casey.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Hi. How are you?

Scott Woodward: So good.

Casey Paul Griffiths: So good. And it’s so good to see you again and have the opportunity to participate in another one of these discussions.

Scott Woodward: I’m excited for this series. This is going to be a good one.

Casey Paul Griffiths: This is a meaty one for sure.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And it’s one that I have to admit to approaching with a little bit of fear and trepidation.

Scott Woodward: Mm-hmm.

Casey Paul Griffiths: We’re going to be spending the next couple episodes discussing race and the priesthood and the temple, and a lot of things linked to the history of the church and how we kind of manage and deal with it now, just as kind of a foreword and introduction, and Scott, you can jump in at any time here. We want to acknowledge that this topic is fraught. It’s complex, and it’s difficult, and it’s challenging, and it needs to be handled with extreme caution and a little skill and a lot of sensitivity, and I hope we’re able to do that.

Casey Paul Griffiths: I’ve been hesitant to talk about this for a long time because it is just such an explosive topic. But as I’ve been reviewing the materials, especially the ones that Scott prepared, more and more it’s been impressed on my mind that this is something we need to have a conversation about. It’s something that we’re still in the midst of dealing with, and it’s not going to get better if we don’t ever confront it and try and figure out how we move forward, and so…

Scott Woodward: Yeah, there’s just so many questions a lot of people have, as I teach in church history topics this comes up a lot. I know that there are people who wonder about this. Some have received not very good answers, unsatisfying answers, and so I don’t know if we’re going to be able to do it in this series, but we’re going to do our best, aren’t we, Casey? We’re going to try to give the very best answers that we are aware of.

Casey Paul Griffiths: We’re going to try, right?

Scott Woodward: Yeah. I think this history in particular about blacks and the priesthood and the temple privileges is easy to misunderstand and get wrong. It’s—and that’s where, ooh, we just need to do our very best. I find, tragically, some people end up villainizing prophets and apostles on the one hand, as they study this history, while other people get overly protective of apostles and prophets, and therefore we can’t fully get into the details, and neither of these approaches is helpful or necessary.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Yeah.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. I’m excited to just, let’s just go into it eyes wide open, faithful hearts, and let’s just do our best to understand what happened, when it happened, the best we can understand why it happened, and how ultimately God set things the way they are now after a 1978 revelation.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Yeah. And one thing to keep in mind is that this is a challenging topic. It challenges the way that we look at the role of prophets and apostles. It even challenges maybe our perceptions of the society that we live in. And it can be really uncomfortable to discuss, but the leader of the church, President Nelson, has asked the members of the church to not only deal with this topic, but the exact wording he used was to “lead out”—

Casey Paul Griffiths: —in dealing with this topic. And so we’re trying to follow the prophet here in having a discussion about race and racism, and the end goal is to try and make things better.

Casey Paul Griffiths: So we’re imperfect, and we’re going to make mistakes, and we might phrase things poorly, but we’re going to do the best we can because I think both of us feel really strongly that this is something that needs attention, that we need to understand and we need to present solutions to as well. We need to find a way forward.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. The true history here can grate a little uncomfortably against, sometimes I call them our “cozy assumptions”—

Casey Paul Griffiths: Mm-hmm.

Scott Woodward: —that we might hold about prophets and God. It’s certainly done that for me.

Scott Woodward: You know, at very least it forces us to confront and examine our assumptions, and that can be uncomfortable. It can be painful, especially when we realize maybe our assumptions weren’t quite accurate. But to do the hard work of modifying our assumptions in light of more accurate information, ultimately, I’ve found, has created a more robust faith, a more flexible faith in God and in prophets. And I think this is necessary and important work to do.

Scott Woodward: So let’s do it.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Let’s do it. Let’s start with a couple resources. Now, Scott, you’ve done a lot of reading, and by the way, there’s been an explosion of tremendous resources that are helpful in understanding this topic just in the last couple years. Scott, give us a rundown on some of the best sources to go to to understand this particular issue.

Scott Woodward: I’ll mention a few and then, yeah, if you want to throw any others on here. I would recommend starting with the Gospel Topics essay “Race and the Priesthood.” Fantastic introduction to the topic and wonderful footnotes.

Scott Woodward: By far, I would say the best—if you only could choose one, one single resource after reading the Gospel Topics essay on race and the priesthood, I would recommend a little book. You can get it at Deseret Book. It’s called, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood by Paul Reeve. It’s part of a Let’s Talk About series. Paul Reeve, he is the preeminent scholar on this topic. He’s done the most cultural contextual research, as well as going through the records of the church and church meeting minutes, et cetera. So, much of what we’re going to discuss throughout this series will actually draw upon Paul’s really well done research.

Scott Woodward: Once you have read through that, I would recommend a book by Russell Stevenson. It’s called For The Cause of Righteousness , and it gives a global history of blacks and Mormonism from 1830 to 2013. And what he has that’s super valuable—it’s well written. It’s amazing research—but in the back, an appendix, he has original sources, all the original stuff by which he derived the narrative that he tells us. So you can basically read through the original stuff: Original council meeting minutes, for instance, when topics relevant to blacks and priesthood and temple were discussed by church leaders. You can come to your own conclusions as to what to make of that information. And he’s just done a very bang-up job. Well done, Russell Stevenson.

Scott Woodward: So Paul Reeve and Russell Stevenson. But if you can only choose one, I say choose Paul Reeve’s little book, Deseret Book, you can get it, called, Let’s Talk About Race and the Priesthood.

Scott Woodward: What else would you add?

Casey Paul Griffiths: I’d add a couple things to the list. First of all, amen to everything you say, especially Paul Reeve’s research, which is excellent. Paul’s a scholar of the University of Utah. He’s also an active church member, and he deals with things really well, really sensitively. One item that’s been helpful to my students is an article by Edward L. Kimball called “Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood.” It’s a BYU Studies article. It’s on the longer side of things, but my students are usually pretty enthusiastic to read it. It gives the background for the 1978 revelation, and it also—it’s an insider’s perspective. Ed Kimball was Spencer W. Kimball’s son, and after the revelation was given, he actually asked President Kimball, “Can I interview everybody involved?” He was given pretty much unfettered access to the church leaders that were involved.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And so it’s got this great amount of primary sources, a great discussion of what led to the revelation, what caused it to happen. And there’s an expanded version of it in his book, Lengthen Your Stride, which is a second volume of his biography of his dad, Spencer W. Kimball.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And I know this is a son writing about a father, but to me those two biographies about Spencer W. Kimball are sort of the golden mean of church president biographies. They’re just excellent. And Ed Kimball, who was a member of the law faculty at BYU, was super compassionate towards his subjects but also wasn’t afraid to ask difficult questions—

Casey Paul Griffiths: —and confront some of the more complex issues that his father dealt with during his presidency.

Scott Woodward: Excellent.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And one last resource that I’ll recommend is you can go on the Church History Library site and actually download the autobiography of Jane Manning James. It’s only about eight pages long. Jane wasn’t able to write, she was illiterate, so somebody transcribed it for her, but just that little eight-page autobiography is a great snapshot of race relations and the church in the 1840s.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Where you see all the complexity that Jane has to deal with, where she’s not a slave: She’s born a free woman.

Casey Paul Griffiths: But she still faces incredible racism, even from some members of the church. But she also personally interacted with Joseph and Emma Smith and has a lot of insight there.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And Jane’s story not only captures the race question but questions about women, questions about the role of black women within the church. And so that was really enlightening. My wife and I sat down and read that together, and it opened our eyes to a couple issues that we maybe, in the 21st century, hadn’t been connected to.

Scott Woodward: Excellent. Thank you. So there you go. We’ll put links to all of this in our show notes, everything we’ve mentioned. Boy, we just highly recommend—for those of you, we know you’re out there, those who want to go ever deeper into this subject, there you go. There’s our top recommendations.

Scott Woodward: Now, during today’s episode, we want to talk specifically about the 18th- and 19th-century racial culture of America, especially regarding the Black African population. Now, the reason this is an important place to begin is because, as Paul Reeve says, “It is impossible to divorce the racial history of the church from its American context.” That’s what we want to get at. So our burning question of the day is, “What was the racial culture and context in America during the 18th and 19th centuries, and how did it get that way? And how did that culture and context impact the thinking and views of church members about race?” Right? “We cannot divorce,” as Paul says, “We cannot divorce racial history of the church from the racial history of America.”

Casey Paul Griffiths: So let’s start with a quote from the Gospel Topics essay. This is the first resource you said. I, too, would say, the first thing that you should read is probably the Gospel Topics essay, and then expand your study out from there. A quote in the Gospel Topics essay says, “The church was established in 1830 during an era of great racial division in the United States. At the time, many people of African descent lived in slavery, and racial distinctions and prejudice were not just common but customary among white Americans.”

Scott Woodward: Wow.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And that’s one thing that we neglect is—there’s been so much talk in the last couple years about critical race theory and what that means, and it’s a huge thing—

Casey Paul Griffiths: —that’s difficult to distill down to one thing, but I don’t think it’s controversial at all to just say that there was racism baked into the cake: that the world that the church was restored into had these racial class divisions, and that was something that was part and parcel of the world that the early saints lived in.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. I like that line—I don’t like the line, but I think it’s an important line—that racial distinctions and prejudice were not just common but customary among white Americans, right? It was the air that they breathed. It was the water that they drank. This was—it was just totally normal. It was the way things were, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths: Yeah. When it comes down to it, we sometimes neglect how customary this was. Our faculty, for instance, went to Washington, D․C․ a couple of years ago.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And as part of the trip we went to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate, and Mount Vernon is beautiful and impressive, and you walk through George Washington’s house, and you’re just thinking, “I love this guy. Like, what an amazing person. I’m so proud that he is the father of our country.”

Casey Paul Griffiths: And then you walk out of the house, and you walk down to the slave quarters.

Scott Woodward: Oh, ooh.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And you’re immediately confronted by the fact that this great man, who was incredibly moral, also had this huge moral blind spot that to a 21st-century person is mind-boggling. And I sort of walked away from that experience a little shaken. I had to spend a little time diving into sources and writings about George Washington to appreciate the world he lived in.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And how this was the way it was where he grew up. If you’re a Virginia planter, if you’re part of the sort of upper strata of society, slaves are a part of your life.

 Scott Woodward: Yeah. You’re not a bad person. Morally, right? I like your phrase, “moral blind spot.”

Scott Woodward: That was a moral blind spot that they didn’t even consider, a lot of them. Now, plenty of them did. We’re going to talk about all that.

Casey Paul Griffiths: It’s complicated.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. So let’s actually get into this. Why was it like that? Like, how did it get that way?

Casey Paul Griffiths: So there’s really three things that are going on in the early American republic—this is the world the church is going to be restored into—that have to do with widespread racial prejudice in the United States, and we’ll go through each one, but let me just list them here, and then we’ll expand outward.

Scott Woodward: OK.

Casey Paul Griffiths: One is African enslavement. It’s just part of society, especially in the Southern United States. We mentioned George Washington, and by the way, I’m going to stick up for George later on because his views on slavery are more complex than they sometimes get credit for.

Casey Paul Griffiths: But almost all the founders from the south were involved in slavery.

Casey Paul Griffiths: John Adams, who’s from the north, notably isn’t, but it doesn’t seem like it was particularly morally pressing for him, either.

Casey Paul Griffiths: The second thing is the prevailing scientific thought. The popular science of the age had this racial component to it that just basically fundamentally saw the races as different and the white race as superior. And then the final thing is the Bible and the way that people interpreted the Bible. The Bible is an incredibly complex work. It has portions of it that can be strongly against the idea of slavery, that support agency, but other passages that were misinterpreted to support slavery and even justify it. And the arguments people used to justify slavery before the Civil War are often drenched in biblical verse and biblical imagery.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And all this stuff that makes it seem like, “Hey, this is the way God made it.”

Casey Paul Griffiths: And so what are you going to do?

Scott Woodward: Yeah. OK. Let’s start with African enslavement, then.

Scott Woodward: So most of us have heard at school at some point the idea of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, right?

Scott Woodward: Black slavery, as a legal institution, was an established norm in several states and in union because of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which begins back in the 1600s, and it led to over 10 million—just let that number sink in—10 million Africans, and that’s a low ball estimate, being sold and shipped to the new world. So that’s not just North America, that’s also South America, central America, but 10 million Africans brought over. And these are the ancestors of many in the African-American community today. And so you just think about over the centuries, from the 1600s to the 1800s, we have millions and millions of people being brought over from Africa as slaves into the Americas.

Scott Woodward: That’s going to set up a really interesting context, right?

Scott Woodward: But was everybody pro-slavery?

Casey Paul Griffiths: There’s a whole spectrum, like there is with most things, where at one extreme end, you’ve got people that are totally pro-slavery, absolutely 100 percent believe God placed Africans in servitude, and that’s the end of it. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you have abolitionists, sometimes extreme abolitionists that, you know, were willing to use violent means to bring about the end of slavery, who saw it as morally evil.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And in between is a wide view of views about slavery, its morality, and what should be done about it.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. It’s interesting: the pro-slavery group, right, who accept it, support it, build their economy on it, are opposed on the other end of the spectrum, as you said, by these abolitionists, who—they believed that the United States was laboring under, like, national sin, right? And that anybody who didn’t fight slavery was complicit with it to one degree or another.

Scott Woodward: And sometimes they would resort to violent means, but they felt that violent resistance to slavery paled in comparison to the daily violence of slavery.

Scott Woodward: And a lot of us today might say, “Woo! The abolitionists, they’re the good guys,” right? They’re the emancipators. But actually in their day, it’s super interesting that they’re not seen as the good guys by most. They’re seen as, like, extremist, fringy, almost anarchist-type people, right? Since for what they were advocating for would be considered a radical overthrow of, by that time, a deeply embedded social economic system that was then protected by the U․ S․ Constitution, right? So to abolish slavery would be highly disruptive to the social order.

Scott Woodward: So you have these middle people that are not pro-slavery, but they’re also, they don’t want to be seen as, like, extreme abolitionists. And they call themselves the anti-slavery people, right? This is like Abraham Lincoln.

Scott Woodward: The Republican Party—

Scott Woodward: —mostly fit in this anti-slavery group, which was they’re opposed to slavery, and they were uneasy with its spread, but they disagreed with the methods and extremism of abolitionists, right? They wanted to take a more gradual approach, a gradual phasing it out, whereas abolitionists would say, “Dude, we’ve got to get rid of this yesterday.”

Scott Woodward: “Like, this is evil. Evil is in our midst.”

Scott Woodward: And many church members at that time fell into that more moderate anti-slavery camp, while at the same time actually opposing abolitionism, so very interesting.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Yeah. And geography’s at play here too, right? I mean, at least initially early on, most members of the church are from the northern United States.

Casey Paul Griffiths: So it’s probably fair to say that most of the early church members didn’t own slaves, weren’t enmeshed in slave culture.

Casey Paul Griffiths: But at the same time, too, they weren’t the kind of radical bomb throwers, John Brown types—

Casey Paul Griffiths: That wanted to, you know, flip the whole system or anything. And so they find themselves caught in the middle between these two extremes, and sometimes trying to negotiate between both sides and find a space to just flat-out survive in, because they’re already considered radical because they’re introducing new scripture.

Casey Paul Griffiths: The Book of Mormon.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And they’re also advocating some radical ideas on race. Not necessarily towards Africans, but towards American Indians.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Saying that they’re part of the House of Israel, which is also a radical racial idea to begin with.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. And just to put the timeline in perspective here, if it’s been a while since you’ve brushed up on your Civil War history, remember that the Civil War won’t happen until 1861 through 1865.

Scott Woodward: And so when we’re talking about the church being restored in 1830, we can see how this issue is, like—it is far from resolved.

Scott Woodward: And in fact, there’s an interesting editorial that was written by church leaders, either Oliver Cowdery or Frederick G. Williams of the first presidency, we’re not sure, but they wrote an editorial in the Northern Times, this is 1835, and they’re informing non-LDS readers about the church position on this issue, and watch how they’re trying to separate themselves from abolitionism. They say, “We are opposed to abolition and whatever is calculated to disturb the peace and harmony of our constitution and country. Abolition,” he continues, “does hardly belong to law or religion, politics or gospel.” So you could see, “We don’t want to be associated with abolitionists,” right?

Scott Woodward: Even though most church members are from the north, kind of in this anti-slavery category, they do not want to be associated with this socially disruptive, radical group called abolitionists.

Scott Woodward: I didn’t understand that for a long time. I thought abolitionists were, like, the good guys, and maybe from a modern perspective we would say that’s the case, you know? Some might say that, “Yeah, that was the only way.” But I didn’t know there was this group called the anti-slavery group which did not want to be associated with abolitionism, but also were anti-slavery.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Yeah, and we might need to contextualize that 1835 statement just a little bit.

Scott Woodward: Yeah, please.

Casey Paul Griffiths: This is after the church has been booted out of Jackson County in Missouri, which adds to the complexity of the situation, too.

Scott Woodward: Yes.

Casey Paul Griffiths: The location of Zion, as revealed to Joseph Smith, is Jackson County, Missouri, which is a slave state.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And it’s also right on the borders of the United States.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Just a couple miles away from where the American Indians live. And all of a sudden you’ve got these northerners that generally don’t own slaves coming in and filling up this small community, Independence.

Scott Woodward: Right.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And one of the tensions between them was that it’s not like the saints moving in were radical abolitionists—

Casey Paul Griffiths: —but they also weren’t exactly pro-slavery.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And one of the reasons why persecutions flared up in 1833 against the church was that there were mild views about the equality of black people expressed in a church newspaper.

Casey Paul Griffiths: In fact, the statement that the mob in Jackson County issues against the church, the reason why they need to be kicked out, is that they’re promoting the equalization of the races.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And so the church gets kicked out of Jackson County. And part of it is because they’re viewed as abolitionists, and Oliver Cowdery writes that in part to basically try to tell the people in Jackson County, “Hey, we’re not abolitionists. We’re not advocating violence against whites or anything like that.”

Casey Paul Griffiths: They’re trying to get their homes back. They’re trying to convince them that they can be good neighbors.

Casey Paul Griffiths: But that’s a powder keg right there in that little county on the edge of the frontier, where slavery is prevalent.

Casey Paul Griffiths: I mean, they were entering into a complex situation where race was going to become a question sooner or later, whether or not they wanted it to be.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. Really important context. Thank you. And we’ll talk about that in more depth in a future episode as we talk about this issue with the church and blacks.

Scott Woodward: So to summarize these kind of sub-points here, there’s a spectrum of strongly held views on the subject of slavery in the U. S. at the time the church is organized, from pro-slavery on the one end to abolitionism on the other and with anti-slavery somewhere in between. Everyone’s views on slavery are going to fall somewhere on this spectrum.

Scott Woodward: But the main point not to be missed here is that the enslavement of black Africans in some parts of America played a major role in making racial prejudice customary among white Americans.

Scott Woodward: I mean, that’s the first ingredient of this three-part recipe for widespread racial prejudice in the U. S.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Yeah, and it’s fair to say this recipe we’re talking about is still cooking in America. Some of the problems that existed back then we’re still dealing with today. In order to solve the problem, we have to understand it.

Scott Woodward: Totally.

Casey Paul Griffiths: The second factor that we’re dealing with is prevailing scientific thought. There was the prevailing belief, and it was just seen as science, popular science, that black people were inferior to white people. Tell us a little bit about that, Scott.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. Yeah. I think this is even more pernicious than slavery because while it’s true that slavery views varied widely among whites, there’s actually a more broadly shared belief amongst whites of that time that blacks were inherently inferior and that you could prove it by a simple observation, or scientifically, right? Like, Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave owner and a scientist, he cautiously concluded after his own observations in 1781, that blacks were “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind,” and this is him observing and trying to come to some “cautious conclusion.”

Scott Woodward: Scientists, zoologists, physicians, philosophers from the 17th to the 19th centuries, they all concluded, and they were all white, that blacks were biologically less advanced than whites. They had smaller brains, they said. They were a separate species more closely related to monkeys or apes. There’s this interesting book published by a scientist named Josiah Nott, where—he’s a doctor, an anthropologist, and he depicts—you have this row of, like, white people, white skulls, and then you have black people, black skulls, like, trying to anthropologically try to depict this, and then underneath that you have apes and ape skulls. And what he’s trying to show is, “Hey, look how blacks fall somewhere between whites and apes.” I mean, it today is just, like, the most repulsive, like, disgusting thing you’ve ever seen.

Scott Woodward: But he was taken seriously, and he was actually respected. This idea that they were either a separate species or that they had greatly degenerated from the “original, pure race” of Adam and Eve, which of course was why, they would say, this is very common— customary, right? And so all of this sort of explains in kind of a twisted logic why blacks were considered by whites less intelligent, because they had “smaller brains.” They felt less pain and emotion, some of them said, because they had more primitive nervous systems. They generally lack sexual restraint, some of them said, because they were more closely related to animals. So these pseudoscientific explanations actually allowed many whites who were not biologists, who were not scientists, just to, “Oh, OK,” just accept their superiority to blacks, not as a matter of bigotry, but simply as a matter of biology.

Scott Woodward: This is a key reason why these racial distinctions and prejudice were not just common but customary among white Americans. 

Casey Paul Griffiths: Yeah. And another piece of the puzzle that we sometimes neglect in the 21st century is that the idea of promoting racial purity to us today is really scary, right?

Scott Woodward: Repulsive, yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths: It’s repulsive, right? White supremacy is condemned, and it should be. But in the 19th century, even into the 20th century, a little bit, it was common for people to talk about the purity of their race.

Casey Paul Griffiths: There’s a address Teddy Roosevelt gave where he talked about the purity of the Teutonic race, the Germanic race, and how it needed to be preserved because they were destined to rule the world. Now, anybody starts talking about the purity of the Germanic race today, you know, the alarm bells go off in our mind because we saw those ideas play themselves out and saw how dangerous they were.

Casey Paul Griffiths: We also have the benefit today of—we’ve got the human genome. We know that the difference between a person with light-colored skin and dark-colored skin is less than, you know, 1% of 1% of the entire genetic makeup of the person.

Casey Paul Griffiths: But in the 19th century they didn’t see this as bigotry. They saw it as biology.

Casey Paul Griffiths: “That’s just the way it is, and what are you going to do about it? We’re superior, and we’ve been asked to civilize these other races.”

Casey Paul Griffiths: And that was pretty common thought, which leads to another piece of the puzzle, which is a term we don’t hear a lot today, but in the 19th century you would often hear the term “amalgamation” or “racial amalgamation.”

Casey Paul Griffiths: Explain to us a little bit about what that means.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. Amalgamation is—and sometimes they also call it miscegenation.

Scott Woodward: Which basically just meant intermarriage between blacks and whites. And you can see, right? This helps us understand, too, this prevailing scientific thought helps us understand why intermarriage or sexual relations between whites and blacks was not just frowned upon during this time but actually legislated against in many states, right?

Scott Woodward: There are many states that it wasn’t up until, what, the 1960s that we finally got laws against racial intermarriages—they’re called anti-miscegenation laws—off the books in every state. So racial intermarriage was totally taboo. It was the ultimate bugaboo.

Scott Woodward: In fact, one of the major concerns of that middle group, the anti-slavery people, one of their concerns about abolitionists calling for immediate emancipation was what they saw as the inevitability of intermarriage.

Scott Woodward: If blacks were all suddenly emancipated and made socially and politically equal with whites, then what would keep them from ultimately marrying whites?

Scott Woodward: This was a major concern and a deeply held fear of many people.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Yeah. And those concerns were used to perpetuate the system as it existed.

Casey Paul Griffiths: As some people saw slavery as benevolent, “Hey, we’re educating them and Christianizing them,” and it feels like it was almost universal that people were worried about what would happen if the races intermixed with each other.

Casey Paul Griffiths: I have a dear friend who, you know, is in a mixed race marriage and he has, you know, biracial children.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And you still see this stuff flare up every now and then—

Casey Paul Griffiths: —where sometimes he or his wife or his kids are singled out to like, “Hey, you know, are you sure you should be doing that?”

Scott Woodward: Oh my goodness.

Casey Paul Griffiths: That’s still present in the 21st century. In the early 19th century, I mean, the prejudices on this level and the fears associated with it are just off the charts.

Scott Woodward: Yeah, and what added fuel and, like, legitimacy to that fear were, again, some respected physicians in the mid-1800s who are actually saying stuff like this, that they’re warning that the offspring of a mixed-race couple would be weak.

Scott Woodward: They would be infertile. They would probably, therefore, if this was allowed to continue, lead to the destruction of both races. Talk about fear-mongering, right?

Scott Woodward: But this is coming from respected physicians. They would refer to biracial children as “mulattos.” That’s a term still sometimes people throw around. It’s a pejorative term. It’s not a appropriate term. “Mulatto” derived from the word “mule.”

Scott Woodward: Which is the infertile love child of a horse and a donkey. So horses and donkeys could have offspring, but then that offspring was infertile, and that’s what some respected physicians and doctors were saying, that this is what’s going to happen. Like, biracial children—in fact, one of them, again, Josiah Nott, I mentioned his name earlier, he said that biracial children are, “A degenerate, unnatural offspring doomed by nature to work out their own destruction.”

Scott Woodward: This guy’s a respected scientist.

Scott Woodward: And people were, like, just nodding their heads, like, “OK. I see the danger of interracial marriage,” right? Totally bunk, right? Totally—today we’re like, “Oh my gosh. That’s, like, the worst thing I’ve ever heard.” Like, he would not be a respected scientist in any circle today, but then, like, how would you know better?

Scott Woodward: Right? How would you know better if you were living in that world, right? What would it have been like to grow up in such a world?

Scott Woodward: You know, I think about that, right? If you were a white person in that context, do you think you could have resisted all of this and seen through it all? Or would you, like George Washington, have had some moral blind spots?

Scott Woodward: When leading doctors and scientists themselves are confirming and giving apparent scientific backing to this racial prejudice, I mean, man.

Scott Woodward: It makes sense to me as I try to look through a lens of empathy into the past—

Scott Woodward: —why so many otherwise wonderful people did not see the moral problem here.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Yeah. And, I mean, I’m using George Washington as my point of entrance into this time period, but—

Casey Paul Griffiths: I mean, George Washington owned his first slave at age 11. That’s the world that he grows up in. Thomas Jefferson owns hundreds of slaves, but he can write the words, “All men are created equal.” And like we said, today we sit and say, “How could they have had such a huge moral blind spot?” But we have to consider the world that they live in and not necessarily what’s normal to us, but what is normal to them. We’re not saying what was right.

Scott Woodward: No.

Casey Paul Griffiths: We’re just trying to gaze into the past with empathy and understand where they were living and where they’re at.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. The Congress, right? U. S. Congress in 1790, they limited citizenship in the United States to free white persons. That’s what they said, “Free white persons.” And they saw that as a totally upstanding, wonderful thing to do.

Scott Woodward: The founding fathers themselves—there’s a great book called Founding Brothers written by Joseph Ellis, and he makes a stunning observation: He said, “No responsible statesman in the revolutionary era had ever contemplated, much less endorsed, a biracial American society.” Think about that. “No model,” he says, “of a genuinely biracial society existed anywhere in the world at that time, nor had any existed in recorded history.” Wow. So let that just sink in, right? There’s no such thing as a racially integrated society anywhere in the world at that time, nor had there been, that they could draw upon for a model. And so they’re not thinking about, “How can we make a racially balanced, integrated society?” right?

Scott Woodward: And so for Congress in 1790 to say the citizen in this country is a free white person was a totally reasonable stance to take, right?

Scott Woodward: Fast forward to 1857, there’s the Dred Scott case, infamous case, where the U. S. Supreme Court could declare that blacks were “beings of an inferior order, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Scott Woodward: My goodness, right? The U. S. Supreme Court—these are respectable people in society, right, who are saying such things.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Yeah. The leaders of society.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And even people that were moderate held views that today would be deemed racially insensitive. For instance, you know, another person that’s a good point of entry into this period is Abraham Lincoln.

Casey Paul Griffiths: We all know who Abraham Lincoln is and what he did and how important a figure he was. But during a political debate in 1858, this is two years before he is elected president of the United States, he said, “I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. That I am not nor have ever been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. I am as much as any man in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Scott Woodward: Oy.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Whoa. That’s Abraham Lincoln.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And Abraham Lincoln very much occupies this moderate territory in the middle. He’s not an abolitionist, but he doesn’t own slaves, too, but he’s trying to make the country work, and he has to say things like this in order to even be considered a serious contender for president.

Scott Woodward: Oy. Can you imagine a U. S. presidential candidate today saying, “I as much as any man am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race?” Like, oh my gosh.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Oh, yeah.

Scott Woodward: It is so revolting.

Scott Woodward: But that’s, like you’re saying, that was moderate. That was like, “OK, this is a respectable guy,” you know?

Scott Woodward: Man.

Casey Paul Griffiths: OK, so we’ve got the second sort of factor, which is prevailing scientific thought. That’s the world they live in.

Casey Paul Griffiths: The last one, and this might be the toughest one for me personally, is how they interpreted the scriptures, specifically the Bible.

Casey Paul Griffiths: One of the things the Gospel Topics essay on race and the priesthood brings up is, “Racial distinctions and prejudice were not just common, but customary among white Americans,” and then the next line said, “Those realities, though unfamiliar and disturbing today, influenced all aspects of people’s lives, including their religion.”

Casey Paul Griffiths: So maybe the toughest thing for me is that religion was also used to justify these racial views and practices. So tell us a little bit about that.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. How could white Christians who are slave owners feel good about what they were doing? Well, they would go to the Bible, and they would find that which seemed to justify their behavior, right? I want to be a good Christian as a good, honorable slave holder, right?

Scott Woodward: In the Gospel Topics essay, it continues saying that, “According to one view, which had been promulgated in the United States from at least the 1730s,” right? That’s a hundred years before the church is organized.

Scott Woodward: “Blacks descended from the same lineage as the biblical Cain, who slew his brother, Abel. Those who accepted this view believe that God’s curse on Cain was the mark of a dark skin.” So a hundred years before the church is organized in America, this actually goes back way further over in Europe, but in America, 1730s, they’re teaching that Cain was the ancestor of the black Africans, and he received a mark on his skin of blackness.

Scott Woodward: Now, can we just pause here for a second and say that this is an indefensibly wack reading of the Cain story.

Scott Woodward: But this understanding was pervasive among Protestant Christians in America, especially those with a vested interest in slavery.

Scott Woodward: It was believed by people who joined the church a hundred years later in the 1830s and forties, and they actually carry this idea with them into the church.

Scott Woodward: We’re going to see this play out in future episodes of this podcast, but can we just briefly review the Cain story for our listeners, if…?

Casey Paul Griffiths: Yeah. And before we get into Genesis 4, I’m just going to advise everybody, we all bring assumptions to the scriptures, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths: But before we read Genesis 4 or review its contents, try and set all your assumptions aside and just look at what the story actually says. So go ahead.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. OK. Number one: Cain killed Abel. Remember the story? The first recorded murder of scripture.

Scott Woodward: So God cursed him to be a homeless wanderer, right? A wanderer and a vagabond.

Scott Woodward: Cain then worries that, “Everyone that findeth me shall slay me,” he tells God. So the Lord put a protective mark on Cain so that people wouldn’t kill him when they found him.

Scott Woodward: And that’s the end of the whole story. So what was the mark, and what’s that got to do with black Africans? I mean, like, the text says nothing about the mark. Actually, early rabbinic tradition speculates that this Mark may have been that Cain was given a dog as his companion or that a horn grew from his forehead or that a permanent Hebrew letter was seared onto his forehead. In other words, nobody actually knows what the mark was.

Scott Woodward: It’s not in the text. So it’s all just speculation, right?

Scott Woodward: So I want to speculate. Maybe it was male pattern baldness. How about that? Every male who’s got male pattern baldness, that’s the mark of Cain, right? See, I can do it too. We can all do this. It’s all speculative, right?

Scott Woodward: Male pattern baldness is just as justifiable in the text as is black African skin.

Scott Woodward: So to associate Cain’s mark with black Africans—like, what in the world, right?

Scott Woodward: So let’s just review a few key points. What do we know from Genesis 4, and what do we not know? OK, so first point: The mark placed on Cain was a mark of mercy. Did you catch that in the narrative?

Scott Woodward: It’s a mark of mercy meant specifically to protect Cain from being killed, right? Number two, nobody knows what the mark was. The text itself just doesn’t say, so any attempt to define exactly what it was is purely speculative.

Scott Woodward: Number three, nowhere in the narrative is there even a hint that Cain’s protective mark would, in any sense, be passed down genetically to his children. And so just to go from that story to say, “Therefore it is justified to enslave black Africans because they carry the mark of Cain” is just a colossal leap totally unjustified by scripture.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And we should point out that there were critics of this in the 1830s in the environment the church comes into. David Walker said, “Some ignorant creatures hesitate not to tell us that we, the blacks, are the seed of Cain and the murderer of his brother Abel. But where or of whom those ignorant and avaricious wretches could have got their information I am unable to declare.” He’s basically saying, “Where are you getting this from?” He goes on to say, “Did they receive it from the Bible? I’ve searched the Bible as well as they and have never seen a verse which testifies whether we are the seed of Cain or of Abel. Yet those men tell us that we are the seed of Cain, that God put a dark stain upon us that we might be known as their slaves. Who act more like the seed of cane by murdering, the whites or the blacks?”

Scott Woodward: Ah, shoot.

Casey Paul Griffiths: “How many vessel loads of human beings have the blacks thrown into the seas?”

Scott Woodward: Oh-ho-ho-ho.

Casey Paul Griffiths: “How many thousand souls have the blacks murdered in cold blood to make them work in wretchedness and ignorance to support them and their families?” Like, powerful arguments.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And I’ve got to point out really fast, the longevity of this argument about the mark of Cain is astounding.

Casey Paul Griffiths: I mean, I have heard well-meaning but misguided members of the church within the last 20 years make that argument.

Casey Paul Griffiths: “Yeah, of course black people are descendants of Cain. That’s just how it is.” And sometimes we have to be willing to look at the scripture and question our own assumptions.

Casey Paul Griffiths: What’s in the text and what’s not in the text are really, really important. It can be a matter of life or death for some people.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. So the Gospel Topics essay is showing us that as far back as a hundred years before the church was established, this is the narrative already entrenched, right? And then think about it, and this is a Protestant America. Many of those Protestant Americans join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Do they automatically shed all of their assumptions?

Casey Paul Griffiths: No.

Scott Woodward: They do not. They do not shed those assumptions. And so it actually starts to become woven into some church narratives, right? And like you said it continues even to this day, with some segments of church members believing that this is still the case, because there’s been some apostles who, in the early church and in the mid-1900s, mention this again, and we’re going to get into all that, right? Again—

Scott Woodward: —we’re going to track this whole story carefully, but today we’re just focusing on how did the climate in America get such that this racial prejudice was customary, and then how does that influence church members? I think this is a big example of that. This is going to influence how they read the Bible. And “As good Christians, how do we make sense of black Africans?” And since this answer was already entrenched in their culture, in their biblical environment, it’s no wonder that they bring it with them into the church.

Scott Woodward: There’s another tragic example of this that we need to talk about as well: the curse of Ham, right?

Scott Woodward: Should we talk about that one?

Scott Woodward: This is in Genesis chapter 9. This is even a bigger whopper than the Cain story in my mind. So let me just review the story real quick. So you remember after the flood, Noah planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine. He got drunk, and then he laid naked in his tent. Do you remember this story?

Scott Woodward: And then his son Ham “saw the nakedness of his father, and he went and told his two brethren, Shem and Japheth,” who got some kind of a cloth, and they walked backwards toward their father, and they covered his nakedness. OK. So far, this is a weird story, but then number three, when Noah wakes up, he somehow “knew what his younger son Ham had done unto him. And so he exclaimed, ‘Cursed be Canaan.’” That’s Ham’s son. “‘Cursed be Canaan. A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.’ He then said of both Shem and Japheth that Canaan shall be his servant.” OK, so three important points here. First of all, this is the weirdest story in the whole Bible, all right?

Scott Woodward: And then number two, nowhere in this narrative, if you were tracking carefully here, was there any sort of a mark given nor any sort of condemnation to servitude of an entire race of people, right?

Scott Woodward: Associating this story with black Africans is totally unjustified by the text and therefore wildly irresponsible. Wildly irresponsible.

Scott Woodward: But it’s used by Christians 200 years ago to justify slavery and to further affirm the inferiority of blacks to whites. Crazy.

Casey Paul Griffiths: Yeah. This is a strange story, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths: And to associate it with black Africans is—I don’t know. I mean. But it’s also an example of a story I’ve heard people use to justify racism and racial practices. We’ve just got to be extremely cautious with how we use the scriptures because our own assumptions and biases can (inaudible)—that’s what’s happening in the early American republic. And by the way, not just in America but generally among white Christians around the world these assumptions prevailed, and a cold, hard look at the scriptures basically shows that it was an addition. It wasn’t actually in there to begin with.

Casey Paul Griffiths: It was an assumption they brought to the text.

Scott Woodward: So it would be a really important thing, I think, for us in the modern age to just take a cold, hard look at ourselves, right? Just to ask ourselves what do we accept as “common knowledge?” And what social assumptions do we accept without question? What interpretations of scripture do we just accept without having ourselves examine the text? I think that’s a very healthy practice. Just always question your own assumptions, right?

Scott Woodward: Realize that there’s probably more to it than what you thought or what you’ve heard, and go to the text itself and examine it for yourself and see if you come to those same conclusions.

Scott Woodward: I should also say that as far as biblical interpretation goes, on top of the curse of Cain and curse of Ham readings, there are verses in the Bible that explicitly talk about slavery, right? Like, Paul talks about this, talks about how to deal with your slaves benevolently, that kind of thing.

Scott Woodward: But we’ve got to realize that this wasn’t about whites enslaving black Africans. It was Mediterranean people enslaving Mediterranean people. Not that even that’s right, but it was a practice in Paul’s day, and so he talks about it. But the text is in no way justifying whites enslaving black Africans, right? That’s the point here to read it that way, is to read it with an agenda.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And, I mean, this is unpleasant stuff, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths: I am an American. I love my country. At the same time, too, I don’t want to have my eyes covered when it comes to our history because I believe that America has a divine destiny and purpose, but the narrative given in scripture is that people have to qualify for those things. They have to live up to the ideals that they have.

Casey Paul Griffiths: And in order to understand and be better in the future, we need to know this background a little bit. In order to just give a fair assessment of what the Saints did in the 19th century we have to do a little bit of work to understand the world that they’re living in, particularly with regards to this really complex issue.

Casey Paul Griffiths: So I know it’s taken us an hour, and all we’ve done is really set the table, basically, but this is such a complicated issue that we could probably go a couple more hours on this, couldn’t we Scott?

Casey Paul Griffiths: To just introduce the world that the church is born into. Church members can’t just look at this academically, either. This is the world they exist in. And early on they’re going to start bumping into these ideas and responding, and that’s the legacy that we still have to grapple with today.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. And so our point today has been to hopefully help everyone understand that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was organized in 1830, was organized during the height of this stuff, right? It was the height of the Protestant acceptance of the curse of Cain doctrine in North America, as well as the even more popular curse of Ham doctrine. Most converts were from Protestant sects, and they carry these ideas with them into the church. There’s these other unexamined assumptions, right, that were brought in by prevailing scientific thought and by the prevalence of African enslavement in certain parts of the country. It’s against that backdrop of entrenched racial prejudice in America that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was established.

Scott Woodward: And so we’ve just got to keep in mind that these unexamined assumptions about blacks being inferior to whites, blacks carrying the curse of Cain and Ham, and especially that interracial marriage was bad or unhealthy, they’re all there when the church is organized, all there just stewing in the background. And we’ll find in our next episode that Joseph Smith will challenge some of these assumptions, and he’ll adopt others. And so our next episode’s going to be really interesting as we look at Joseph Smith and Blacks. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. Next week we continue this series by diving into what we can learn from the historical record about Joseph Smith’s own views of black Africans generally and specifically of their ability to be ordained to priesthood and enjoy temple privileges while he was church president. Today’s episode was produced by Scott Woodward and edited by Nick Galieti and Scott Woodward, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.

Show produced by Zander Sturgill and Scott Woodward, edited by Nick Galieti and Scott Woodward, with show notes by Gabe Davis.

Church History Matters is a Podcast of Scripture Central. For more resources to enhance your gospel study go to ScriptureCentral.org where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you.

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Race and the Priesthood

• Matthew 22:36–40
• Matthew 28:19–20
• 2 Nephi 26:33
• Doctrine and Covenants 38:24–25
• Official Declaration 2

Teachings of Prophets and other Church Leaders

• Bruce R. McConkie “ All are Alike unto God ” (Brigham Young University devotional, Aug. 18, 1978), speeches.byu.edu
• Dallin H. Oaks, “ Remarks at Worldwide Priesthood Celebration ” (address given at the “Be One” celebration, June 1, 2018) mormonnewsroom.org
• Russell M. Nelson, “ Remarks at Worldwide Priesthood Celebration ” (address given at the “Be One” celebration, June 1, 2018) mormonnewsroom.org
• Helvecio Martins, “ Watchmen on the Tower ,” Ensign, May 1995, 43–45

Additional Church Resources

• “ Race and the Church: All Are Alike Unto God ” (official statement, Feb. 29, 2012), mormonnewsroom.org
• “ Race and the Priesthood ,” Gospel Topics, topics.lds.org
• James Goldberg, “ Witnessing the Faithfulness: Official Declaration 2 ,” Revelations in Context, history.lds.org
• Ahmad Corbitt, “ Revelations in the Summer of 1978, Parts 1–4 ,” history.lds.org
• “ Till We All Come in the Unity of Faith” (2:21), medialibrary.lds.org
• “ Chapter 56: Official Declaration 2 ,” Doctrine and Covenants Student Manual (2018), 861–76
• Elizabeth Maki, “ A People Prepared ,” history.lds.org
• Elizabeth Maki, “ You Have Come at Last ,” history.lds.org
• “ At ‘Be One’ Celebration, a Call for Optimism and Overcoming Prejudice ,” (news release, June 1, 2018) mormonnewsroom.org
• “ Elijah Able ,” Church History Topics, saints.lds.org
• “ Jane Elizabeth Manning James ,” Church History Topics, saints.lds.org

Other Resources

• “ Blacks and the Priesthood ,” fairmormon.org
• John A. Tvedtnes, “ The Charge of ‘Racism’ in the Book of Mormon ” (address given at the 2003 FAIR Conference), bookofmormoncentral.org

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Religious Educator Vol. 17 No. 3 · 2016

Discussing difficult topics: race and the priesthood, w. paul reeve and thomas a. wayment.

Paul W. Reeve and Thomas A. Wayment, "Discussing Difficult Topics: Race and the Priesthood,"  Religious Educator  17, no. 3 (2016): 126–43.

Paul W. Reeve ( [email protected] ) was an associate professor of history at the University of Utah when this article was published.

Thomas A. Wayment ( [email protected] ) was publications director of the Religious Studies Center when this article was published.

Wayment: Paul, tell us a little bit about your background on race and Mormonism. What brings you to this discussion?

Reeve: I started research for the book Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) in 2007. I was familiar with some of the existing historiography in the field of whiteness studies. The whiteness historiography has largely revolved around immigration and labor history. There have been studies of Irish immigrants who were racialized as not white or not white enough. The histories of Irish immigrants trace the ways in which the Irish attempted to claim whiteness for themselves and thereby become fully Americanized or assimilated. The same thing was true for Italian immigrants at the turn of the century and other immigrant groups coming into America. I was familiar with some preliminary evidence that suggested that the same thing was happening to Mormons. I wanted to do some research to see if that was true.

Wayment: And you noted two predominantly Catholic groups; is there anything there as far as religion and race?

Reeve: There is. One of the things that really interested me is that the existing historiography didn’t really pay attention to religion; it was mostly an immigrant and a labor historiography. The existing historiography does not pay significant attention to the Catholic religion of the Italian and Irish immigrants, a gap that I believed needed to be addressed. In my research, I had come across incidences where people from outside of Mormonism—Protestant Americans in particular—looked in at Mormons and suggested that they weren’t merely religiously different; they were sometimes physically different, even racially different. I started paying attention to that. I made a file, and started collecting sources, and decided that I could situate the Mormon experience within this bigger whiteness historiography and made the case that whiteness historians had largely ignored the religious component to this racialization that took place in the nineteenth century.

There are a couple of studies of Jewish immigrants which do pay attention to religion, and one of them, I think, is really quite nicely done— The Price of Whiteness is a Jewish whiteness study. For me, the interesting thing was that with the Mormons you have an inside religious group, a religion born in America, yet Mormons were being racialized as not American, not fully white, somehow a distinct “other,” not just religiously different but racially different.

So, I started the research. I had colleagues at the University of Utah who said I might get a nice journal article out of my research, but there certainly is not a book there. I started the research, and it just sort of snowballed. Friends and colleagues became aware of the project, and I would regularly get emails containing sources that fellow historians had come across. Once people became aware, they started paying attention to it. It seems to permeate interactions with Mormons in the nineteenth century.

I wrote a prospectus for a fellowship at the Huntington Library in California in 2007; they have a large collection of Protestant anti-Mormon tracts, and I thought, “If this is a theme, something that outsiders were projecting onto the Mormons, it’s going to show up in these Protestant tracts.” So I got this fellowship and spent the summer of 2007 at the Huntington reading these tracts. And the categories for the book started to emerge from the sources.

Wayment: You’ve also looked at whiteness in Mormon scripture, is that right?

Reeve: Yes, I mean the Book of Mormon obviously has passages that are charged with race and can certainly be read in very racist ways, and Mormons have read them in those kinds of ways. I think, perhaps, Mormons sometimes struggle to know exactly what is going on there. The narrative of the Book of Mormon especially revolves around a notion of the fallen Lamanites being redeemed into white and delightsome people, and obviously nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint leaders latched onto that and believed that their mission was to help redeem Native Americans, whom they understood as racially different from Euro-American Latter-day Saints. It was a mission for Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century to redeem Native Americans from their fallen status and make them “white and delightsome.”

Wayment: So, an interesting thing you said—and I hadn’t planned to ask this—Mormons, at the time that they were developing this narrative of redeeming Native Americans, were also viewed as ethnically not white enough, or racially not white enough. Is that accurate?

Reeve: That is accurate. That’s really the point of the book: that Mormons were seen as not white enough; outsiders were never quite sure how to categorize Mormons. Nearly every marginalized group in nineteenth-century America was used as a comparison with the Mormons. There was a narrative of guilt by association: Mormons were missionaries amongst Native Americans, so outsiders concluded that Mormons were conspiring with Native Americans to wipe out true, white Americans.

Wayment: Like the events that took place in Missouri, or later in the Nauvoo period?

Reeve: Yes, both. Every time the Mormons were driven from their homes—so I’m talking about the expulsions from Jackson County and from Clay County, from the state of Missouri altogether, the state of Illinois altogether, or even the Utah war—there was a corresponding accusation of Mormon-Indian conspiracy. It happened every time. It was one of the rationalizations used to justify a Mormon expulsion. It was in the letters piling up on Governor Boggs’s desk before he issued the extermination order. The accusations took three key forms: Outsiders suggested that Mormons were conspiring with Indians to wipe out white Americans. They were intermarrying amongst them, and sometimes the argument was that the Mormons had become more savage than the “savages.” Outsiders also said things like, “White people really shouldn’t act this way”; “Mormons are not performing whiteness”; “they’re not true Anglo-Saxons”; “they’re more like Indians than they are like true, white Americans.”

Wayment: So, in a sense, there was this “othering” pressure, and Mormons now were other and Native Americans were other, so was it easy to say that they were both such different categories; they were conspiring against the United States. Is that an OK way to say it?

Reeve: Yes, I think that’s right. I think that this racialization process was the way in which outsiders justified discriminatory policies against the Mormons. How did you justify an extermination order against a group of people who looked like you? One way in which you did so was to suggest that in fact they weren’t like you, they were more like marginalized groups that nineteenth-century Americans felt perfectly justifiable in exterminating or expelling—Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, immigrants. Mormons were conflated with all of those different groups and it is one way in which the nation justified discriminatory policies against them.

Wayment: So, isn’t it true that the Book of Mormon works in a different direction? It’s kind of recognizing an “other,” a different race, and trying to redeem that? Whereas the American experience, what you were saying, is trying to identify an “other” so that we can push it to the periphery, maybe exclude it. Is that correct?

Reeve: I think that is correct. Mormons in the nineteenth century read the Book of Mormon narrative and saw in themselves the need to become agents of redemption for Native Americans. From a twenty-first-century perspective, this was paternalistic and animated by colonialism, but nonetheless, the notion is that Mormons saw themselves as agents of uplift. They used racialized language in the way in which that uplift played out, but they saw their mission as helping to redeem the fallen decedents of ancient Israel. And Mormonism was born into a racial context in which President Andrew Jackson had signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the same year Mormonism was founded. Andrew Jackson had become convinced that Native Americans were not merely culturally different, but racially different, and in fact intermixing with white Americans had been a disaster. So the best thing to do was to remove them from their homes east of the Mississippi to an Indian country west of the Mississippi River. Mormons came along and suggested that they had a book that was reportedly a history of this group of people, and that Indians were in fact fallen descendants of ancient Israel and that they had a divine role in the ushering in of Christ’s return. The Mormon view of who Indians were shines in the face of the way in which Protestant, white America viewed Native Americans at the same time.

Wayment: So, it was almost countercultural, maybe even subversive to the American agenda at that time?

Reeve: Yes, that is one accusation absolutely leveled against Mormons. One of the themes that I trace is the way in which Protestant, white America made these arguments, these accusations against the Mormons. I also then look at the ways in which outsiders looked to the Native American context as a solution to the Mormon problem. So the Indian solution would be the solution to the Mormon problem; there was actually a reservation proposed for Mormons.

Wayment: I didn’t know that. Where was that located?

Reeve: After Joseph Smith’s murder in Illinois, there was a low-level official in Illinois who actually made a formal proposal that a Mormon reserve be created. He was explicit in saying that it was borrowed from this Native American, Indian reservation context. His proposal was to give the Mormons twenty-four square miles of land where only Mormons could settle, and there would be an agent appointed to preside. He borrowed from the reservation process in terms of the administrative structure. He proposed this to Mormons in Illinois, who responded by saying, “Well, it’s worth exploring,” because they really were looking for a new place to go by that point. Mormons were not necessarily opposed to the plan and even argued that twenty-four square miles was not enough land. The proposal did not receive much traction and died without coming to fruition.

Wayment: Let me shift gears a little bit. You’re familiar with the Gospel Topics essays, and the Church has now reflected on this period and made some statements regarding how we handled race, how we currently view race, and in a big picture I wonder if you would comment on what you feel the essay is saying, and maybe what it’s not saying. Help us read that from an historian’s perspective.

Reeve: Sure. Well, I think the “Race and the Priesthood” essay attempts to situate Mormonism’s priesthood and temple restrictions within a broader American racial context. Mormonism was born into a very charged racial atmosphere. We just talked about the racial atmosphere towards Native Americans; there was also a very charged atmosphere towards African Americans, and Mormonism was born into that context and can’t escape its consequences. So, what I see for the “Race and the Priesthood” essay is an effort to try to help Latter-day Saints understand that context. In the first couple of decades of Mormonism, there was an open racial attitude in terms of priesthood and temple admission. There were notions of universal salvation, a universal gospel message, and a universal male priesthood. Two well-documented black Latter-day Saints were ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood in the first couple of decades of Mormonism. Then, what you see taking place across the course of the nineteenth century was a shrinking space for black Latter-day Saints within their chosen faith.

One of the most significant ways in which people claimed whiteness for themselves in the nineteenth century was in distance from blackness. Even Native American tribes passed laws against their tribal members marrying black people. The majority of states in the nation had laws against black–white racial mixing. I think that it is helpful to view race as a hierarchy, with Anglo-Saxons at the top and a variety of less desirable “races” beneath them. People were clamoring for a higher position on this racial ladder. Mormons were one of many groups that were racialized and pushed down that ladder at the same time they were trying to climb up and secure a more favorable rung for themselves.

Wayment: So do you see that happening as early as Brigham Young, prior to Brigham Young, or would you say mostly during the Utah period? Were they trying to grasp onto this American concept of whiteness?

Reeve: It happens even in the first couple of decades of Mormonism. So, the first documented black person to join the Church was in 1830 in Kirtland, the founding year of Mormonism. A man by the name of Black Pete joined Mormonism in Kirtland, part of a group that was converted by those early missionaries, and within a few months, I found a news report in Philadelphia and in New York stating that Mormons had a black man worshipping with them. This was not a celebration of Mormon diversity. Then, in Missouri, the accusation was that “Mormons are inviting free blacks to the state of Missouri to incite a slave rebellion and to steal our white wives and daughters.” Fear of race mixing was bound up in Mormonism, almost from the beginning, and that was a factor in the Mormon expulsion from Jackson County. So those accusations of a Mormon-Indian conspiracy are there, but also accusations that Mormons allowed and even promoted black-white race mixing. “Mormons accepted rogues, and vagabonds, and free blacks,” is one charge leveled against them in the state of Missouri. Mormons were accused of being too accepting of people that proper white American society knew should be excluded.

But in terms of the priesthood restriction, the first documented open articulation of a race-based priesthood restriction from a prophet was President Brigham Young in 1852 to the Utah territorial legislature. We know that a couple of black Latter-day Saints were ordained to the priesthood, and we know that Joseph Smith was aware of and sanctioned at least one of those ordinations, and his younger brother who was an Apostle at the time, William Smith, ordained the other well-documented black person to the priesthood.

Wayment: And the other being Elijah Abel?

Reeve: So Elijah Abel was one, and Q. Walker Lewis was the other. Joseph Smith signed Abel’s certificate in March of 1836. Abel was ordained on 3 March and Joseph Smith signed a ministerial certificate later that month, which certified that he was an ordained elder. It was a certificate that he was an ordained minister of the Mormon gospel, authorized to preach.

Wayment: Then he could be a missionary.

Reeve: Exactly. It indicates that he was ordained to the Mormon priesthood, an elder on 3 March 1836. Then on 20 December , that same year, he was ordained into the Third Quorum of the Seventy, which was a missionary quorum at the time, not functioning as an administrative unit like it does in the present day Church. Abel was ordained by Zebedee Coltrin on 20 December. All of those documents are at the LDS Church History Library. It is also important to note that LDS leaders were fully aware that Abel was a black man; Church documents call him a “colored” man. In US census records he was listed as a mulatto, which in a nineteenth-century racial and legal context equaled black.

Wayment: That was my question. There’s been some modern discussion on how black he was, if that’s an OK way to say it, and you’re saying that there is documentation that they interpret him as an African American.

Reeve: That’s right. Elijah Abel was in Cincinnati in the 1840s, and there was a Church conference that was held there. This was in 1843, so Joseph Smith was still alive. Joseph Smith was not at the conference but several Apostles were. The minutes of this conference survive in Church records, and Elijah Abel was present at this Church conference, and the Apostles said, (paraphrasing) “Well, we aren’t comfortable with a colored man preaching to white people, so he should relegate his preaching to the black population.” And Elijah Able responds by saying, “I don’t have a problem with that, I’m a member of the Seventy. It’s a missionary calling; I’ll preach to my own race.”

I’m citing that example to say that the documents support that LDS leaders fully understood him to be a black man; they called him a “colored” man. There are later remembrances that suggest that somehow Joseph Smith stripped him of his priesthood. There is just simply no evidence that this was the case. Abel was still a practicing Latter-day Saint in 1843, when Joseph Smith was still alive, and LDS Apostles were identifying him as a black man who had the priesthood and who was preaching the gospel.

Wayment: And actively in the Third Quorum of the Seventy.

Reeve: And the same holds true for Q. Walker Lewis as late as 1847. Brigham Young was on record as favorably aware of Q. Walker Lewis as a black man and a Melchizedek Priesthood holder. Minutes of a meeting in Winter Quarters substantiate this, where Brigham Young referred to Q. Walker Lewis as one of our best elders, an African in Lowell, Massachusetts, and a barber. So, Brigham Young himself is on record as late as 1847 as favorably aware of a black ordained priesthood holder.

Wayment: So that brings us to an interesting juncture. The essay, and I’m sure you’re aware of this, has been broadly interpreted as placing, if you will, blame—maybe that’s the wrong word to use—but kind of placing on Brigham’s shoulders the blame for instituting the priesthood and temple restrictions. So you’re saying that Brigham started out early accepting the ordination of a black man, and then in 1852 in the territorial legislature, he made some of those famous statements. Tell me, first of all, what historically is happening there? The recovery of whiteness or kind of trying to participate in American whiteness seems to be one factor, but what else could you add to that?

Reeve: Well, concerns of race mixing permeated American society. So there were laws dating back to the colonial period against white people marrying slaves, and not just slaves, but white people marrying black people. The majority of states in the nation had laws against interracial marriage between black and white. Like I mentioned earlier, even Native American tribes passed laws against their tribal members marrying black people. By December of 1847, Brigham Young became aware of Enoch Lewis’s marriage to Mary Webster in the Lowell, Massachusetts branch. Enoch was black and Mary was white. He also learned of the corrupt version of plural marriage that another black Mormon, William McCary, introduced at Winter Quarters. It involved interracial, sexualized, and unauthorized “sealings.” In response, Brigham Young spoke out strongly against race mixing; he even advocated capital punishment as the penalty.

Wayment: So that began to happen between 1847 to 1852?

Reeve: Yes. December of 1847 Brigham Young responded to news of both interracial circumstances. But the surviving minutes of the 1847 meeting at Winter Quarters do not mention a racial priesthood restriction. It was not until 1852 that Brigham Young openly articulated a priesthood restriction.

In terms of the “Race and the Priesthood” essay, and the perception that it places the blame, if that’s the right word, on Brigham Young, I think there are all kinds of important contextual elements coming into place here. I think that it’s a mistake to suggest that the priesthood ban was a result of Brigham Young’s inherent racism, or that he grew up as a racist. I do not believe that is what the essay implies. We have, like I mentioned, a very open racial attitude in March of 1847 from Brigham Young, and then you start to see a deterioration in Brigham Young’s own racial attitude between 1847 and 1852, and race mixing was a significant factor in that process. So I don’t see it as something inborn or inherent in Brigham Young.

Wayment: So one thing we could say, based on what you’re saying, is that the essay is not blaming someone per say, but maybe a larger cultural phenomenon?

Reeve: Well, yes, I think there are just so many moving parts. Certainly then, as far as historians have been able to determine, the priesthood restriction began with Brigham Young. There are no known statements from Joseph Smith making a race-based priesthood restriction or a temple restriction. In fact, the evidence seems to be really conclusive to the contrary, that Joseph Smith was aware of black people who were ordained to the priesthood, and that in the case of Elijah Abel, he sanctioned the ordination. No known statements from Joseph Smith of a race-based priesthood or temple restriction exist. Published in the Times and Season in Nauvoo is an open racial vision for admission to the Nauvoo temple. It announces that Nauvoo Saints will welcome all people, and specifically mentions people of all colors, into God’s holy house.

Elijah Abel was amongst the very first to do baptisms for the dead at Nauvoo, with no proscription at all against his participation. We know that he received his washing and anointing in the Kirtland Temple, which was as far as the temple ordinances were developed to that point. There is incontrovertible evidence that he was welcomed into that ritual. He wasn’t in Nauvoo when the endowment was introduced, so I don’t know what would have happened if he had been there. A belated remembrance records that Abel applied to Brigham Young for his endowment after he arrived in Utah, and Brigham Young told him no. In 1879, Abel did apply to John Taylor for his endowment and to be sealed to his wife, and that opened an investigation into Elijah Abel’s status as a black priesthood holder. If the priesthood restriction was unambiguously in place as late as 1879, then why the need for an investigation? As late as 1879, the leader of the church was unsure of how to proceed regarding race, the priesthood, and temple admission. After conducting an investigation in which Abel produced his priesthood certificates, Taylor allowed Abel’s priesthood to stand, but denied him temple admission.

So, once again, there is all kinds of evidence that LDS leaders knew Abel as a black person and as a priesthood holder. So, in terms of laying it all on Brigham Young, I guess that is kind of what we’re grappling with. The “Race and the Priesthood” essay is such a truncated exploration of this. It is difficult to capture the complexity of the priesthood and temple restrictions’ evolving history in such a short essay. If people are concerned that it’s all being laid at Brigham Young’s feet, ultimately I think it’s much more complicated than that. Yes, the restrictions began under Brigham Young and then take on a life of their own. They developed in fits and starts across the course of the nineteenth century. A lot more people were involved in that process, especially as the restrictions accumulated a growing precedent. I don’t see the restrictions as firmly in place until 1908. The last brick in the wall of exclusion, I think, was Joseph F. Smith in a meeting that took place in 1908. Joseph F. Smith in this meeting falsely remembered that Elijah Abel’s priesthood had been declared null and void by Joseph Smith himself. I think that was the last brick in the priesthood and temple restrictions becoming entrenched and firmly in place.

In my estimation, you have to erase from collective Mormon memory the black priesthood holders that complicate the story. Joseph F. Smith, in that 1908 meeting, basically said that the priesthood restriction had been in place from the beginning, God put it in place and man cannot do anything about it; it would take a revelation to get rid of it. In fact, that is what happened seventy years later; it did take a revelation to get rid of it. But that new memory that it had always been a white priesthood and that temple admission had always been white is fully solidified in 1908, when he erased from collective Mormon memory the black priesthood holders that complicated that narrative.

Wayment: And later, others developed the idea into a fully formed wall to protect this idea.

Reeve: That’s right.

Wayment: I want to put you in a difficult situation for a minute. So you’re a teacher, a Latter-day Saint teacher, of college-aged and high school-aged students, and you have a student who has a very simplistic narrative, that the Church is racist and our past is racist, and yet you’ve painted a wonderfully complex picture and very granular. How do you help speak to that? And I know that kind of puts you out of your academic mindset, but what could you do to help, or help a teacher, find a way to talk about this without placing blame on a single entity? That’s a large question, I apologize for it.

Reeve: Yeah, well you know, what I see, and what’s really striking to me in exploring this, is that Latter-day Saints were converting to Mormonism from a variety of backgrounds and understandings about the political issues of their day, and a major political issue in the nineteenth century was race, slavery, the status of African Americans, and abolitionism. And Mormonism was casting a wide net in the nineteenth century and drawing all of these people in, and they came into Mormonism with their political positions intact. So, Mormonism brought into the fold abolitionists and anti-abolitionists, white slave masters, black slaves, and free blacks; all of them were welcomed into the Mormon gospel fold.

Other religious traditions in the nineteenth century ended up splitting or going through schisms as a result of those same hot political issues. Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians either split or experienced a schism. Mormonism escaped those fates because they accepted people from all of those categories into the gospel fold. It came to a head in 1852, when Brigham Young tried to figure out how to make order out of the diverse group of people who had gathered to the Great Basin. What should Utah Territory do with the black slaves who had been brought to the territory by their white slave masters who had converted to Mormonism in the South? Some of the black slaves were also Mormon converts themselves. Brigham Young and the territorial legislature determined that white people would preside over black, and free would preside over bound. That is the order that Brigham Young and the legislature created out of the diverse population that had gathered to the Great Basin. So a variety of outside political positions became inside theological positions as this played out across the course of the nineteenth century. Those who converted to Mormonism brought their political and racial attitudes with them. Unfortunately, this had an impact on how the Mormon racial story played out theologically.

Wayment: That’s fascinating. That’s a really great point to make, and I think you’ve helped me see something there. Can I push you a little bit harder on that? Tell me about 1978. So, it was a long time later and the racial issue was pretty hot in ’78, but it seems in America it had reached its pinnacle a generation earlier. Do we wait till ’78 in part because of what you described? Mormons exist on this broad spectrum of backgrounds and beliefs and it takes that long to bring us together as a people. Is that one of the reasons for the delay?

Reeve: Yes, I think that the notion that priesthood and temples were white from the beginning really became entrenched in the twentieth century. No one remembered Elijah Abel and Q. Walker Lewis. They had been forgotten—erased from collective Mormon memory. The fact that there were black priesthood holders to complicate the Mormon racial understanding was gone. Mormons had arrived by the 1950s in terms of their acceptance as Americans. The Mormon notion of what it meant to be an ideal American finally dovetailed quite nicely with what mainstream society thought it meant to be an ideal American in the 1950s. Mormons had really made themselves over into these apple-pie-eating, baseball-playing, flag-waving, uber-Americans. They were monogamous and white and very traditional, and it fit with the post-World War II vision of what it meant to be an American—the Leave It to Beaver vision. But, right at the moment when Mormons arrived and are viewed as acceptable, the nation started to move in a different direction. The civil rights movement began, and rather than moving with the nation, Mormons entrenched behind segregated priesthood and temples.

David O. McKay would, however, begin the slow process of change. He went to South Africa in 1954, the same year as Brown v. Board of Education , and in South Africa you have people who looked white who were being denied ordination into the priesthood because they couldn’t trace their ancestry out of Africa. So the policy as it was being implemented in South Africa, because of the mixture of the races there, was basically guilty until proven innocent. You had to be able to trace your ancestry out of Africa in order to be eligible for ordination to the priesthood. David O. McKay unilaterally reversed this policy to a policy of innocent until proven guilty. He said it’s better to err on the side of mercy. “Why are we preventing these people from being ordained to the priesthood,” he questioned. “Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt—let’s ordain them to the priesthood. Then, if we find out later that there happens to be some African ancestry, we can deal with that, but why prevent a whole group of people, who at least on the surface look white, from being ordained to the priesthood?”

He also interpreted the priesthood restriction to apply only to those of African descent, so black Fijians, Filipino Negritos, Australian Aborigines, and Egyptians were all ordained to the priesthood before 1978. Then, you have a variety of other factors that came into play: Mormonism moved into international locations where mixed races were the de facto racial heritage of the bulk of the population. Brazil, for example, South Africa, and other Central and South American countries all had a mixture of these populations as a result of the slave trade. Good luck trying to figure out if a person had “one drop” of African ancestry in that context. Mormonism had adopted a one drop policy in 1907, that is that one drop of African ancestry would exclude a person from being admitted to the temple or to the priesthood. In the United States, let alone in countries with large percentages of mixed-race ancestry, it was almost impossible to ferret out one drop. We know now from DNA evidence that we are really intermixed—one big family across the globe.

The São Paulo Brazil Temple was announced, and you had faithful, black Latter-day Saints who were contributing their hard earned money to a building they knew they wouldn’t be able to enter. LDS leaders from Salt Lake flew to Brazil and met those Saints, and it touched them. They became more concerned about how they might let them into the temple instead of how they were going to keep them out.

I think also that the Spirit led out in front of LDS policy that dragged behind. On the continent of Africa itself, for example, entire congregations considered themselves to be Latter-day Saints based upon LDS literature they had encountered. They wrote to Church headquarters asking for missionaries, asking for more literature, asking for representatives to baptize them. They formed their own congregations. That was another pressure that brought the question to the forefront. Then you also have to take into account the various personalities amongst the leadership. Spencer W. Kimball, as an Apostle, was on record as early as 1963 calling the priesthood restriction a “possible error,” which he said the Lord could forgive. So, he is on record as early as 1963 with a very open attitude. You have Hugh B. Brown, who in 1969 attempted to remove the priesthood restriction simply by policy vote. He argued that “there was not a revelation that put it in place, so let’s remove it by vote; it’s a policy, so let’s get rid of it.” McKay himself had interpreted the restrictions as policy, not doctrine. Hugh B. Brown, however, was unable to achieve consensus. Harold B. Lee believed that it would take a revelation, and so that delayed things. Harold B. Lee became the next President. He had a short tenure, and then Spencer W. Kimball became President, and like I said, was on record with a more open attitude and seemed willing to take his case to the Lord and reported a revelation in June of 1978.

Wayment: That’s fascinating. That’s some great detail there. What do you feel needs to be part of this discussion to make it work for the average reader?

Reeve: So I think the question about Brigham Young—I don’t know if maybe I didn’t explore all the possible avenues there. I guess for some people, or for a lot of people, it comes down to this question to prophetic fallibility and what we should do with that as Latter-day Saints. For me, I don’t have a vision of a micromanager God who directs every finger lift. In fact, I don’t see God revoking a prophet’s agency when he makes him a prophet. If a prophet has agency, then a prophet can make a mistake. For me, the framework that works to help me not just with this but with a variety of issues that come up in navigating sometimes challenging waters is a principle articulated by Ezra Taft Benson when he was an Apostle. He articulated what’s called the “Samuel principle.” He referred to the Old Testament when the children of Israel asked for a king and Samuel told them no. They wanted to be like other kingdoms around them, and finally God said to Samuel, “Samuel they haven’t rejected you. They’ve rejected me. Give them what they want.” President Benson said that sometimes, within certain parameters, God gives us what we want and lets us suffer the consequences. It was a decision with long-term ramifications that lasted for several generations to switch to a monarchy. God allowed the children of Israel to live with the consequences of a monarchy.

I see that principle as something that is at play, for example, with Joseph Smith and the 116 lost manuscript pages. God gave Joseph Smith what he wanted and let him suffer the consequences. God called his prophet to repentance and in the revelation he gave to Joseph Smith he told him that he lost the ability to translate and that he had trusted more in the arm of flesh than he trusted in God. God let Joseph Smith suffer the consequences. The other example I think about is in Kirtland, Ohio, when the Saints wanted to open a bank. They applied for a bank charter, but the state of Ohio rejected the application. Joseph Smith decided to move ahead anyway. He opened a bank without a charter and called it an anti-banking institution. And a lot of Latter-day Saints in Kirtland believed that Joseph Smith had given them assurances that their money was safe. When the bank failed, they lost their money and their faith. It led to what’s called the Kirtland apostasy. Some of Joseph Smith’s closest associates dissented in that period. I look at that experience and say, “Well, God obviously knew the bank would fail, why not tell Joseph Smith simply, ‘Hey bad idea, you’re not a banker. Don’t go there—it’s going to cause all kinds of problems and people are going to lose their faith over this.’” God didn’t intervene: he let Joseph Smith open the bank and suffer the consequences.

When Brigham Young announced a priesthood restriction to the territorial legislature, God didn’t come down and stop him from doing so—he didn’t intervene. He didn’t say that in implementing a racial priesthood and temple restriction that it would lead to an entrenched policy that would be problematic to remove later and would bring a significant weight upon the Church. He let Brigham Young articulate a policy, a rationale for a priesthood restriction that I think took on a life of its own and let us as a body of Saints suffer the consequences. Some white Latter-day Saints grew increasingly secure in feelings of racial superiority, beliefs in divine curses centered on skin color, and the development of a theology that suggested that our brothers and sisters are somehow inferior to us.

The other thing I think is important for people to realize is that Brigham Young used one rationale—and one rationale only—for the priesthood restriction. He never deviated from it. I hear so much confusion about the notion that we had a racial priesthood restriction because of the Book of Mormon. Brigham Young never drew upon the Book of Mormon, never drew upon the Book of Abraham, never drew upon the Book of Moses. He used one rationale and one rationale only. He said that Cain killed Abel, and because Cain killed Abel, all of Abel’s decedents would need to receive the priesthood before Cain’s supposed decedents could receive the priesthood. And he believed Cain’s decedents were black people—that the mark that God put upon Cain was a black skin. That idea predates Mormonism by a thousand years; it is a part of the broader Judeo-Christian tradition, and Mormonism inherited it and used it to its own ends.

Wayment: A curse-of-Ham kind of thing?

Reeve: A curse of Cain, and then there was a corresponding curse of Ham, two different kinds of curses that played out. Brigham Young brought that curse of Cain into Mormonism and gave it theological weight. He never deviated from that; he never used “fence-sitter” or “less valiant in the war in heaven.” That was an explanation that grew up outside of official channels, because Brigham Young set up a theological problem in the curse of Cain explanation. Joseph Smith said we will be punished for our own sins and not for Adam’s transgression, and yet Brigham Young’s curse of Cain held the supposed descendants of Cain responsible for a murder they took no part in. Why aren’t white people responsible for David’s murder of Uriah? Why isn’t there a multigenerational curse around that?

Wayment: So they have to seek an explanation, scripturally.

Reeve: So other Church leaders had this alternate explanation. They thought there must be some sort of agency at play here, because Brigham Young’s accusation removed agency from the equation. Black people must have made some decision in the premortal existence that led to them being born into black skin and this cursed lineage. So, sometimes the invented explanation was that they were neutral in the War in Heaven. Brigham Young rejected that outright in 1869. To the School of Prophets, he said there were no neutral spirits in the War in Heaven; everyone chose sides. Then Brigham Young returned immediately to the curse of Cain explanation for black skin and the priesthood restriction. But that didn’t get rid of the idea of neutrality or black people being “less valiant”; other leaders would return to it. It would shift from neutral to less valiant.

I think that it’s an important point for people to be aware of, that there’s only one explanation that Brigham Young gave. He never deviated from it throughout his entire life. He resorted only to the Bible, the book of Genesis, and Cain’s murder of Abel. People in the 1880s started to refer to the Book of Abraham, like George Q. Cannon, and then that would take on a life of its own. The Book of Abraham wasn’t canonized until 1880, and Brigham Young never resorted to it. Joseph Smith gave us the Book of Abraham, and there’s no record of him using it as justification for a race-based priesthood restriction. So it’s important to have all that in our understanding of what the only rationale was for a prophet/ president, and it was the curse of Cain, and it created a theological problem in the way that he articulated it.

The other important idea to keep in mind is that all of the previous explanations have now been disavowed by this generation of leaders. The First Presidency and the Quorum of Twelve approved the “Race and the Priesthood” essay. It disavows all of the previous justifications. There is no need to defend past statements on race when this generation of leaders has disavowed them. And this generation of leaders condemns all racism, past and present. That includes racism within the Church. It has now been condemned.

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Gospel Topic Essays: 009: Race and the Priesthood

• July 15, 2020 April 24, 2023

We continue our tour of the Gospel Topics Essays and with the essay Race and the Priesthood .  The Goal – To share the LDS Church’s Gospel Topic Essays and help the both the believing member and the non-believer get a sense of the why these essays were written, who the intended audience is, whether these essays resolve the concerns of the faithful and non-believer and why they perhaps these essays even add to the disbelief of those who skeptical of the issues they find in Mormon History.

Co-Hosts of this episode

Allan Mount is Co-host of the Marriage on a Tightrope podcast with his wife Kattie. After 35 faithful years in the church, it was the Gospel Topic Essays that acted as a catalyst to his faith transition. He is a sales director for a technology company in South Jordan Utah. Kattie and Allan have 4 children.

Anthony Miller is an entrepreneur and education enthusiast in Billings, Montana, with Masters degrees in Business Administration and in Financial Services. After a lifetime of faithful membership in the church, he experienced a faith transition after he stumbled across the Gospel Topics Essays and similar materials in 2016, while he was searching for resources to support his adult gay son. Anthony blogs at UnpackingAmbiguity.com and is a frequent contributor to post and progressive Mormon support communities.

Ryan de Roque lives in Houston, Texas with his wife and two sons. He grew up in Arkansas and was raised in the Mormon church, serving as a missionary in Venezuela. He got his degree from BYU in Spanish Translation, and currently teaches High School Biology. He went through a faith transition and left the Mormon church in 2017 after studying concerning historical and doctrinal information about Mormonism that he had not been exposed to previously. Part of this transition was learning through genealogical work that he had African ancestry, which motivated him to look further into the pre-1978 priesthood and temple ban against those with African ancestry.

Julienna Viegas was born and raised in Belgium. She served a mission on Temple Square. She has a B.A in International Politics from Brigham Young University. She published several Op-eds in the Salt Lake Tribune in regards to changes needed in the Mormon Church. She works and lives in Texas with her three children.  She can be found on the “ Faith Transition Podcast ”

RESOURCES: Mormonthink article Wikipedia article on Blacks within Mormonism Dr. Paul Reeve – The Long Promised Day Wikipedia article on Jane Manning James Wikipedia article on Elijah Abel Article on Priesthood of Elijah Abel Religion of a Different Color Saints, Slaves, & Blacks Mormonism and White Supremacy Jane and Emma Brigham Young’s speech as read by Jonathan Streeter Dr Darron Smith and Marvin Perkins on Thinker of Thoughts The Stewart Udall Sequence The Lowry Nelson Exchange Lowry Nelson correspondence Podcast delving into some of the facets of Race and Priesthood Podcasting dissecting the crux of truth issues within Race and Priesthood Follow up podcast on the crux of these same issues 

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Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

It is heavy history that raises a variety of challenging questions.

• Post author By Chad Nielsen
• Post date April 27, 2023
• 5 Comments on Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

The history of the race-based priesthood and temple ban in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is complex. In the early days of the Church, Joseph Smith and other leaders of the Church ordained Black men to the priesthood. A ban took hold by the 1850s—and wasn’t reversed until 1978. This interview with W. Paul Reeve discusses the history of the race and priesthood in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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Read more about race and priesthood in Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood by W. Paul Reeve .

Table of Contents

• Three-part narrative
• Early converts
• Winter Quarters
• Competing explanations
• Solidification of ban
• Uneven Enforcement
• Spencer W. Kimball
• Previously unpublished

Why is it important to learn about the history of race and the priesthood?

Latter-day Saints have been directed by two members of the First Presidency to “root out racism.” In my estimation it is impossible to root out racism without examining its roots. History is thus a valuable way for Latter-day Saints to learn what racism looked like in the past so we can better understand its consequences in the present and help shape a more just and equitable future.

What has been W. Paul Reeve’s experience in studying the history of race in the Church?

It has been both exciting and challenging. It has been exciting to uncover new sources, especially the anti-slavery speeches of Orson Pratt and to understand that he and Brigham Young were engaged in a vigorous debate. It has been challenging because of the depth of the racism the sources reveal.

It is heavy history and it raises a variety of challenging questions. I attempt to grapple with those questions in the book and share the ways that I have sorted through them for myself.

The curse of Cain was Brigham Young’s explanation.

What is the three-part narrative of race and the priesthood?

The book is divided into three phases which lay out the chronological history of the racial priesthood and temple restrictions as I have come to understand them:

• Phase 1. In phase one there were no restrictions. Priesthood and temples were open to people of all races and ethnicities. In fact the First Presidency published an article in the Nauvoo newspaper in 1840 announcing their intent to welcome “persons of all languages, and of every tongue, and of every color” into the temple that they would start to build the following spring.
• Phase 2. Sadly, that open racial vision gave way in fits and starts in phase two to segregated priesthood and temples.
• Phase 3. In phase three, the June 1978 revelation ushered in a return to racial inclusivity and restored the Church to its universal roots.

Who are some of the early Black converts to the Church?

There have been Black Latter-day Saints from 1830 to the present.

Some of the most well known include Elijah Able and his wife Mary Ann Adams Able, who presided over a multi-generational family of Latter-day Saints. Elijah Able is significant because he is the most well-documented Black priesthood holder in the nineteenth century. His son Moroni was also ordained to the priesthood in 1871 and his grandson, Elijah R. Ables, was ordained an elder in 1935 after passing as white.

Q. Walker Lewis was another Black priesthood holder; he worshiped in the Lowell, Massachusetts Branch and was a prominent abolitionist and a barber by trade. Brigham Young called Lewis “one of the best elders” and referred to him as a person of African descent.

The lack of consensus among leaders had prevented change.

Jane Elizabeth Manning along with six additional family members converted in Connecticut in 1842. She and her husband Isaac James and her son Sylvester and their son Silas were 1847 pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley.

In the U.S. South, at least 26 enslaved people also joined the upstart faith before the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlawed slavery. Enslaved Latter-day Saints included John Burton, Green Flake, and Samuel Chambers. Chambers became an unordained deacon in the Salt Lake Eighth Ward after he and his wife Amanda migrated to Utah following their emancipation at the end of the Civil War.

How common was priesthood ordination during the 19th century?

As I note in the book:

In the nineteenth century the purpose of ordination was to provide each congregation leadership, not to ensure that all men held priesthood office. In 1842, the branch in Brandywine, Pennsylvania, for example reported 124 total members, which included seven elders, two priests, three teachers, and two deacons, while the branch in Salem, Massachusetts, counted 66 members, with one elder and one priest. Not until the early decades of the twentieth century did the Church systematically ordain young men to priesthood offices. The fact that a few Black men were ordained to the priesthood when white men were not universally ordained makes it that much more remarkable. Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood , page 14

How were early prophets accurate in stating that God “hath made of one blood” all of humankind?

DNA evidence reveals that the entire human family is related through common ancient ancestry. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both quoted Acts 17:26 to teach that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”

They were thus both religiously and scientifically correct when doing so.

How did Brigham Young’s experiences in Winter Quarters seem to shape his views?

On December 3, 1847, in a meeting at Winter Quarters , Brigham Young learned of two Black Latter-day Saint men who had married white women and thereafter shifted his open racial perspective.

Both explanations were disavowed.

Brigham spoke out stridently against race mixing; he even advocated capital punishment as the penalty. By 1852 he openly articulated a racial priesthood restriction and did so in conjunction with ongoing preaching against race mixing.

What were the two competing explanations for the priesthood and temple ban?

Curse of cain.

The curse of Cain was Brigham Young’s explanation for the racial restrictions. He suggested that because Cain killed his brother Abel, all of Abel’s children (who he presumed to be white people) would need to receive the priesthood before any of Cain’s descendants (who he presumed to be Black people) could receive the priesthood.

It was a violation of the Second Article of Faith because Brigham Young held the supposed descendants of Cain responsible for a murder in which they took no part.

Less valiant in premortality

The second explanation suggested that Black people must have been neutral, less valiant, or fence sitters in a premortal war in heaven and were thus born into a lineage that was barred from the priesthood.

Both explanations were disavowed in 2013 by the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve Apostles.

How did the priesthood and temple ban solidify over time?

The restrictions were not firmly in place at Brigham Young’s first utterance. Each succeeding generation of leaders were unwilling to violate the precedent established under Brigham Young , even though Young’s precedent violated the open racial policies established under Joseph Smith.

Joseph F. Smith solidified the restrictions in place in the first decade of the twentieth century when he erased from collective Latter-day Saint memory the original Black priesthood holders.

See How the Church Changed in Remarkable ‘Saints 3’

What are some examples of how the priesthood and temple ban was enforced unevenly?

Elijah Able’s son, Moroni, was ordained an elder in 1871 and Able’s grandson Elijah R. Ables was ordained an elder in 1935, after passing as white.

Russell Dewey Ritchie, the son of a formerly enslaved father was ordained to the priesthood in 1970 and his sisters received temple rituals long before 1978 even though their parents were denied a temple sealing in 1909. Descendants of the Ritchie family continue to exhibit African ancestry in their DNA to the present.

Spencer W. Kimball studied the issue.

One formerly enslaved woman, Rebecca Henrientta Foscue Bentley Meads, received full temple rituals and was sealed to her husband in 1863.

DNA evidence today reveals the impossibility of policing racial boundaries. If the “one drop” policy was the standard, then there has never been a period of Latter-day Saint history without Black priesthood holders and temple attenders. I discuss the Church’s “one drop” policy in chapter 13 in the book and explore its impossibilities.

How did Spencer W. Kimball exemplify his belief that revelation only comes to those who are “reaching as high as he can”?

President Spencer W. Kimball studied the issue out in his mind, learned the history of the restrictions for himself, and sought new sources of information . He studied the scriptures and, according to his son Edward Kimball, he concluded that the restrictions “did not come from explicit scriptures but rather from interpretations by various Church leaders.”

He fasted, prayed, sought inspiration in the temple, and laid the groundwork for consensus among senior Church leaders. The lack of consensus among leaders had prevented change in the past and President Kimball recognized the need for consensus as an important component in moving forward.

What is some previously unpublished information in the book?

The book includes quotes from the Pitman shorthand version of Brigham Young and Orson Pratt speeches, some of which had never been transcribed before. Orson Pratt gave two strident anti-slavery speeches. In one of those speeches he stated that there is no evidence that Black people are descendants of Cain, which was Brigham Young’s only explanation for the priesthood restriction.

Read George D. Watt’s 1851 Journal from Liverpool to Chimney Rock for the First Time

The book also includes evidence from Joseph F. Smith’s 1879 notes when he interviewed Black priesthood holder Elijah Able. It includes the fact that Joseph F. Smith set apart Elijah Able for his third mission in 1883.

It includes a variety of Black Latter-day Saints from the Century of Black Mormons database hosted at the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. Most readers of the book will likely have never heard of many of these Black pioneers before. Their stories offer evidence of the ways that the racial restrictions played out in the lives of Black Latter-day Saints and personalize the policies in new ways.

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About the interview participant

W. Paul Reeve is the Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies in the History Department at the University of Utah where he teaches courses on Utah history, Mormon history, and the history of the U.S. West. He is Project Manager and General Editor of a digital database, Century of Black Mormons, designed to name and identify all known Black Mormons baptized into the faith between 1830 and 1930.

Further Reading

• How Well Do You Know Brigham Young?
• Who Was Jane Manning James?
• How Has the Book of Mormon Influenced Race Discussions?
• How Did Race Factor Into Pioneer-Era Latter-day Saint Settlement and Missionary Work?
• What Did Spencer W. Kimball Write About the Priesthood Revelation?

Race and Priesthood Resources

• Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood ( Deseret Book )
• Century of Black Mormons Database ( Marriott Library )
• Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood ( BYU Studies )
• Race and the Priesthood ( Gospel Topics Essay )
• Discussing Difficult Topics: Race and the Priesthood ( Religious Educator )
• The Autobiography of Jane Manning James ( Church History )

Interviews from the Let’s Talk About series

• Let’s Talk About Polygamy (Brittany Chapman Nash)
• Let’s Talk About the Translation of the Book of Mormon (Michael Hubbard MacKay)
• Let’s Talk About the Book of Abraham (Kerry Muhlestein)
• Let’s Talk About the Law of Consecration (Steven C. Harper)
• Let’s Talk About Faith and Intellect (Terryl Givens)
• Let’s Talk About Temples and Ritual (Jennifer C. Lane)
• Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood (W. Paul Reeve)

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By Chad Nielsen

Biotech professional. Armchair historian. Latter-day Saint.

5 replies on “Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood”

How do the statements by President David O. McKay that were reported in his biography by Greg Prince fit into your narrative?

I can’t speak for W. Paul Reeve, but I can share my thoughts on those statements: “A few events in church history, however, complicate the issue. Both President David O. McKay and President Harold B. Lee both sincerely prayed to know if God wanted the ban to be lifted in the decades prior to 1978. Some have brushed off David O. McKay’s seeking for a revelation as a simple failure to discern the divine will on the matter (and, frankly, Harold B. Lee was biased against an answer of lifting the ban). Others dismiss the accounts as late, second-hand recollections on an emotionally-charged subject, and therefore not reliable as historical sources. These reports of church leaders seeking to lift the ban complicate the picture of God’s involvement in the ban, though, and I’m not settled on an answer as to what they mean.” ( https://www.timesandseasons.org/index.php/2022/02/on-the-priesthood-and-temple-ban/ ).

Thanks for posting this overview of Paul Reeves book.

One of the things that seems to be missing in these discussions is an acknowledgement of how different the world truly was–especially prior to World War II. While most folks will acknowledge that Brigham Young was a man of his time, and so forth, what we fail to do is wrestle with the literal impossibility, not only on the part of the church, but on the part of the entire West of fully integrated fellowship with our black brothers and sisters. And so, in my humble opinion, it wasn’t just a matter of church leaders not petitioning the Lord with enough faith and unity that prevented the ban from being lifted sooner than 1978. The fact is that through most of the decades leading up to WWII church leaders did not feel impelled to seek the Lord’s counsel on the subject–at least not to the same degree that leaders would feel after WWII. And not simply because there weren’t enough external pressures to bring them to their knees–but because of the nature of the prevailing culture at the time. The entire West needed to be cleansed (along with the church) before we could take those steps that would bring our black brothers and sisters into full fellowship.

Re: Pres. McKay receiving a “no, not now” answer to his prayer. What do you think of the answer given by one of your subtitles here — “The lack of consensus among leaders had prevented change?” One explanation I see frequently given is that before ’78, during Pres. McKay’s presidency, many of the apostles (and broader church membership) would be adamantly opposed to full integration. Since our current methods of revelation require unanimity among the top quorums (at least), any change requires that the most conservative among those top quorums become convinced of the need for change. Status quo rules in the absence of unanimity.

Historical scholarship only gets an inquirer so far with this subject, where prophets and apostles are involved. Those interested in a more complete perspective should see my piece here at truthwillprevail: “Apostles, Prophets, and God’s Former Priesthood Restriction” http://www.truthwillprevail.xyz/2022/02/apostles-prophets-and-gods-former.html

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Race and the Priesthood - Response to LDS.org

An essay on Race and the Priesthood was added on 12/8/13 in the topical guide of the LDS.org website. The essay is mostly a historical recap of the Church's treatment of blacks regarding the priesthood and few things are really explained. It is found here: Race and the Priesthood

A MormonThink editor responds to the essay below.

UPDATE: On 5/5/15, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that a LDS Sunday Scool teacher was dismissed for using the church's own race essay in a lesson:

It all started with a question.

The Mormon youth simply asked his white Sunday school teacher why the man's Nigerian wife and her family would join a church that had barred blacks from being ordained to its all-male priesthood until 1978. Why, the student wanted to know, was the ban instituted in the first place?

To answer the teen's inquiry, Brian Dawson turned to the Utah-based faith's own materials, including its groundbreaking 2013 essay, " Race and the Priesthood ." His research prompted an engaging discussion with his class of 12- to 14-year-olds.

But it didn't please his local lay leaders, who removed him from his teaching assignment — even though the essay has been approved by top Mormon leaders and appears on the church's official website lds.org

Read full article

Editor Comment: The LD Church was having a hard time responding to what it felt was a lot of misinformation about its doctrine and history. So they compiled a list of essays to answer those questions so members could have an official, LDS approved reference. This teacher appears to have been dismissed for using the essays for their exact stated purpose.

Significant facts presented

The essay states:

Despite this modern reality, for much of its history—from the mid-1800s until 1978—the Church did not ordain men of black African descent to its priesthood or allow black men or women to participate in temple endowment or sealing ordinances.

True, and not every member is aware of this. Many members believe the restrictions were just not allowing black men to hold the priesthood, they do not realize that it also pertained to not allowing black families to be sealed together as well, thus denying them exaltation in the highest degree of celestial glory.

The Church was established in 1830, during an era of great racial division in the United States. At the time, many people of African descent lived in slavery, and racial distinctions and prejudice were not just common but customary among white Americans.

True, racial divisions happened among the apostate churches as well. However, the church teaches that they are led by revelation through their prophets so that they do not have to be trapped in popular cultural norms.

Errors & misleading statements

1) Starting with the first paragraph, the essay states:

In theology and practice, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints embraces the universal human family. Latter-day Saint scripture and teachings affirm that God loves all of His children and makes salvation available to all. God created the many diverse races and ethnicities and esteems them all equally. As the Book of Mormon puts it, "all are alike unto God."

The current prophets may believe this but obviously past prophets and apostles did not. For example (emphasis added):

You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, un- comely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind. (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 7:290-291, October 9, 1859) Not only was Cain called upon to suffer, but because of his wickedness he became the father of an inferior race . A curse placed upon him and that curse has been continued through his lineage and must do so while time endures. Millions of souls have come into this world cursed with a black skin and have been denied the privilege of Priesthood and the fullness of the blessings of the Gospel.

Joseph Fielding Smith, The Way to Perfection, pages 101-102

Link to more Quotes from LDS Church leaders

The Book of Mormon also has many statements that contradict the simple "all are alike unto God". For example:

...that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.

2 Nephi 5:21

Link to more LDS scriptures about race

2) Second paragraph excerpts:

The structure and organization of the Church encourage racial integration.

By definition, this means that the racial, economic, and demographic composition of Mormon congregations generally mirrors that of the wider local community.

Such practices make The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a thoroughly integrated faith.

That may be true at the local levels, but this doesn't seem to translate to the top Church leadership which sets the global policy for the LDS Church. Here's a 2013 photo of the highest -ranking members of the Church. Note the lack of ethnic diversity.

3) Fourth paragraph states:

Toward the end of his life, Church founder Joseph Smith openly opposed slavery.

The key phrase is 'toward the end of his life'. Prior to this, Joseph was not opposed to slavery.

The position of Joseph Smith during his participation in the U.S. presidential election of 1844 was a political statement and cannot be seen as representative of his religious attitude toward slavery (emphasis added).

We believe it just to preach the gospel to the nations of the earth, and warn the righteous to save themselves from the corruption of the world; but we do not believe it right to interfere with bond-servants , neither preach the gospel to, nor baptize them contrary to the will and wish of their masters, nor to meddle with or influence them in the least to cause them to be dissatisfied with their situations in this life, thereby jeopardizing the lives of men; such interference we believe to be unlawful and unjust, and dangerous to the peace of every government allowing human beings to be held in servitude.

D&C 134:12

Timing and historical background of this statement makes it clear that the position of Joseph Smith was primarily motivated by political necessity. In 1835, there were a lot of Mormons in Missouri, where slavery was permitted, so Joseph Smith supported slavery. In 1844, the year of his death, most Mormons lived in the northern state of Illinois and he was against slavery.

Brigham Young's position on slavery is well-documented.

4) Fourth paragraph states:

There has never been a Churchwide policy of segregated congregations.

It is probably technically true that there has never been a Churchwide policy of segregated congregations, but there certainly was tacit approval of racial segregation from the days of Joseph Smith until relatively recently.

Link to 17 examples of Segregation in the LDS Church

5) Fifth paragraph:

During the first two decades of the Church's existence, a few black men were ordained to the priesthood. One of these men, Elijah Abel, also participated in temple ceremonies in Kirtland, Ohio, and was later baptized as proxy for deceased relatives in Nauvoo, Illinois. There is no evidence that any black men were denied the priesthood during Joseph Smith's lifetime.

This is carefully-crafted language which gives the impression that Bro. Abel had full temple privileges in the Kirtland Temple. However, the Kirtland Temple was not a "temple" as we think of one today. For example, it was open to the public, like a stake center or other chapel is today. In fact, in Kirtland, there were no temple ceremonies other than an early version of the "washing and anointing" ordinance, which Elijah did participate in. But there was no endowment ceremony or sealing ceremony (they didn't even do baptisms for the dead in the temple—that would not begin until Nauvoo). Mentioning that Elijah performed baptisms for the dead in Nauvoo very likely refers to his doing so in a river (as all early baptisms for the dead were done), not in the Nauvoo Temple.

If only 2 or perhaps 3 black men received the priesthood in the early days of the Church, then it seems more likely these were either favors or mistakes. Undoubtedly there were more than 2 or 3 black men in the first 20 years of the Church who wanted the full privileges of the restored gospel by receiving the priesthood and being sealed to their families.

It is of interest to note that Elijah Abel was only one-eighth black and had a rather plain appearance. See photo reported to be of him. Some speculate that it wasn't readily apparent that he was black.

More information on Elijah Abel

Also, the article states There is no evidence that any black men were denied the priesthood during Joseph Smith's lifetime. This seems to imply that Joseph didn't believe in the ban. However, that is contradicted by the December 15, 1969 First Presidency statement on race issued to General Authorities, Regional Representatives of the Twelve, Stake Presidents, Mission Presidents, and Bishops:

From the beginning of this dispensation, Joseph Smith and all succeeding presidents of the Church have taught that Negroes , while spirit children of a common Father, and the progeny of our earthly parents Adam and Eve, were not yet to receive the priesthood , for reasons which we believe are known to God but which He has not made fully known to man.

Note: This letter is also the first time that the church leaders publicly removed the scriptural explanation for the restrictions and claimed not to know the reason. Privately, church leaders such as as Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold B. Lee, still held to the traditional explanation (Kimball 2008) .

6) Sixth paragraph excerpt:

In 1852, President Brigham Young publicly announced that men of black African descent could no longer be ordained to the priesthood.

Following the death of Brigham Young, subsequent Church presidents restricted blacks from receiving the temple endowment or being married in the temple.

If the prophets after Joseph Smith were responsible for the ban on blacks from receiving the priesthood and if indeed this was a false doctrine then how could any of those men possibly be prophets? For men of God to deny an entire race the benefit of the priesthood for 150 years is inexcusable. The Church would have been much better off to have been governed by a group of men that did not claim divine authority and therefore could have been responsive to the will of the members.

If Brigham Young instituted the priesthood ban on blacks without being directed to from God, then this is just too serious to ignore. And if all the prophets since Brigham Young until Spencer W. Kimball let it go unchallenged, then how can anyone say these men are truly prophets of God? It's ironic that all the other Christian churches, that do not claim to have prophets, allowed blacks the same rights as whites long before the prophet-led LDS church did. If the LDS prophets made this big of an error then why should they be believed on other matters?

7) Sixth paragraph excerpt:

Over time, Church leaders and members advanced many theories to explain the priesthood and temple restrictions. None of these explanations is accepted today as the official doctrine of the Church.

What the Church neglected to say is that the LDS scriptures give the answer and it has been taught as doctrine for over a century. The Book of Abraham has been used as the scriptural source by the First Presidency since 1912. Here is one set of verses out of many LDS scriptures that discuss this (emphasis added):

21 Now this king of Egypt was a descendant from the loins of Ham, and was a partaker of the blood of the Canaanites by birth. 22 From this descent sprang all the Egyptians, and thus the blood of the Canaanites was preserved in the land. 23 The land of Egypt being first discovered by a woman, who was the daughter of Ham, and the daughter of Egyptus, which in the Chaldean signifies Egypt, which signifies that which is forbidden; 24 When this woman discovered the land it was under water, who afterward settled her sons in it; and thus, from Ham, sprang that race which preserved the curse in the land . 27 Now, Pharaoh being of that lineage by which he could not have the right of Priesthood , notwithstanding the Pharaohs would fain claim it from Noah, through Ham, therefore my father was led away by their idolatry…

Abraham 1:21-24, 27

Further clarity of these scriptures from the Church:

The Book of Abraham is rich both in doctrine and in historical incidents. Of the latter the fact of the large influence (if not identity) of Egyptian religious ideas in Chaldea in the days of Abraham is established; the descent of the black race (Negro) from Cain , the first murderer; the preservation of that race through the flood by the wife of Ham--"Egyptus," which in the Chaldean signifies "Egypt," "which signifies that which is forbidden"--the descendants of "Egyptus " were cursed as pertaining to the priesthood --that is, they were barred from holding that divine power; the origin also of the Egyptians--these things, together with the account of Abraham migrating from Chaldea to Egypt, constitute the chief historical items that are contained in the book.

Comprehensive History of the Church , Vol.2, Ch.47, Pg.128

Link to more LDS scriptures on black skin as a curse

Additionally, the Church leaders were very clear why blacks were denied the priesthood:

That negro race , for instance, have been placed under restrictions because of their attitude in the world of spirits, few will doubt. It cannot be looked upon as just that they should be deprived of the power of the Priesthood without it being a punishment for some act, or acts, performed before they were born.

Joseph Fielding Smith, 10th President of the Church ,The Way to Perfection , page 43.

8) Eighth paragraph:

In 1850, the U.S. Congress created Utah Territory, and the U.S. president appointed Brigham Young to the position of territorial governor. Southerners who had converted to the Church and migrated to Utah with their slaves raised the question of slavery's legal status in the territory. In two speeches delivered before the Utah territorial legislature in January and February 1852, Brigham Young announced a policy restricting men of black African descent from priesthood ordination. At the same time, President Young said that at some future day, black Church members would "have [all] the privilege and more" enjoyed by other members.

Here is a link to Brigham Young' s speech in Feb. 1852 quoted in the essay. They neglect to include the many racist quotes as well as quotes that indicate that there is no promise that the restrictions would be lifted in the foreseeable future. Brigham said (emphasis added):

What is that mark? you will see it on the countenance of every African you ever did see upon the face of the earth, or ever will see. Now I tell you what I know; when the mark was put upon Cain, Abels children was in all probability young; the Lord told Cain that he should not receive the blessings of the preisthood nor his seed, until the last of the posterity of Abel had received the preisthood, until the redemtion of the earth . If there never was a prophet, or apostle of Jesus Christ spoke it before, I tell you, this people that are commonly called negroes are the children of old Cain. I know they are, I know that they cannot bear rule in the preisthood, for the curse on them was to remain upon them, until the resedue of the posterity of Michal and his wife receive the blessings , the seed of Cain would have received had they not been cursed; and hold the keys of the preisthood, until the times of the restitution shall come, and the curse be wiped off from the earth, and from michals seed.

Also, this statement of Brigham Young's from the same Deseret News article:

...yet, the Canaanites may believe the Gospel, repent, and be baptized, and receive the Spirit of the Lord, and if he continues until Abel's race is satisfied with his blessings , then may the race of Cain receive a fullness of the Priesthood, and become satisfied with its blessings, and the two of them became as one again, when Cain has paid the uttermost farthing . ( Deseret News , April 3, 1852)

Compare that with the church's quote from the same article:

At the same time, President Young said that at some future day, black Church members would " have [all] the privilege and more " enjoyed by other members.

The church quotes four words from the article (my emphasis). The more complete statement shows that the church's quote is a gross misrepresentation of Young's intent that blacks will only "have the privilege and more" AFTER "Abel's race is satisfied" and after they have paid "the uttermost farthing."

9) Ninth paragraph excerpt:

The justifications for this restriction echoed the widespread ideas about racial inferiority that had been used to argue for the legalization of black "servitude" in the Territory of Utah. According to one view, which had been promulgated in the United States from at least the 1730s, blacks descended from the same lineage as the biblical Cain, who slew his brother Abel. Those who accepted this view believed that God's "curse" on Cain was the mark of a dark skin. Black servitude was sometimes viewed as a second curse placed upon Noah's grandson Canaan as a result of Ham's indiscretion toward his father.

The footnotes to the external sources are cited as the origin of these views. But why did the Church not include the many Mormon scriptures that support these same views? There are at least 10 separate sets of passages in scriptures unique to the LDS faith that discuss the black skin as a curse and several that link the curse to Cain. For example (emphasis added):

2 Nephi 5: 21 'And he had caused the cursing to come upon them , yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.' Alma 3: 6 'And the skins of the Lamanites were dark , according to the mark which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them because of their transgression and their rebellion against their brethren, who consisted of Nephi, Jacob and Joseph, and Sam, who were just and holy men.' 3 Nephi 2:15 "And their curse was taken from them, and their skin became white like unto the Nephites." Moses 7:22 And Enoch also beheld the residue of the people which were the sons of Adam; and they were a mixture of all the seed of Adam save it was the seed of Cain, for the seed of Cain were black , and had not place among them.

Link to LDS scriptures on black skin as a curse

It is disingenuous to blame the Bible and views that non-LDS Americans had when the LDS scriptures are much more clear that the curse of Cain was a dark skin. The Bible merely refers to the curse as 'a mark' which can be interpreted as meaning many things, whereas the Book of Mormon specifically refers to the curse as a 'skin of blackness'.

10) Ninth paragraph excerpt:

Although slavery was not a significant factor in Utah's economy and was soon abolished, the restriction on priesthood ordinations remained.

The article doesn't state that it was congress that ended slavery in Utah (as well as in the other territories) and not the Utah government under Brigham Young. Slavery ended in 1862 which was some 16 years after Brigham Young moved to Utah. That indicates that ending slavery in Utah was not a big concern of the Church. Indeed, the attitude of the Church leaders in Utah in the 1850s was to keep slavery as it was.

Brigham Young on Slavery Interviewed by Horace Greeley for NY Tribune article Aug 20, 1859:

H. G.-What is the position of your church with respect to slavery? B. Y.-We consider it of divine institution, and not to be abolished until the curse pronounced on Ham shall have been removed from his descendants. H. G.-Are any slaves now held in this territory? B. Y.-There are. H. G.-Do your territorial laws uphold slavery? B. Y.-Those laws are printed-you can read for yourself. If slaves are brought here by those who owned them in the states, we do not favor their escape from the service of those owners.

Link to the Church's view on slavery in Utah

11) Tenth paragraph excerpt:

Jane Manning James, a faithful black member who crossed the plains and lived in Salt Lake City until her death in 1908, similarly asked to enter the temple; she was allowed to perform baptisms for the dead for her ancestors but was not allowed to participate in other ordinances.

The article doesn't give the rest of the Jane Manning James story. Omitted is how Jane pled with the Church to allow her to be sealed to her family. She was a very good and faithful Latter-day Saint but her request was denied. Instead, the First Presidency sealed her to Joseph Smith as a servant for all eternity.

"When she died in 1908, Church president Joseph F. Smith spoke at her funeral." At her funeral, President Smith admitted that "Aunt Jane" (as she was known) had been relegated to eternal servanthood in the Mormon realms above, despite being a valiant, faithful Church member to the end. Wilford Woodruff, journal note for Oct 16, 1894.

Mathias F. Cowley reported:

In after years when President Joseph F. Smith preached the funeral sermon of this same faithful woman he declared that she would in the resurrection attain the longings of her soul and become a white and beautiful person .

Read the story of Jane Manning James

This LDS belief that even faithful blacks were destined to be just servants in the next life was also taught openly at least through the mid 1950s. LDS apostle Mark E. Petersen declared in 1954 in a sermon to BYU students that baptized LDS Blacks would receive only qualified acceptance into Mormonism's highest degree of glory (emphasis added):

"In spite of all he [the Black person] did in the pre-existent life, the Lord is willing, if the Negro accepts the gospel with real, sincere faith, and is really converted, to give him the blessings of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost." "If that Negro is faithful all his days, he can and will enter the Celestial Kingdom. He will go there as a servant, but he will get celestial glory."

Apostle Mark E. Peterson, "Race Problems – As They Affect the Church," Address given at the Convention of Teachers of Religion on the College Level, delivered at BYU, August 27, 1954.

12) 10th paragraph excerpt:

The curse of Cain was often put forward as justification for the priesthood and temple restrictions. Around the turn of the century, another explanation gained currency: blacks were said to have been less than fully valiant in the premortal battle against Lucifer and, as a consequence, were restricted from priesthood and temple blessings.

It should be clarified that the people that put forth the explanation that blacks were less valiant in the preexistence were the top leaders of the Church such as from Joseph Fielding Smith, 10th president of the Church (emphasis added):

" There is a reason why one man is born black and with other disadvantages, while another is born white with great advantages. The reason is that we once had an estate before we came here, and were obedient, more or less, to the laws that were given us there. Those who were faithful in all things there received greater blessings here, and those who were not faithful received less." ( Doctrines of Salvation , p. 61) President Brigham Young, answering a question put to him by Elder Lorenzo D. Young in a meeting held December 25 , 1869, in Salt Lake City, said that Joseph Smith had declared that the Negroes were not neutral in heaven , for all the spirits took sides, but the posterity of Cain are black because he (Cain) committed murder." The Way to Perfection , pages 105-106. "That negro race , for instance, have been placed under restrictions because of their attitude in the world of spirits, few will doubt. It cannot be looked upon as just that they should be deprived of the power of the Priesthood without it being a punishment for some act, or acts, performed before they were born. " The Way to Perfection , page 43.

This belief may have been started by Orson Hyde, an original member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. This is the earliest statement we are aware of that discusses this:

At the time the devil was cast out of heaven, there were .some spirits that did not know who had the authority, whether God or the devil. They consequently did not take a very active part on either side, but rather thought the devil had been abused, and considered he had rather the best claim to the government. These spirits were not considered bad enough to be cast down to hell, and never have bodies ; neither were they considered worthy of an honourable body on this earth : but it came to pass that Ham, the son of Noah, saw the nakedness of his father while he lay drunk in his tent, and he with " wicked joy," ran like Rigdon, and made the wonderful disclosure to his brethren ; while Shem and Japheth took a garment, with pity and compassion, laid it upon their shoulders—went backwards and covered their father, and saw not his nakedness. The joy of the first was to expose—that of the second was to cover the unseemliness of their father. The conduct of the former brought the curse of slavery upon him, while that of the latter secured blessings, jurisdiction, power and dominion. Here was the beginning of blessing and cursing in the family of Noah, and here also is the cause of both. Canaan, the son of Ham, received the curse ; for Noah wished to place the curse as remote from himself as possible. He therefore placed it upon his grandson instead of his son. Now, it would seem cruel to force pure celestial spirits into the world through the lineage of Canaan that had been cursed. This would be ill appropriate, putting the precious and vile together. But those spirits in heaven that rather lent an influence to the devil, thinking he had a little the best right to govern, but did not take a very active part any way were required to come into the world and take bodies in the accursed lineage of Canaan ; and hence the negro or African race. Now, therefore, all those who are halting concerning who has the right to govern had better look at the fate of their brethren that have gone before them, and take warning in time lest they learn obedience by the things which they suffer. " Choose ye this day whom you will serve." These things are among the mysteries of the kingdom, and I have told them, not by constraint or by commandment, but by permission. (SPEECH OF ELDER ORSON HYDE, DELIVERED BEFORE THE HIGH PRIESTS' QUORUM, IN NAUVOO, APRIL 21th, 1845 ..., p. 30)  

This was believed and taught by the more modern leaders as well:

" Negroes in this life are denied the Priesthood ; under no circumstances can they hold this delegation of authority from the Almighty. (Abra. 1:20-27.) The gospel message of salvation is not carried affirmatively to them... negroes are not equal with other races where the receipt of certain spiritual blessings are concerned , particularly the priesthood and the temple blessings that flow there from, but this inequality is not of man's origin. It is the Lord's doing , is based on his eternal laws of justice, and grows out of the lack of Spiritual valiance of those concerned in their first estate." (Apostle Bruce R. McKonkie, Mormon Doctrine , 1966, pp. 527-528)

Link to more Quotes from LDS Church leader s

13) 11th paragraph:

By the late 1940s and 1950s, racial integration was becoming more common in American life. Church President David O. McKay emphasized that the restriction extended only to men of black African descent. The Church had always allowed Pacific Islanders to hold the priesthood, and President McKay clarified that black Fijians and Australian Aborigines could also be ordained to the priesthood and instituted missionary work among them. In South Africa, President McKay reversed a prior policy that required prospective priesthood holders to trace their lineage out of Africa.

The LDS Church has always been quite active in Oceania, because they believe that the inhabitants of these areas are descendants of the Nephites in the Book of Mormon (Ludlow 1992, pp. 1110-1112.). The Nephites in the Book of Mormon were considered "white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome" so therefore not subject to the restrictions.

14) 12th paragraph:

Nevertheless, given the long history of withholding the priesthood from men of black African descent, Church leaders believed that a revelation from God was needed to alter the policy , and they made ongoing efforts to understand what should be done. After praying for guidance, President McKay did not feel impressed to lift the ban.

The policy? The article tries to suggest that the exclusion of blacks was not a doctrine of the church, but were merely policies that arose in the course of time. The First Presidency issued the following official statements (emphasis added):

1947 the First Presidency of the Church issued an Official Statement :

"From the days of the Prophet Joseph Smith even until now, it has been the doctrine of the Church , never questioned by Church leaders, that the Negroes are not entitled to the full blessings of the Gospel." ( Statement of The First Presidency on the Negro Question , July 17 1947, quoted in Mormonism and the Negro , pp.46-7)

In 1949, The First Presidency issued the following statement:

"The attitude of the Church with reference to Negroes remains as it has always stood. It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization, to the effect that Negroes may become members of the Church but that they are not entitled to the priesthood at the present time." (The First Presidency on the Negro Question, 17 Aug. 1949)

Official Statement of First Presidency issued on August 17, 1951, reads:

"The position of the Church regarding the Negro may be understood when another doctrine of the church is kept in mind, namely, that the conduct of spirits in the pre-mortal existence has some determining effect upon the conditions and circumstances under which these spirits take on mortality, and that while the details of this principle have not been made known, the principle itself indicates that the coming to this earth and taking on mortality is a privilege that is given to those who maintained their first estate; and that the worth of the privilege is so great that spirits are willing to come to earth and take on bodies no matter what the handicap may be as to the kind of bodies they are to secure; and that among the handicaps, failure of the right to enjoy in mortality the blessings of the priesthood is a handicap which spirits are willing to assume in order that they might come to earth. Under this principle there is no injustice whatsoever involved in this deprivation as to the holding of the priesthood by the Negroes..... "Man will be punished for his own sins and not for Adam's transgression. If this is carried further, it would imply that the Negro is punished or allotted to a certain position on this earth, not because of Cain's transgression, but came to earth through the loins of Cain because of his failure to achieve other stature in the spirit world."

Link to Doctrine or Policy

15) 13th & 14th paragraph excerpts:

...the priesthood and temple restrictions created significant barriers, a point made increasingly evident as the Church spread in international locations with diverse and mixed racial heritages.

Brazil in particular presented many challenges.

In 1975, the Church announced that a temple would be built in São Paulo, Brazil.

... they realized they would not be allowed to enter once it was completed.

In parallel with the developments in Brazil, the Church in the USA was also under heavy fire for the priesthood restrictions. Few people wanted to listen to the missionaries, there were demonstrations against the Church, the Boy Scouts were pressuring the Church as only priesthood holders could become scout leaders. Similarly, the educational institutions of the Church, including Brigham Young University, received bad press. Some of the sports teams BYU played against demonstrated against the ban by refusing to play or wore armbands. Stanford and San Jose State University both refused to play BYU in any sport because of what they called racism at BYU.

A particular complication was the possibility that the Church Educational Institutions could lose their tax-exempt status due to discrimination. This could cost the Church tens of millions of dollars. The Church has always denied that financial considerations have played a role. However, in 1976, the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University was withdrawn and revoked retroactively to 1970 because it did not allow blacks. Something similar could very well have happened to BYU if the courts felt the LDS Church practiced discrimination.

Also, most white Latter-day Saints did not like it either. It was embarrassing to talk about and almost impossible to explain to non-members, especially to their black friends.

16) 16th paragraph:

This "revelation on the priesthood," as it is commonly known in the Church, was a landmark revelation and a historic event. Those who were present at the time described it in reverent terms. Gordon B. Hinckley, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, remembered it this way: "There was a hallowed and sanctified atmosphere in the room. For me, it felt as if a conduit opened between the heavenly throne and the kneeling, pleading prophet of God who was joined by his Brethren. . . . Every man in that circle, by the power of the Holy Ghost, knew the same thing. . . . Not one of us who was present on that occasion was ever quite the same after that. Nor has the Church been quite the same."

The above description is a simplified and romanticized version of the actual decision.

Elder Le Grand Richards, from an interview by Wesley Walters and Chris Vlachos on August 16, 1978, Church Office Building, Salt Lake City:

Walters: On this revelation, of the priesthood to the Negro, I've heard all kinds of stories: I've heard that Christ appeared to the apostles; I've heard that Joseph Smith appeared; and then I heard another story that Spencer Kimball had had a concern about this for some time, and simply shared it with the apostles, and they decided that this was the right time to move in that direction. Are any of those stories true, or are they all? Richards: Well, the last one is pretty true, and I might tell you what provoked it in a way. Down in Brazil, there is so much Negro blood in the population there that it is hard to get leaders that don't have negro blood in them. We just built a temple down there. It's going to be dedicated in October. All those people with Negro blood in them have been raising money to build that temple. If we don't change, then they can't even use it. Well, Brother Kimball worried about it, and he prayed a lot about it. He asked each one of us of the twelve if we would pray--and we did--that the Lord would give him the inspiration to know what the will of the Lord was. Then he invited each one of us in his office--individually, because you know when you are in a group, you can't always express everything that's in your heart. You're part of the group, see--so he interviewed each one of us, personally to see how we felt about it, and he asked us to pray about it. Then he asked each one of us to hand in all the references we had, for, or against that proposal. See, he was thinking favorably toward giving the colored people the priesthood. Then we had a meeting where we meet every week in the temple, and we discussed it as a group circle. and then held another prayer circle after the close of that meeting, and he (President Kimball) lead in the prayer; praying that the Lord would give us the inspiration that we needed to do the thing that would be pleasing to Him and for the blessing of His children. And then the next Thursday--we meet every Thursday--the presidency came with this little document written out to make the announcement--to see how we'd feel about it--and present it in written form. Well, some of the members of the Twelve suggested a few changes in the announcement, and then in our meeting there we all voted in favor of it--the Twelve and the first Presidency. One member of the Twelve, Mark Peterson, was down in South America, but Brother Benson, our president, had arranged to know where he could be reached by phone, and right while we were in that meeting in the temple, Brother Kimball talked with Brother Peterson, and read him the article, and he (Peterson) approved of it. Walters: There wasn't a special document as a "revelation", that he had wrote down? Richards: We discussed it in our meeting. What else should we say besides that announcement? And we decided that that was sufficient; that no more needed to be said. Reference: Link is here.

Link to more information on the revelation

17) 18th paragraph:

Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.

This is probably the most important and far-reaching point of the whole article. It implies that the current church leaders believe that the Mormon scriptures contain wrong "theories". It will be interesting to see how this will be reflected in the next edition of the standard works.

18) Final paragraph:

The Church proclaims that redemption through Jesus Christ is available to the entire human family on the conditions God has prescribed. It affirms that God is "no respecter of persons" and emphatically declares that anyone who is righteous—regardless of race—is favored of Him. The teachings of the Church in relation to God's children are epitomized by a verse in the second book of Nephi: "[The Lord] denieth none that cometh unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; . . . all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile."

Again, the article cherry-picks favorable quotes from the Book of Mormon and ignores the many quotes that indicate God regards black skin as a curse.

1) LDS scriptures that discuss the black race

As mentioned earlier, There are at least 10 separate sets of passages in scriptures unique to the LDS faith that discuss the black skin as a curse and several that link the curse to Cain.

Link to LDS scriptures about race

How can the Church respond to the priesthood ban and completely ignore the LDS scriptures that enforced this idea to begin with? The Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price make it clear that God cursed whole groups of people (e.g. Lamanites) with a black skin when they disobeyed God.

2) Black people turning white

Also something worthy of discussion is how the LDS scriptures teach that the cursed black people (Lamanites) turned white when they accepted God.

3 Nephi 2:15 "And their curse was taken from them, and their skin became white like unto the Nephites."

And aside from the scriptures, even modern-day prophets taught this. Who can forget this gem from the prophet Spencer W. Kimball:

"The day of the Lamanites in nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome... The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation...There was the doctor in a Utah city who for two years had had an Indian boy in his home who stated that he was some shades lighter than the younger brother just coming into the program from the reservation. These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. Spencer W. Kimball; The Improvement Era , Dec. 1960, p. 923)

3) Was it wrong?

The Church starting in 1969 began stating that it didn't know the reason for the ban. The question members, especially black members want answered is "Was the ban wrong?"

The Church has never said the ban was wrong. They also haven't in modern times said that it was necessarily divinely inspired either.

4) No mention of an apology

The Church leaders say that the 1978 announcement negated the necessity of an apology. It's interesting that the announcement doesn't even mention the word 'black' or 'negro'. It was worded in such a way as to downplay the fact that blacks were denied the priesthood.

Other religious institutions have apologized for their past racist behavior:

In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention officially denounced racism and apologized for its past defense of slavery. In November 2008, the Bob Jones University declared itself "profoundly sorry" for having allowed "institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful.

Why can't the LDS Church do the same? Many black members feel the need for an official apology as there are still white members of the Church that believe what the early prophets have taught as well as what the LDS scriptures support. Although some black church members may think giving an apology would be a "detriment" to church work and a catalyst to further racial misunderstanding.

There has neither been an official and explicit church repudiation of its policy nor an admission that it was a mistake. The LDS Church will only say that: "today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse,…Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form."

We agree that the Church will not likely apologize to blacks. If it did then it would be admitting that the Church made a serious mistake and their prophets are not really prophets. People would say if they were wrong about that, what else might they be wrong about?

5) Why don't the leaders know?

We've been taught that the most significant thing that separates the LDS Church from other churches is that we have a living prophet that communicates God's will via revelation. If we really believe that, then why can't our prophet humbly ask our Heavenly Father why the ban happened? It seems worthwhile as this issue, perhaps more than any other, has caused the most people to not be interested in joining the LDS Church.

We have a hard time believing that God was the author of the ban up until 1978. It's very convenient to blame it on God but we would think God would have told his earliest prophets of the restoration that all of his worthy sons should be eligible to receive the blessings of the priesthood. If the ban truly came from God, then our prophets should be able to tell us why. If the ban came about from the man-made philosophies of the prophets starting with Brigham Young, then these men cannot truly be as inspired as we think they are.

6) Why wait until 1978, after all the other churches changed?

If we believe that the concept of treating all men equally is true, then why would the true church be the very last significant church to change their policy to allow blacks to have the priesthood? Should not the one, true church be on the forefront of civil rights and not lag it? Why would the one, true church lag far behind the apostate churches. The Catholic Church never adopted the' blacks are cursed from Cain belief' and let blacks be ordained as priests in America in the 1800s.

If God was really the architect behind the ban, then why wouldn't he teach that 'all men are created equal' when he restored the true church in 1830? It seems inconceivable that if there really is a one, true church that they wouldn't condemn any form of racism right from its inception and not wait 150 years to follow the apostate churches.

7) Racist missionary practices before 1978

Another example of Mormon racism is the fact that before the 1978 change, LDS missionaries in the USA, especially in the southern states were instructed to not actively proselyte Negroes, and to stay out of black neighborhoods. If the missionaries accidentally knocked on a black person's door, they were instructed to tell the person to have a nice day, perhaps give them a spiritual thought about Jesus and to attend the church of their choice without mentioning a word about Mormonism. That is racism.

Note: To confirm these accounts, we posed the question to returned missionaries to either confirm or deny that this was the policy in their pre-1978 mission. The vast majority of those that responded did indeed say that the policy in their mission was not to give missionary discussions to black people. Typical responses were that they would give a simple message on Jesus and not come back, never to mention the word 'Mormon' and to avoid black neighborhoods. We archived the responses at : Missionary practices before 1978

Ending summary

The Church can change beliefs but it can't change canonized scripture. Despite the effort that went into the essay to attempt to explain the ban, the scriptures remain. One of the central themes of the Book of Mormon is that when people disobey God, they are cursed with a black skin and if they turn back towards God, their skin turns white again. Many passages in the BOM and Pearl of Great Price support this. This essay totally ignores these scriptural references. These LDS scriptures need addressed if the Church really wants to explain or justify the priesthood ban that lasted for almost a century and a half.

We are left with two choices - either the priesthood ban was God's idea or came from man. The Church won't plainly say if it was commanded of by God or instituted by man. This is fundamental in understanding and accepting what happened. If it was from God, then God must be some sort of racist. Few people are comfortable with that idea.

If it came from either Joseph Smith or from Brigham Young as implied by the article, then how could he really be a prophet speaking for God? And how could every prophet from Brigham Young until Spencer W. Kimball really be prophets if they never realized this or received any revelation to stop it during all that time?

We can be forgiving of mistakes, especially if acknowledged, corrected (and hopefully apologized for) but the priesthood ban is something that went on for over a hundred years and had a significant impact on many peoples' lives before being corrected. How do we square that with this statement by Wilford Woodruff:

"I say to Israel, the Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as president of this Church to lead you astray. It is not in the program. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that the Lord would remove me out of my place, and so he will any other man who attempts to lead the children of men astray from the oracles of God and from their duty." --Wilford Woodruff

The essay does not answer the question of racism in LDS scriptures, why the ban took place, whether God or the prophets was behind the ban and whether or not the ban was right or wrong. The essay is merely a historical recap of the Church's treatment of blacks regarding the priesthood. Nothing is really explained. "I don't know" is not acceptable. If we are to accept the LDS Church as God's one true church on the earth, and is indeed lead by prophets that communicate with our Father in Heaven, then we think we deserve more of an answer.

Please read the complete essay in MormonThink's section on Blacks and the Priesthood .

Additional Resource: An excellent annotated response to the essay from a collaborator that I exchange research with: mormonism101.com - Race and the Priesthood

Race and the Priesthood

Gospel topics.