Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality

by Matthew L. Harris

When a question arises today, we work over the details and come up with an idea. It is submitted to the First Presidency and Twelve, thrashed out, discussed and re-discussed until it seems right. Then, kneeling together in a circle in the temple, they seek divine guidance, and the president says, “I feel to say this is the will of the Lord.” That becomes a revelation. It is usually not thought necessary to publish or proclaim it as such, but this is the way it happens.12

“if any man mingles his seed with the seed of Caine, the ownly way he could get rid of it or have salvation would be to come forward & have his head cut off & spill his Blood upon the ground.”

1908, Joseph F. Smith declared, without evidence, that Abel was ordained to the priesthood by mistake and that when the founding prophet learned about it, he nullified the ordination.36

Apostle Mark E. Petersen attacked the ruling viciously. In an address to the church’s religion teachers, Petersen not only rejected integration but, most egregiously, said that Black people would be servants to White people in the afterlife.

Clark and his colleagues feared that if LDS servicemen received a blood transfusion from an unsegregated blood bank, they would inherit cursed blood.3

“I wish we could take him on our faculty, but the danger in doing so is that students and others take license from this, and assume that there is nothing improper about mingling with other races,” Wilkinson explained. “Since the Lord, himself, created the different races and urged in the Old Testament and other places that they be kept distinct and to themselves, we have to follow that admonition.”

“Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomever has said in the 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.” He continued, “It doesn’t make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June of this year, 1978. It is a new day and a new arrangement, and the Lord has now given the revelation that sheds light out into the world on this subject.”77