Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and The Problem of Racial Innocence

by Joanna Brooks

Benson had a long history of extreme social conservatism—both religious and secular. In 1967, he had contributed a foreword (previously published by the segregationist Billy James Hargis in his Christian Crusade magazine) to the white supremacist tract The Black Hammer: A Study of Black Power, Red Influence, and White Alternatives,8 a work that continues to be used by adherents of the Christian identity movement today. (Its cover featured a violently racist cartooning of a Black man’s head, inset within a sickle and hammer, decapitated and dripping blood into a puddle. Additional illustrations within the book include anti-Black racist cartoons drawn in the tradition of nineteenth-century minstrel show imagery.)