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June 29 - June 29, 2020
In the same speech, Brigham Young envisioned a day when people might emigrate to Utah from the “Islands,” or “Japan,” or “China.” They too, Young averred, would have no understanding of government and would have to be governed by white men.20 This speech suggests that the legalization of slavery and Young’s exclusion of Blacks from the priesthood were elements of a larger vision in which the Kingdom of God on earth was to be established with whites avoiding intermixture with Blacks except so as to rule over them.
I have not heard tonight, and I think I never heard from the lips or journals of any of your people, one word in reprehension of that national crime and scandal, American chattel slavery, this obstinate silence, this seeming indifference on your part, reflects no credit on your faith and morals, and I trust they will not be persisted in.23
Greeley wondered at the “obstinate silence” and “seeming indifference” of white Mormons. But he misunderstood. Silence did not mean white Mormons were indifferent on race. The legal and theological architects of “the Kingdom of God on earth” had established Utah territory as a white supremacist space. Brigham Young used his conjoint role as LDS Church president, territorial governor, and empire builder to implement anti-Black racism as a means of consolidating relationships among the young territory’s key operatives and as a foundational step toward realizing a theocratic Mormon kingdom where
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Young’s letter is revealing in many respects. First, in noting that Duritha was “frequently importuned” to sell Jerry in Salt Lake City, it suggests that demand for slaves was greater than supply in Utah territory. Second, it documents that Brigham Young was personally involved in exchanges or trades of slaves:
prevailed upon Duritha Lewis to advise her on the desirability of sale, to set pricing expectations, and to encourage her to sell him to another Church member.
He amassed a substantial fortune that he used at the end of his life to build the Provo Tabernacle and to pay the substantial debts of Brigham Young University, making him its first underwriter.
Provo Temple and BYU both financially underwritten by Abraham Smoot, a whitesuprrmacist slaveholder. Reparations?????
Black lives were, to Abraham Smoot, a display of wealth.
document, Taylor first interviewed Coltrin, who stated that in 1834 Joseph Smith told him “the negro has no right nor cannot hold the Priesthood” and that Abel had been ordained to the Seventy as symbolic compensation for labor on the temple but dropped when his “lineage” was subsequently discovered. Coltrin also testified that he had experienced a deep sense
of revulsion while ordaining Abel at Kirtland. Smoot spoke next, indicating that he agreed with Coltrin’s statement and providing as additional evidence that Black men should not receive the priesthood his memory when serving a mission in the southern states in 1835–1836 that Joseph Smith had instructed him to neither baptize nor ordain slaves.30
31 In the face of Abel’s open, ongoing, and uncontested participation in LDS leadership, Smoot and Coltrin’s testimony was bold, controversial, and socially violent.
Abraham Smoot and Zebedee Coltrin together bore false witness to bar full participation by Black men in the priesthood and temple ceremonies.
Relationship, discernment, rightness, and loyalty or fealty shaped this pivotal moment in LDS history. The joint witness provided by Smoot and Coltrin, the consensus of two white men, was believed over documentation provided by a single Black man, Elijah Abel. Especially after the death of Elijah Abel in 1884, the Smoot-Coltrin consensus came to serve as a basis for LDS Church policy.
This desire for the protections and privileges of whiteness created a climate generally unwelcoming to African Americans, which thus reinscribed white supremacy by “freeing” white Mormons of lived relationships with and accountability to Black fellow Saints and neighbors.
White Mormons in key decision-making roles actively and intentionally privileged white relationships, loyalty, solidarity, and “rule” over Black lives and Black testimonies at the
expense of theology, integrity, and ethics but to the benefit of institutional growth and dominion. This is th...
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White supremacy guided the formation of key LDS institutions—the theocratic territory of Utah, the modern correlated orders of the priesthood, even Brigham Young University, whose founding trustee and major funder bore false witness and influenced others to do the same to block Black Mormons from full access to priesthood and temple rit...
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Thus we find at work at formative nodes in Mormon history an anti-Black racism differentiated from the anti-Black racism of the American South by important distinctions in economic, cultural, and religious contexts, but one just as intense and pervasive.36 Did Black lives matter in early Mormon Utah? Even before the full consolidation and institutionalization of the anti-Black priesthood and temple ban, stories flashing up at the joints of history sug...
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Covington, the leader of the “Cotton Mission” organized by Brigham Young in 1857 to establish a cotton industry in southern Utah and an LDS bishop, recounted to fellow settlers (according to a contemporaneous record) stories of his physical and sexual abuse (including rape) of African American men, women, and children. His statue stands today in downtown Washington, Utah...
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In December 1866, Thomas Coleman, an African American man, was found murdered in Salt Lake City—stabbed and his throat cut, a method of killing resembling “penalties” affixed in early Mormon temple rituals. An anti-miscegenation warning was inscribed on a sheet of paper and
“attached” to his corpse, as reported by the Salt Lake Daily Telegraph on December 12.
On January 27, 1852, Orson Pratt raised a voice of opposition to Brigham Young and the “Act in Relation to Service.” In
Pratt had felt the pressure to accede to Church leadership time and time again—even in so tender
a circumstance as being pressured by Joseph Smith to reject the testimony of Pratt’s wife that Smith had sought to marry her.
Pratt’s is just one example that shows that at every decisive micropolitical moment in Mormon history
it would have been possible to do differently on matters of race. But as we established the foundational institutions of our religion, white Mormons did not choose that path.
information, understanding, or, failing these, a powerful imagination and a consciousness willing to push beyond the comfort of stereotype.
Behind every disciplined presentation of system in neatly arrayed and carefully enumerated treatises stands a thousand, if not a million, human encounters and choices, a long discontinuous sequence of micropolitical interactions that in their collected mass provide the weight of “authority” and the appearance of originality.
With only a few dozen African American people living in LDS communities, white Mormons could maintain an untroubled ignorance of Black experience and Black perspectives, then reframe their ignorance as religious knowledge.
Mormon theologians produced systematic theologies and curriculum that erased and retreated from responsibility for Black Mormon lives. The systematization of Mormon theology went hand in hand with a centralization and bureaucratization of Mormon religious life at the turn of the century. Consequently, modern Mormonism instituted one of the most rigidly enforced systems of racial segregation in the history of American Christianity.
Southern States Mission President John Morgan implicitly endorsed lynching during a sermon at the Church’s main Assembly Hall on Temple Square on December 18, 1881, when he recounted witnessing an African American woman taking her purchased seat in a first-class train car in Nashville, Tennessee, displacing him and other white passengers to the second-class smoking car. Morgan described the woman’s conduct as “impudence” and proudly recalled that he had remarked to the railroad car “manager” that had an African American man attempted the same twenty-five years earlier “you would have hung him
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And the last recorded anti-Black lynching in the American West took place in the coal mining town of Price, Utah, on June 18, 1925, when a crowd estimated at 1,000 including families with children carrying picnic baskets gathered to see Robert Marshall, an African American miner and a fellow Mormon, hung from a tree.
Church leaders voiced base prejudices that had far more to do with the white supremacist culture of the United States than with the principles of the Mormon faith.
Disagree. The text of the BOM is a white supremacist text.
With her death, Mormonism lost its last living Black witness to the generosity of Joseph Smith and the original possibilities of an expansive, anti-racist way of practicing the faith. Not having Jane Manning James in the front row to look them in the eyes meant that the LDS Church leaders who took the stand at major events in the Mormon Tabernacle could tell the Mormon story as they wished, freed from the constraints of historical accountability.
Indeed, it seems likely that President Smith found in the death of Jane Manning James freedom from accountability—from the pain of bearing false witness in the presence of someone who knew it was false—to the last living witness to the reality of Abel’s ordination. The death of Jane Manning James made it possible to deny and ignore the complicated facts of Black Mormon history and the reality of Black Mormon testimony.
The first step to dislodging a lived history is to generalize beyond its details. This is the necessary step that transforms the chaotic creative energy of an emergent faith into a proper and respectable theology.
Directly relates to Inouye on The True Jesus Church
By reading through and discussing together these selected proof texts in a given order, Mormon priesthood holders could develop study habits that joined individual reflection with an orthodoxly conservative perspective on important elements of Mormon doctrine. It was a pedagogy well suited to a modestly educated but intellectually curious Mormon grassroots, an all-comers way of doing theology that persists in Mormon Sunday schools to this day.
I. The American Negro Race Problem 1. The Advent of the Negro Race in America 2. Slavery and the Abolition of It 3. Political Enfranchisement of the Black Race—Its Wisdom or Unwisdom 4. Present Status of the Negro Race Problem II. The Law of the Lord as Affecting the Negro Race Problem 1. The Progenitor of the Race 2. The Manner of Its Preservation Through the Flood 3. The Curse Put Upon It by Noah 4. In What Respects a Forbidden Race 5. From All the Foregoing Deduce the Law of God in the Question
Read this to see how he uses the BOM to support these points
For this lesson on race, Roberts sourced references from the Old Testament, the Pearl of Great Price, Alexander Stephens’s The History of the United States (1881), Stephens’s A Constitutional View of the War Between the States (1868), and William Benjamin Smith’s The Color Line: A Brief on Behalf of the Unborn
These were the historical source texts Roberts introduced into LDS Church Quorums of the Seventy for mass study. LDS lay priesthood curriculum relied on Confederate history.
“That the negro is markedly inferior to the Caucasian is proved both craniologically and by six thousand years of planet-wide experimentation; and that the commingling of inferior with superior must lower the higher is just as certain as that the half-sum of two and six is only four” (see figure 3.3).
Roberts’s systematic theology presented alleged biological inferiority, read through the prism of scriptural proof texts, as a rational basis for an anti-Black theology. Presenting racism in this apparently disciplined way, with a “logical” catechistic infrastructure rooted in a carefully arranged set of scripture verses and validated externally by “science” in an official course of study, vested it with an aura of authority, inevitability, and inarguability.
Talmage and Widtsoe erased the whole history of conflict on the subject of Black exclusion; B. H. Roberts attributed the erasure to the “Law of God.”
would have required an exceptional commitment to racial equality to advance Black ordination at this pivotal moment when the focus was on making priesthood association attractive to participation and commitment from young white Mormon men. That commitment is nowhere in evidence among LDS Church leaders at this historical moment. Instead, the imperative to organize and systematize gave new energy and force to the imperative to exclude African Americans: formally institutionalizing Black exclusion was one of the elements of priesthood reformation.
His statement was canonized in 1908 after having been reiterated for more than eighteen years by his apostles and successors to overcome deep divisions among Latter-day Saints over whether the end of polygamy was a survival tactic or truly the will of God. The charismatic authority of a prophet, collective reverence for the prophet, and shared accession to a newly institutionalized doctrine of prophetic infallibility produced coherence out of the confusion, contradiction, and dramatic reversals that characterized polygamy’s official end. Accession to declared prophetic infallibility also
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In the 1940s and 1950s, LDS Church leaders including J. Reuben Clark advocated for the racial segregation of Utah hospital blood banks so that white LDS people would not have their blood “mixed” through transfusions from black donors and lose eligibility for priesthood, a practice that held in some areas in Utah through the 1970s.28
At the LDS Church’s April 1965 General Conference, Apostle Ezra Taft Benson (who became LDS Church president in 1987) encouraged members worldwide to oppose the civil rights movement: “President David O. McKay has called communism the greatest threat to
the Church—and it is certainly the greatest threat this country has ever faced. What are you doing to fight it? . . . I [have] warned how the communists were using the Civil Rights movement to promote revolution and eventual takeover of this country. When are we going to wake up? What do you know about the dangers [of] Civil Rights Agitation in Mississippi?”30
In the 1940s and 1950s, after abandoning the instruction to teach only Brazilians of European descent, Church leaders in Brazil developed “circulars” directing missionaries to screen potential converts for Black African lineage by scrutinizing phenotypic features—hair, skin, features—at the door when tracting and to avoid teaching potential converts of African descent. The missionary lessons as delivered in Brazil also included a special “dialogue” scripted to detect African lineage and to teach converts that “Negroes” were not eligible for priesthood. Converts of African descent who persisted
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“C” for Cain, “N” for Negro, or similar, a practice that persisted into the 1970s.31 In the 1950s, high-ranking LDS Church leaders Mark E. Petersen and Bruce R. McConkie delivered remarks and published as authoritative “doctrine” anti-Black speculative theology supporting segregation, opposing interracial marriage, and claiming that African Americans were cursed by God and that white supremacy was God’s will. Their words were, in Petersen’s case, circulated in typescript among Brigham Young University religion faculty through the 1960s, and in McConkie’s case remained in print with only minor
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Harold B. Lee wrote to Brigham Young University Ernest Wilkinson that he would hold him “responsible” if a “granddaughter of mine should ever go to BYU and become engaged to a colored boy there.”32
