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

by Joanna Brooks

With major buildings at Brigham Young University named after Smoot (administration building) and Joseph F. Smith (College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences), who also obscured the truth to secure Black priesthood exclusion, as well as other LDS Church leaders like J. Reuben Clark (law school), Harold B. Lee (library), David O. McKay (College of Education), and George Albert Smith (fieldhouse), who are on record as advocates of anti-Black racial segregation, and Ezra Taft Benson (chemistry building) and Ernest Wilkinson (student center), who opposed the civil rights movement or sought to evade responsibility for institutional segregation, LDS Church–owned institutions like Brigham Young University have an opportunity to enter into a national conversation about history, institutionalized racism, privilege, accountability, responsibility, and restitution. Several leading American universities including Brown, Georgetown, and Harvard have undertaken productive scrutiny of their institutions’ formative historical intersections with slavery and white supremacy, and Brigham Young University has the opportunity to join their company.