Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood Quotes

“...[Y]ou are free to hate anyone you choose. That is until you take upon yourself the name of Christ. At which point the right to hate is no longer available to you. - Catherine Stokes”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“In 1897, Elder Joseph F. Smith... was speaking of Brigham Young's idea that Adam was the God of this world, a teaching sometimes referred to as the 'Adam-God theory.' It was something that Brigham Young taught repeatedly but that did not mesh with scriptural understandings and was eventually denounced as 'false doctrine." Joseph F. Smith explained, 'While I am not authorized to sit in judgment upon Pres[iden]t Young, I am at liberty to test the truths of his words or utterances by the revealed and accepted word of God. Anything uttered by man which is contrary to the Divine law must fall, while that only which is in harmony with it can remain, or stand.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“As President J. Reuben Clark explained, Jesus taught Peter through example about the gospel's universal message, but it still took 'a thrice-repeated vision to convince him that God is no respecter of persons.' As President Clark noted, the Savior's 'acceptance of the Samaritans, the race hated by Judah, left Peter untaught.' Instead of following the Savior's example, he 'kicked against the pricks,' especially 'against the principle of the universal salvation of men---men of all creeds, races, and colors.' Peter still resisted even after the Lord commanded His disciples to 'go ye into the world.'... He thus offers a lesson in how hard it can be for good people, even prophets, to overcome their cultural assumptions and biases, even when the Lord gives them very direct instructions.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“Revelations will probably never come, unless they are desired... I believe most revelations would come when a man is on his top toes, reaching as high as he can for something which he knows he needs, and then there bursts upon him the answer to his problems.'... [-] President Spencer W. Kimball [writing] to his son Edward Kimball in 1963.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“In 1900, George Q. Cannon, First Counselor in the First Presidency, led a 'conversation between the First Presidency respecting the negro race.' Cannon 'asked President Snow if the question was not already decided,' but President Snow 'spoke as though it was not,' an indication that even as late a 1900, the President of the Church, Lorenzo Snow, did not consider the racial restriction a settled matter.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“In John Taylor's assessment, Joseph Smith had erred in allowing Able [a member of African descent] the priesthood, and Brigham Young had revealed God's will when he declared Black people to be cursed descendants of Cain. With each new decision, the racial restrictions hardened in place, especially as each succeeding generation became reluctant to violate the precedent established under Brigham Young, even though Brigham Young's precedent violated the open priesthood and temple policies put in place under Joseph Smith.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“John Taylor [stated that] 'many... things done in the early days of the Church'... were sometimes done without proper knowledge, but 'as the Lord gave further light and revelation things were done with greater order.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“In 1907... Joseph Fielding Smith, then serving as assistant Church historian, argued that the teaching... [of neutrality, inadequate valiance, or evil in the premortal realm] was 'not the official position of the Church, merely the opinion of men.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“[Orson Pratt] argued that only God could administer curses and that they were specific to a given time and place. In his estimation, enslavers who suggested that biblical curses were still in force had taken it upon themselves 'to execute the curse of Almighty upon that race without being commanded to do it and they will have to be punished for rising up and inflicting this curse upon [the] descendants of Adam.' Even if God did curse Ham or Canaan or Cain in the Bible, Pratt did not believe that such curses passed down to anyone else. He rejected the notion that nineteenth-century enslavers, including Latter-Day Saints, had any authority from God to enslave Black people. 'Shall we assume the right without the voice of [the] Lord speaking to us and commanding us to [introduce] slavery into our territory?' Pratt queried. He was dismayed by such a prospect... People of African descent were not guilty of some premortal sin for which slavery was the penalty, Pratt said. 'Shall we take then the innocent African that has committed no sin and damn him to slavery and bondage without receiving any authority from heaven to do [so]? That they and their children shall be servants to us and our children? The idea is preposterous in my mind,' he demanded. 'For us to bind the African because he is different from us in color [is] enough to cause the angels in heaven to blush![']... 'We have no proof that the Africans are the descendants of old Cain who was cursed, and even if we had that evidence we have not been ordered to inflict that [curse] upon that race.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“[T]he debate between Orson Pratt and Brigham Young continued long after the legislative session ended. The two men gave life to the two competing explanations for the racial priesthood restrictions in the Church... Both explanations were grounded in an underlying assumption that Black people were inferior to white people and that white skin was normal and black skin was somehow cursed---a deterioration away from whiteness. Rather than trusting Jesus Christ when He told Joseph Smith, 'All flesh is mine, and I am no respecter of persons,' these various explanations favored white flesh over other shades of flesh and implied that Jesus Christ was in fact a respecter of persons.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“In 1869, Brigham Young denounced the idea of neutrality in the premortal realm as an explanation for black skin or the African race. He taught that 'there was No Nutral spirits in Heaven at the time of the Rebellion. All took sides... All spirits are pure that [c]ome from the presence of God.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“Brigham Young spoke... with extreme hyperbole. He even admitted as much in 1848 when he acknowledged, 'I frequently sa[y] 'cut his infernal throat'; I don't mean any such thing.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“Brigham Young answered [William McCary who had...] complained that he was 'hypocritically abused' among the Latter-Day Saints and had experienced racism... with an appeal to the New Testament and the broad commonality among all of God's children. Paraphrasing Acts 17:26, Young said, 'It's nothing to do with the blood, for of one blood has God made all flesh.' In an effort to calm McCary's worries, Young reinforced the commonality of the entire human family. Not only did God create racial diversity out of 'one blood'; Young insisted that Latter-Day Saints did not discriminate even in distributing priesthood authority. He then cited Q. Walker Lewis in the Lowell, Massachusetts branch as his proof: 'We [h]av[e] one of the best Elders[,] and African in Lowell---a barber,' he told McCary. Even Black men were welcome and eligible for the priesthood, Young affirmed. The interview continued in somewhat arbitrary directions after that but eventually returned to McCary's standing among the Saints. 'I am not a Pres[iden]t, or a leader of the p[eo]pl[e],' McCary lamented, but merely a 'common bro[the]r,' something he attributed to the fact that he was 'a little shade darker.' Brigham Young again asserted a universal ideal and told McCary, 'We don't care about the color.' McCary liked hearing that from Brigham Young but still wondered if other apostles shared the same sentiments. 'Do I hear that from all?' he asked. Those present responded with a unified 'aye.' Brigham Young counseled McCary to ignore 'what the p[eo]pl[e] say, shew by your actions that you don't care for what they say---all we do is serve the Lord with all our hearts,' he insisted... William McCary... [was] married [to] Lucy Stanton, a white Latter-Day Saint... McCary was a formerly enslaved [convert] from Mississippi [who attempted to pass as] Native American...”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“In 1843, in a discussion at Springfield, Illinois, [Joseph] Smith expressed his most open ideas regarding racial equality: Black people were not biologically inferior, but were impeded by a lack of educational opportunities and other environmental circumstances common to enslavement. 'They come into the world slaves mentally and phy[s]ically. change their situation with the white & they would be like them,' he argued. ' They have souls & are subjects of salvation' he continued and even suggested that 'Slaves in washington [were] more refined than the presidents.' Give them equal opportunity, in other words, and they could achieve equal or greater results.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“Elder Heber C. Kimball told an audience of Latter-Day Saints, 'We are not accounted as white people, and we don't want to live among them.' He insisted, 'I had rather live with the buffalo in the wilderness.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“One late nineteenth-century memoir recounted... 'that one acquainted with [Mormons] could tell a Mormon when he met him by the look upon his face almost as well as if he had been of a different color.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“Outsiders... projected their fear of race mixing onto the Latter-Day Saints almost from the beginning. Some Missouri residents... complained that the Saints had 'opened an asylum for rogues and vagabonds and free blacks,' while others were concerned that the Saints promoted black 'ascendancy over whites.'... Four days after Phelp's 'extra' appeared in print, a crowd of Jackson County residents stormed his printing office and destroyed all remaining copies of the extra as well as the original July issue of the Star. They scattered Phelp's type and the press itself and demolished his office and home. They seized Bishop Edward Partridge and Charles Allen and hauled them to the town square, where they tarred and feathered them... It marked the beginning of the Latter-Day Saint expulsion from Jackson County. Before the end of the year, some 1,200 Latter-Day Saints would be driven from their homes, charged, at least in part, with being too inclusive.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“The extra edition of the Star [which stated, '...O]ur intention was not only to stop free people of color from emigrating to this state, but to prevent them from being admitted as members of the church[,'...] signaled a willingness on Phelp's part to distance white church members from their black brothers and sisters when charges of racial inclusion threatened the Church's image [even if it]... was simply not true.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood

“Slavery violated agency, a fundamental Latter-Day Saint tenet, and it removed an enslaved person's choices. It crushed an enslaved person's economic, social, and political potential, and most significantly, it tore families apart.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk about Race and Priesthood

“[Samuel Chambers] explained 'Some think it is small to be a deacon,' but then he countered that, 'I think there is nothing small in the kingdom of God.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk about Race and Priesthood