Black People and Mormonism

Note: The opinions expressed in this blog are entirely those of Hunter Moyler alone.

Hello!

If you read my blog post from last week, you might recall that I wrote a good deal about the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and how it encourages vegetarianism. Well, the bit of research I did on the SDA Church got me thinking about another Christian sect that got its start in the Second Great Awakening of the mid-nineteenth century: the Mormons.

The Mormon Church, officially called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—a name so long I’m only going to type it out this once—is a Christian religion that got its start when Joseph Smith, a young man living in upstate New York, claimed to have golden plates revealed to him by an angel. Smith also claimed that God appointed him a prophet and gave him the unique power of translating the text on these plates, supposedly written in a language called “Reformed Egyptian.” The text that Smith claimed was a translation of these plates was published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon. Members of the LDS Church, nicknamed Mormons, hold the Book of Mormon to be a piece of holy scripture comparable to the Christian Bible. (This is where the famous musical gets its title from.)

A replica of the golden plates Joseph Smith supposedly used to translate the Book of Mormon. In reality, no one knows what the plates—if they existed—looked like, because Smith said that God would only allow Smith and a handful of his close associates—known as witnesses—to see them.

If you’ve never read the Book of Mormon, I recommend it, because it’s certainly an interesting read. Its plot (or history, depending on your persuasion) involves a small group of Israelites during biblical times who travel from Jerusalem to the Americas. There, their descendants split into two groups: the righteous, light-skinned Nephites and the idol-worshipping, dark-skinned Nephites. Eventually, there’s a big war and only the Nephites remain. The Nephites then go on to be the ancestors of today’s indigenous Americans. It also claims that Jesus preached to these Israelite-Americans after his crucifixion in Jerusalem.

Anyway, armed with the Book of Mormon and a silver tongue, Smith quickly gained a following and established what would eventually become the LDS Church. He led his flock from New York to Ohio to Missouri and eventually to Illinois, where he was murdered by a mob. The leadership of the church then fell to Brigham Young, who led the Mormons on their famous trek to the Great Salt Lake, where they built Salt Lake City. Today, the religion they founded boasts nearly 17 million members across the globe.

One major reason I wanted to research the LDS Church in the HistoryMakers Digital Archive is that the church has a very interesting history related to African Americans. Of course, we mustn’t forget that the church was founded in the antebellum United States, a place where long-standing controversy over the treatment of Black people would spill over to a civil war that nearly split the country in two. And we should also not forget that slavery only lasted a couple of decades longer in the South than it did in the North. New York, where the Mormon church was founded, had only completely outlawed slavery in 1827—three years before the Book of Mormon was published. Some of Smith’s early followers owned slaves and brought them with them as they traveled with the church.

Not only that, but while Smith himself was vocally anti-slavery and treated some African Americans as being on equal footing with whites, his successor Brigham Young was a notorious racist and there’s no rationalizing his words and actions. He was anti-Black, plain and simple. It was Brigham Young who instituted the “priesthood ban,” which essentially barred men of African descent from becoming fully participating in the church. Note that this ban, which was in place until 1978, did not apply to all “non-white” men, but explicitly Black men. Young also believed that black skin was a curse from God–the mark of Cain.

Nevertheless, there have always been Black people among the membership of the Church as well as Black people generally associated with it. (For example, Gladys Knight is a famous Black person you might know who is Mormon.) So, in order to understand the Mormon faith better, I resolved to see what some people in the Digital Archive had to say about them.

If you search the archive for the simple keyword, “Mormon,” some of the first clips to come up will be those of Donald L. Harwell. Harwell, who died in 2021, was a sales executive who became a member of the LDS Church in 1983. In his interview with the HistoryMakers, he described his experience with the church as overwhelmingly positive—and said that stereotypes about Mormons being racist were very wrong. For example, here’s how he described the end of his very first visit to an LDS church:

“When [the service] was over, this one white guy ran up to me and says, ‘You're a Mormon, aren't you?’ He stuck his hand and I said, ‘No, I'm a heathen.’ And (laughter) you know, and he stepped back for a second and looked at me because I, you know, I wasn't Mormon and I didn't know. I had heard they were really prejudiced people so, you know, I was really just protecting myself in my own mind, and he stepped forward, you know, after I said that, he stepped forward, stuck his hand out again, shook my hand, and says, ‘I don't care what you are, you're welcome.’ You could have pushed me over with a feather. And this is much different than the stories you hear about the Mormons.

When probed about the church’s erstwhile priesthood ban on African men, Harwell had this to say:

“[Y]ou have to understand when the church started, it was slavery and a lot of the church, early church members had slaves. A lot of them freedom, gave them their freedom because of the teachings of the church. Things like people don't know that Joseph Smith ran for president of the United States on the abolitionist ticket… The other story is [that Joseph Smith] told while he was out stumping for president, he told a group of white men in Illinois that if they freed the slaves and gave them the same education, the same opportunities, they'd outwork 'em. That's one of the we- one of the reasons I believe he was killed. Because you couldn't have, you know, people walking around saying that. And, you know, just wasn't a good thing to do. In my opinion, it wasn't a smart thing to do, for him to do, but that's how he was. He always said, said what was in his heart and he told the truth.”

Reverend France A. Davis

As far as I could tell, Harwell was the only HistoryMaker who was a member of the LDS Church at the time of his interview. Other interviewees, however, also talked about the church. One example is France Davis, a civil rights activist who pastored a Baptist church in Salt Lake City, Utah. While not a member of the LDS Church, Davis was apparently friendly to the community and was very knowledgable about the church’s history. (Hard not to be if you live in Salt Lake City, am I right?) For example, in his interview he told the history of an early Black church member who was granted the priesthood before the ban against Black members was implemented. He also helped explain what the priesthood even is:

“In the 1850s, Elijah Abel was an African American who came here and was, was a servant, but he also held the priesthood, which is the highest leveled and highest endowment that you can have as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He helped to build a tabernacle. He helped to build the temple. He also ran a hotel downtown here in Salt Lake [Salt Lake City, Utah], and just recently in response to the Olympics [2002 Winter Olympics] coming to Salt Lake the LDS community responded by marking his grave in the Salt Lake City cemetery and indicating that he actually held the priesthood. After that at some point, they instituted this situation which said that African Americans because of their African heritage were cursed and were not therefore to hold the priesthood in the LDS church. That continued until 1978 when a new revelation was handed down by the president of the church that declared from this day forward all eligible males may now hold the priesthood. That priesthood position is something that all males hold once they reach a certain age and are in good standing within the organization.”

Vaino Spencer, a judge, said that she was surprised when she learned that the Mormon Church previously had some explicitly racist policies during her childhood (the 1920s and 1930s), because one of her best friends was Mormon and her family was perfectly kind to her as a Black girl:

“I remember that one of my probably closest friends, she was from a Mormon family and I recall, I didn't really know anything about Mormonism at that time, but I recall her taking me home with her to have refreshments and to meet her parents, and so later when I learned that Mormons were restrictive with reference to the admission of blacks to certain positions in their church—I was surprised because her parents were just absolutely wonderfully warm and delightful people.”

Of course, not every experience with LDS people among the HistoryMakers was positive. Robert Dale, for example, described racist rhetoric he heard while visiting Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. In a particularly acerbic clip, English professor Shelby Steele says he encountered very bad racism from Mormons when he was a doctoral student at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He described it as being “like an animal in a zoo.”

“[T]his was when the Mormons still had their, sort of, edict against black people. Black people were inferior, the Son of Ham, and racism was, therefore, a religiously sanctioned thing. And it was fascinating to me because I was used to just old regular every day racists who would call you a nigger or something. But here they were absolutely polite. Religion, again, they did not see themselves as racist. They saw themselves as practicing their religion, and so there was this, this impersonal quality to it where they would just stare at you. There was no--there wasn't the visceral hatred. There was just this idea that you are some other kind of a being, and then if you talked to them about it, it was like, ‘Well, I'm really sorry that you're the son of Ham (laughs), but you are and nothing I can do about it, and that must be a rough way for you.’ So that was a bizarre, sort of, that was the worst, most pernicious, most stunning, inhuman racism I've ever encountered. You really felt like an animal in the zoo, often.”

Conclusion

So, as you might have guessed, Black experiences regarding the Mormon Church according to the HistoryMakers Digital Archive are quite varied. That’s to be expected—every religion is going to have its good apples and its bad apples. I think that perhaps the most important thing I learned from my research into the Digital Archive about Mormonism was that it’s pretty much the same as any other faith.