Physician, historian of the ban
Lester E. Bush Jr.
b. 1942
1 topic · 1 dated event · 2 sources
Their part in each topic
Race and the Priesthood
Physician, historian of the ban
A believing Latter-day Saint physician, Bush spent a decade compiling a four-hundred-page anthology of First Presidency and Quorum minutes, sermons and correspondence on race, then distilled it into a fifty-seven-page article with 219 footnotes for Dialogue in 1973. It showed the restriction had no documented revelatory origin. Publishing it was thought to risk his membership and the journal's survival.
In the timeline
1 events across 1 topics, chronological. Only events this person was actually part of — present at, responsible for, or the subject of — not every event where the name comes up.
Lester Bush publishes "Mormonism's Negro Doctrine"hinge
Dialogue ran Bush's fifty-seven-page article with 219 footnotes, drawn from a four-hundred-page compilation of First Presidency and council minutes he had gathered over a decade, with responses from Gordon Thomasson, Hugh Nibley and Eugene England. Bush had shown the material to general authorities beforehand. A BYU vice president warned editor Robert Rees of grave consequences; Rees published anyway. It won the Mormon History Association's best article prize.
Sources in their own name
Source records in the database whose author line names this person. Each links to the topic that uses it.
"Mormonism's Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview," Dialogue 8, no. 1: 11–68
Lester E. Bush Jr.
The documentary case that the restriction developed after Joseph Smith's death and rests on no known revelation.
Lester E. Bush Jr.
What it cost to publish the article, and what leaders did and did not do with the research beforehand.
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