Before there was a ban
In September 1832 a young man from Maryland named Elijah Abel was baptized into a two-year-old church. On 3 March 1836 he was ordained an elder, and that December a Seventy, by Zebedee Coltrin. He was washed and anointed in the Kirtland Temple, served missions in Ohio, New York and Canada, worked as an undertaker at Joseph Smith's request, and was among the men who set out from Nauvoo to try to rescue the Prophet from arrest.1 He was not alone. Joseph T. Ball was ordained in Massachusetts in 1837 and presided over the Boston branch; Q. Walker Lewis, an abolitionist barber in Lowell, was ordained an elder by William Smith by 1844.2
In the autumn of 1840 the Manning family set out from Wilton, Connecticut for Nauvoo. Refused passage on a boat at Buffalo because they were Black, they walked. Jane Manning later dictated the account herself: her conversion after eighteen months as a Presbyterian, the gift of tongues three weeks after her baptism, the eight-hundred-mile journey, and the months she and her family spent in Joseph and Emma Smith's Mansion House, where she washed the Prophet's temple clothes.3 Emma twice offered to have her adopted into the family. Jane did not answer at the time, and spent the next sixty years trying to.
The Church into which these people were baptized was not a racial egalitarian. Its 1835 declaration on government held it wrong to interfere with bond-servants or to baptize them against their masters' will.4 Joseph Smith denounced abolitionists in 1836 and told the Saints in 1838 that they did not believe in setting the Negroes free. But by 1844 his presidential platform proposed that Congress buy the freedom of every enslaved person with the proceeds of public land sales, ending slavery by 1850.5 Whatever else was true, nothing in his lifetime barred a Black man from ordination, and the Church now says so in as many words.
1852: a governor's speech and a slave code
The first surviving trace of a restriction comes not from Brigham Young but from Parley P. Pratt, in April 1847, with Young a thousand miles west. Responding to the scandal around William McCary — a charismatic Black convert who had married a white woman, claimed powers of prophecy, and then began sealing women to himself — Pratt said McCary had the blood of Ham in him and that those descended from Ham could not hold the priesthood.6 A month earlier Young himself had told McCary that race was no barrier and had praised Walker Lewis as one of the best elders, an African.7 Two apostles, two lineages, one contradiction already lodged at the foundation.
What changed was children. When Young returned to Winter Quarters in December 1847 he was told by William Appleby that Walker Lewis's son Enoch had married a white woman and that they had a child. His recorded reaction was violent. Historians differ on how much weight to give the episode, but the sequence is not in dispute: interracial offspring, not priesthood as an abstraction, is what appears to have moved him.8
In January 1852 Young, now territorial governor, addressed a joint session of the Utah legislature. Southern converts had brought enslaved people with them and the territory's law had to be settled. Young told the legislators that because they believed in the Bible and in the priesthood, they must believe in slavery; that the colored race had brought severe curses on themselves; and that he was not authorized to remove them.9 On 4 February the legislature legalized Black servitude. The next day Young returned to the chamber. Wilford Woodruff wrote down what he said: that the Lord told Cain he should not receive the blessings of the priesthood nor his seed until the last of the posterity of Abel had received it, and that if no prophet or apostle of Jesus Christ had said it before, he was saying it now — this people commonly called negroes are the children of Cain.10
That is the announcement. It was made to a legislature by a governor who was also a prophet, in the same week that body wrote slavery into territorial law. It was not presented to the Church for a sustaining vote, and no text of a revelation behind it has ever been produced.
The scriptures pressed into service
Three arguments carried the ban, and they arrived in that order. First the curse of Cain: Genesis 4, read as a mark of black skin, with Young insisting the children of Cain could not receive the first ordinances of the priesthood until the last of the residue of Adam's children had been brought up.11 Second the curse of Ham, from Genesis 9, which Pratt had reached for and which the Times and Seasons revived in 1845. Third, and latest, the Book of Abraham: chapter 1's account of Pharaoh, of the lineage by which he could not have the right of priesthood, and of Egyptus, read together as a racial genealogy running from Cain through the flood to modern Africans.
The fourth rationale was Mormon-specific and did the most damage. In 1885 B. H. Roberts, writing in the Contributor, speculated that some spirits, without rebelling, had been so indifferent in their support of the Redeemer that they forfeited privileges granted to those more valiant, and said he thought there was a demonstration of this in the seed of Ham.12 The idea spread. In January 1912 the First Presidency squarely denied it, saying that so far as they knew there was no revelation, ancient or modern, and no authoritative statement in support of the notion that the negroes were neutral in heaven at the time of the great conflict.13 John A. Widtsoe said the same: the opinion was held by many, there was no evidence to justify it, and the cause of the black skin was not known.
It did not matter. Joseph Fielding Smith, who had rejected the pre-existence explanation in 1907, was open to it by 1924 and embraced it by 1931 in The Way to Perfection, where Cain became the father of an inferior race whose black covering was emblematical of eternal darkness.14 By 1949 the First Presidency was teaching the same thing over its own signature, in a statement its own predecessors had contradicted.
Jane Manning James asks, and asks again
Jane Manning James was allowed to be baptized for her dead. She was refused everything else. In 1883 she went to John Taylor to ask for her endowment; he discussed it with her and said the time had not come. Two years later she wrote again. “I realize my race and color and can't expect my endowments,” she said, but God had promised to bless all Abraham's seed, and “As this is the fullness of all dispensations, is there no blessing for me?” She added: “You know my history. According to the best of my ability I have lived to all the requirements of the gospel.”15
She asked to be sealed to Walker Lewis. She asked to be adopted into Joseph Smith's family, as Emma had twice invited. In October 1894 Wilford Woodruff wrote in his journal that Black Jane wanted her endowments, and that he could not do it, as it was against the law of God, because all the seed of Cain would have to wait for redemption.16 George Q. Cannon then proposed something else: a special ceremony attaching her to the Prophet's family as a servant. It was performed with Zina D. H. Young standing proxy and Joseph F. Smith standing in for Joseph Smith. Jane herself was not in the room.
The minutes of the Twelve record that Aunt Jane was not satisfied with this, and as a mark of dissatisfaction applied again for sealing blessings, but of course in vain.17 She died in April 1908, having paid tithing for six decades, having outlived all but two of her children, nearly blind. Joseph F. Smith spoke at her funeral. Elizabeth Roundy read the autobiography Jane had dictated, which ends in a testimony.
Making it doctrine: 1879 to 1908
Elijah Abel would not stop asking either, and because he would not, the Church had to keep explaining him. In May 1879 John Taylor convened a council. Zebedee Coltrin — who had himself ordained Abel a Seventy — testified that Joseph Smith had said in 1834 that the Negro had no right to the priesthood, and that Abel had been dropped. Joseph F. Smith objected that Coltrin's memory was wrong: Abel held certificates from 1841 and a later one from Salt Lake City, and his account of who had washed and anointed him in Kirtland contradicted Coltrin's. Abel spoke for himself, saying that the Prophet Joseph had told him he was entitled to the priesthood.18 Taylor let the ordination stand, on the theory that it had happened before the word of the Lord was fully understood, and refused the temple. Abel was sent on a mission at seventy-three and died in 1884.
Then the record was rewritten. Joseph F. Smith repeated the story favorably in 1895 and again in 1902. In 1908, telling it for at least the fourth time, he said the opposite: Abel had been ordained a Seventy, “but this ordination was declared null and void by the Prophet himself.”19 The same year, answering a different question, he wrote that priesthood once received could not be taken away except by transgression serious enough to forfeit Church membership. Bush calls the reversal a mystery. Harris says it was made without evidence. Whatever the cause, it worked: by 1907 the First Presidency and Twelve had agreed that no member of Black African descent could hold priesthood or enter the temple, and the one documented exception had been retroactively erased.
With Abel out of the way, the ban's origin migrated backward to Joseph Smith. In 1912 a First Presidency letter cited George Q. Cannon's secondhand account of the Prophet's views. A decade later Joseph Fielding Smith could write flatly that the negro race is barred from holding the priesthood, this has always been the case, the Prophet Joseph Smith taught this doctrine, and it was made known to him.20 Harold B. Lee was still deploying the 1908 nullification against critics in the 1960s.
The century of statements
In July 1947 the First Presidency wrote that from the days of the Prophet Joseph Smith even until now it had been the doctrine of the Church, never questioned by Church leaders, that the Negroes are not entitled to the full blessings of the gospel. In August 1949 it went further: “It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization.”21 In 1951 it supplied the reason, in the language Roberts had invented and the 1912 Presidency had denied: the conduct of spirits in the pre-mortal existence has some determining effect on the conditions under which they take on mortality, and among the handicaps spirits were willing to assume was the loss of priesthood — under which principle, the statement concluded, there is no injustice whatsoever involved in this deprivation.
In August 1954 Mark E. Petersen told an audience of seminary and institute teachers at BYU that segregation was God's design. Spencer W. Kimball marked the talk up in red ink; N. Eldon Tanner called it the Church's position. A Latter-day Saint law student wrote that Petersen's whole argument rested on conjectures and did not even try to explain the Negro that Joseph Smith ordained.22
David O. McKay is the hinge and the puzzle of these years. He narrowed the ban's reach — clarifying that Fijians and Australian Aboriginal people could be ordained, reversing South Africa's requirement that prospective elders trace their lineage out of Africa — and he endorsed the 1949 statement. Sterling McMurrin, his son Llewelyn and Elder Paul H. Dunn all reported him saying privately that it was a practice, not a doctrine. He told Marion D. Hanks that he had pleaded and pleaded with the Lord and had not had the answer he sought, and told an architect late in life that he had been told, with no discussion, not to bring the subject up again.23 In 1964 he was asked in Oakland whether the doctrine would change and answered: not while you and I are here.
Pressure, and the Genesis Group
In the summer of 1963 the Salt Lake NAACP, unable to get a meeting with the First Presidency, resolved to picket Temple Square during October conference. Sterling McMurrin — a philosopher whom Joseph Fielding Smith had twice wanted excommunicated, and whom McKay had promised to defend as the first witness — arranged for the branch's leaders to meet Hugh B. Brown and N. Eldon Tanner. The two counselors would not commit to anything that night. Afterward they asked McMurrin to help draft a statement. McKay approved it, Brown read it at Sunday morning conference, and the demonstration was cancelled: “There is in this Church no doctrine, belief, or practice that is intended to deny the enjoyment of full civil rights by any person, regardless of race, color, or creed.”24 McMurrin himself noted that it was not issued by the First Presidency and yet was thereafter treated as if it were.
The pressure then moved to stadiums. In April 1968, two days after BYU learned it was under federal investigation for possible Civil Rights Act violations, Black athletes from UTEP refused to compete at Provo. On 17 October 1969 fourteen Black players on an undefeated Wyoming team asked to wear black armbands against BYU; coach Lloyd Eaton threw them all off the squad. Wyoming won 40–7. In November Stanford announced it would schedule nothing with BYU at all — not games, not debates — because of the Church's policy, and Gordon B. Hinckley's private appeal to reverse it failed.25 BYU's president Ernest Wilkinson told the Board of Trustees that the message being repeated thousands of times daily to millions of people was that Mormons are racists and bigots.
The most consequential pressure came from inside. In the spring of 1971 three Black converts — Ruffin Bridgeforth, Darius Gray and Eugene Orr — knelt in a room in the Marriott Library and then asked the Twelve for a branch where Black Saints could gather. On 19 October 1971 Hinckley, Monson and Packer set them apart as the presidency of the Genesis Group, an auxiliary of Liberty Stake with its own Relief Society and Primary.26 Packer told them to keep a low profile: this was not a tourist attraction. Monson said it was a small beginning with the approval of the First Presidency and the Twelve. Bridgeforth presided over a congregation in a church whose priesthood he was forbidden to hold.
Lester Bush and the unravelling
Lester Bush was a believing physician who had been following the question since George Romney's 1962 campaign. Over a decade he assembled a four-hundred-page compilation of primary material — First Presidency minutes, council minutes, sermons, correspondence — and then wrote a fifty-seven-page synthesis with 219 footnotes. He sent the compilation to general authorities before publishing, including Boyd K. Packer, and got acknowledgment and concern back through intermediaries in Asia.27
Publishing it nearly cost Dialogue. Robert K. Thomas, BYU's academic vice president, telephoned editor Robert Rees to say that if Bush thought the brethren were not upset by the article, he was mistaken, and that BYU was going to be in big trouble over the use of the Bennion papers. Truman Madsen, asked to respond, refused: it was a tar baby and he did not want to get stuck. One scholar withdrew a response in galley proofs after being warned his membership could be at risk. Rees published in Spring 1973 anyway, with responses from Gordon Thomasson, Hugh Nibley and Eugene England.28 It won the Mormon History Association's best article prize.
What the article showed was simple and devastating. Bush had read the internal minutes across the ban's whole life and found no suggestion of information beyond what had been publicly espoused — no hidden revelation, no sealed document. He later said that in a classical debate the stronger case would not be on the side of an inspired origin.29 Darius Gray's verdict fifty years on is that Bush's work provided Spencer W. Kimball the roadmap with which to undertake his own research.
Brazil, the upper room, and June 1978
Brazil had been the ban's hardest case since the 1940s, because in a country where a majority had some African ancestry there was no workable way to apply it. Bishops judged by appearance, then genealogy, then patriarchal blessings and inspiration. A branch president in Ipiranga discovered a probable African ancestor while doing his family history in 1964 and was released from all priesthood duties. Then in March 1975 the Church announced a temple for São Paulo. Black and mixed-ancestry members donated money and labor — Rudá Martins sold her jewelry — for a building they understood they could not enter.30 Leonard Arrington recorded hearing on 13 June 1978 that the projected temple opening was one of the immediately precipitating factors of the new revelation.
On 1 June 1978 the First Presidency and the Twelve met in an upper room of the Salt Lake Temple. McConkie's account says Kimball restated the problem, said he had spent many days alone in that room pleading for an answer, and that if the answer was to continue denying the priesthood he was prepared to defend that decision to the death. Each man spoke, for two hours. Then Kimball offered prayer as voice, and, McConkie wrote, all of them heard the same voice and received the same message from on high.31 Nothing was written down at the time. Arrington, as Church Historian, reconstructed it from dozens of interviews with people who had spoken to those present.
The letter of 8 June announced that the long-promised day had come when every faithful, worthy man in the Church might receive the holy priesthood. Darius Gray, told the news at work, growled at his colleague to leave, then called Kimball's office and was told it was true.32 On 30 September Tanner presented the letter to conference; the sustaining vote was unanimous. In November the São Paulo temple was dedicated and the Martins family was sealed, with Marcus — soon to be the first Black full-time missionary called after the revelation — serving as witness.
In August, addressing seminary and institute teachers, Bruce R. McConkie said the thing that is quoted more than anything else in this whole history: “Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world.” And: “It doesn't make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June of this year, 1978.”33 He had taught the opposite in print for twenty years. He said it to Church employees in a classroom, not from the conference pulpit.
After: folklore, disavowal, and the thing not said
The folklore did not go away when the ban did. Armand Mauss reported hearing the curse of Cain offered as an explanation in Latter-day Saint classes as late as 1999, and Eugene England found it common among BYU students well into the 1990s.34 In 2012 a BYU religion professor named Randy Bott gave a Washington Post reporter the whole apparatus — Cain, Ham, Egyptus, less valiant premortally — and added that being denied the priesthood until 1978 was the greatest blessing God could give Black people. It ran during Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. The Church replied the same day that Bott's positions absolutely did not represent its teachings, that it is not known precisely why, how, or when the restriction began, and that it condemned racism including any and all past racism inside and outside the Church.35 Bott retired that spring. Harris's judgment is that Bott had faithfully taught what the manuals and the 1949 and 1969 statements taught, and was scapegoated for it.
The following year the Church published Race and the Priesthood. It says there is no reliable evidence that any Black men were denied the priesthood in Joseph Smith's lifetime; it names Brigham Young's 1852 announcement; it says that none of the explanations advanced over time is accepted today as official doctrine; and it disavows, by name, the theories that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, that it reflects unrighteous premortal action, that mixed-race marriage is a sin, or that any race is inferior.36 The revised header to Official Declaration 2 says Church records offer no clear insights into the origins of the practice.
What the essay does not say is the point of contention. It does not say the restriction was wrong. It does not say who was responsible. It does not reconcile its own account with the 1949 statement calling the ban a direct commandment from the Lord — a document it cites in a footnote. And it does not apologize. In 2018 a former member published a hoax apology in Russell M. Nelson's name; it circulated for hours through Black Latter-day Saint networks, prompted celebrations, and then collapsed, leaving a measurable amount of grief behind it.37 Two weeks later the real First Presidency stood with the NAACP and called for civility, and at the Be One celebration Dallin H. Oaks acknowledged that some members had continued attitudes of racism painful to many throughout the world, including the past forty years.
Jana Riess's survey work found that a large majority of Black Latter-day Saints still believe the ban was God's will. An anonymous writer in Dialogue's 2018 race issue put the inheritance plainly: to Nephi she was not fair and delightsome; to Brigham she was Cain's curse; to McConkie an unfaithful spirit, a fence-sitter; and to the Church today she is colorless, a child of God. She asked that the thing be called by its full name — the priesthood and temple ban — because Black women lost the temple too, and no revelation was ever needed to take it from them.38