1830–1978 and after
How a church that ordained Black men came to forbid it, and how it stopped
12 people, ordered by how much of this topic turns on them. Each note describes the person's part in this topic, not a biography — the same person carries a different note on another topic.
Baptized in 1832, ordained an elder on 3 March 1836 and a Seventy that December, Abel served three missions and worked on the Salt Lake Temple. He was repeatedly refused the endowment, and in 1879 defended his own ordination before John Taylor's council, saying the Prophet Joseph had told him he was entitled to the priesthood. In 1908 Joseph F. Smith declared the ordination had been void all along.
She walked most of the way from Connecticut to Nauvoo, lived in Joseph and Emma Smith's household, crossed the plains in 1847, and spent decades petitioning John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith for the endowment and a sealing. Every request was refused. In 1894 leaders devised a ceremony attaching her to Joseph Smith's family as a servitor, with a proxy standing in for her; she said it did not satisfy her and asked again.
An abolitionist barber in Lowell, Lewis was baptized in the early 1840s and ordained an elder by William Smith. In March 1847 Brigham Young called him one of the best elders in the Church. His son Enoch's marriage to a white woman, reported to Young later that year, is one of the events historians place at the origin of the restriction.
Young announced the priesthood restriction publicly in two addresses to the Utah territorial legislature in January and February 1852, in the same session that legalized Black servitude in the territory. He grounded it in the curse of Cain and taught that it would remain until all the rest of Adam's children had received the priesthood. He also refused Elijah Abel the endowment.
For nearly thirty years Smith testified that Elijah Abel had been ordained a Seventy in Joseph Smith's day and held a certificate to prove it. In 1908 he told the council the opposite: that the ordination had been declared null and void by the Prophet himself. Under him the First Presidency and Twelve settled by 1907 that no member of Black African descent could receive priesthood or enter the temple.
McKay narrowed the restriction's reach — clarifying that Pacific Islanders, Fijians and Australian Aboriginal people could be ordained, and reversing South Africa's lineage-tracing requirement — while endorsing the 1949 statement that called it a direct commandment. He is reported by Sterling McMurrin and others to have privately called it a practice rather than a doctrine, and to have said he had pleaded with the Lord and not received the answer he sought.
Brown told the New York Times in June 1963 that the Church was in the midst of a survey looking toward the possibility of admitting Black members to the priesthood, and read the Church's civil rights statement at October conference that year after meeting the Salt Lake NAACP. He pressed McKay repeatedly to lift the restriction and was overruled; he was dropped from the First Presidency in 1970.
With Darius Gray and Eugene Orr, Bridgeforth asked the Twelve in 1971 for a branch where Black members could gather. What they got instead was the Genesis Group, organized 19 October 1971 under Liberty Stake, with Bridgeforth as president — a leader who could not hold the priesthood he was asked to preside without. He was ordained in June 1978 and later made a high priest.
A KSL journalist who joined the Church in 1964, Gray was flown to Wyoming on thirty minutes' notice in 1970 to face activists protesting BYU. He was first counselor in the Genesis Group from its founding, later co-wrote a trilogy of novels and the documentary Nobody Knows with Margaret Blair Young, and has spent decades recovering the record of Black Latter-day Saints.
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.
Kimball spent many days alone in the Salt Lake Temple's upper room on the question, then on 1 June 1978 led the First Presidency and Twelve in a prayer during which, participants said, the answer came. The letter of 8 June announced that every faithful, worthy man in the Church might receive the priesthood. He had visited Brazil for fifteen years and knew the Saints the restriction was excluding from a temple they had helped build.
A Petrobras executive in Rio de Janeiro, Martins joined the Church in 1972, accepted the restriction, served as the Church's public spokesman in Brazil, and with his wife Rudá donated to a temple they expected never to enter. Ordained in June 1978, he was sealed in the São Paulo temple that November and in March 1990 became the first General Authority of African descent.
