Race

Black Mormons and the Priesthood: A Retrospective Perspective

Robert A. Rees

Typical of far too many youths of my generation, I grew up in a racist home, a racist community, and in racist Latter-day Saint congregations. As a young man, I harbored deep racist sentiments and…

Lester Bush’s Pioneering Contribution on Mormonism and Race: Some Personal Reflections

Newell G. Bringhurst

On this the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lester E. Bush’s landmark Dialogue article “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” I, along with other knowledgeable students of Mormon studies, gratefully acknowledge the crucial role…

Lester Bush’s Journey as Seen by His Wife, Yvonne

Yvonne Bush

Those of you who have paid attention along the way know quite a bit about Lester’s 1973 article, particularly because of the follow-up article he published in the Journal of Mormon History in 1999 that…

The Impact of Lester Bush’s Dialogue Essay

F. Ross Peterson

When I received a copy of Dialogue volume 8 in the spring of 1973, my mind was immersed in Watergate, Vietnam, and civil rights. Lester Bush’s article on the evolution of a policy relative to…

A Tribute to Lester Bush on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Article that Changed the Church

Gregory A. Prince

When the Dialogue office moved from Stanford to Los Angeles, it found a home in the University Religious Conference, which was kitty-corner from the UCLA School of Dentistry, where I was a student. Occasionally, I…

ROUNDTABLE: FIFTY YEARS SINCE LESTER BUSH,“MORMONISM’S NEGRO DOCTRINE”: An Appreciation

Darius Gray

Lester Bush’s 1973 Dialogue article is the focus here, as it brought much-needed clarity to the convoluted, deeply entrenched Mormon attitude toward race. We all know the story. Prior to June 1978 the Church of…

Truth and Reconciliation: Reflections on the Fortieth Anniversary of the LDS Church’s Lifting the Priesthood and Temple Restrictions for Black Mormons of African Descent

Robert A. Rees

Listen to the audio version of this piece here. The Church has no power to do wrong with impunity any more than any individual. Brigham Young[1] America’s history of racial inequality continues to haunt us.…

How a Mormon Ended Up at Union Theological Seminary: A Step Toward Racial Justice and a Better Church

James C. Jones

Dialogue 56.1 (Spring 2023): 7–50
In the decade since I made that decision, a lot has happened that ultimately reoriented me back to the academy and to theological studies in particular. First, the job I took after graduating from Brigham Young University took me to Boston, Massachusetts. I immediately noticed a refreshing difference between the congregations I attended in Utah and congregations in Boston. These were the most educated people I had ever worshiped with in my adult life, and it was the safest I had ever felt being my authentic self at church.

Joseph Fielding Smith’s Evolving Views on Race: The Odyssey of a Mormon Apostle-President

Matthew L. Harris

Dialogue 53.3 (Fall 2021): 1–76
Given the inadequate tools to police racial boundaries, LDS Church leaders like Joseph Fielding Smith struggled to define precisely where Black and light-skinned Latter-day Saints fit into the Church’s conception of soteriology.

Review: Unerasing Shoshone Testaments of Survival, Faith, and Hope Darren Parry, The Bear River Massacre

Farina King

Although Darren Parry claims to not begrudge the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he does not hold back when addressing the injustices and wrongs that his people have faced at the expense of…

Roundtable: Considering the Next Generation of Indigenous Children

Sarah Newcomb

The year was 1984 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and an elementary school was practicing for a Thanksgiving play. Children were on stage dressed as Pilgrims, Native Americans, pumpkins, and turkeys while teachers rushed around helping excited…

Roundtable: I Am Giving Columbus No More of My Time

Roni Jo Draper

In 2017, the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a statement condemning “white supremacist attitudes.” As a member of the Church who also knows the history, erasure, and pain…

Roundtable: The Complications of Columbus and Indigeneity at BYU

Farina King

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have held their own sets of values and beliefs since time immemorial. Indigenous peoples have rejected the Doctrine of Discovery because it suggests that the United States government is…

Roundtable: Latter-day Saint Indigenous Perspectives on Columbus Introduction

Editor

When Brigham Young University (BYU) hosted Clark B. Hinckley’s presentation about his book Christopher Columbus: “A Man Among the Gentiles” for Education Week 2019, many community members responded with concern. In his presentation, Hinckley claimed…

To Be Native American—And Mormon

(author)

“Lamanite! I am not a Lamanite. They are a wicked people. I am not a wicked person.” I can well remember my father, Albert H. Harris, saying this, both in church and to anyone else…

Diné Doctor: A Latter-day Saint Story of Healing

Farina King

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. “They say that they are like firemen. They know what they signed up for. They must fulfill their call for duty.” This is what my mother told me when…

The Lamanite Dilemma: Mormonism and Indigeneity

Monika Brown Crowfoot

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. Many times throughout my childhood, I heard various church members or my parents tell me that we had to choose between being Navajo and being Mormon. Our family went…

Finding Agency in Captivity: Resistance, Co-optation, and Replication Among Indentured Indians, 1847–1900

Matthew Garrett

When Mormon settlers entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, they brought with them their institutions and attitudes. These included a perception of Native Americans as fallen Israelites who, the Book of Mormon promised, would…

Racial Categories: Indigenous Australians and Mormonism, 1850s to Present

Brenton Griffin

In February 2008, then prime minister of Australia Kevin Rudd stood before the nation and apologised to Indigenous Australians, people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, for the so-called “Stolen Generations.”[1] These infamous eugenicist…

Mormonism and White Supremacy As White Mormon Scholarship

LaShawn C. Williams

Joanna Brooks’ Mormonism and White Supremacy is certain to engage readers who have opinions about (white) Mormon theology, (white) Mormon culture, (white) Mormon people or white American, anti-black supremacy as a concept and sociohistorical practice.…

Mormonism and White Supremacy As Cultural Critique

W. Paul Reeve

In Mormonism and White Supremacy Joanna Brooks sets out to tell the Latter-day Saint racial story refracted through the lenses of white supremacy and racial innocence. As she describes it, her book “seeks to use…

Mormonism and White Supremacy As an Explanation of Mormonism and White Supremacys

James C. Jones

Mormonism and White Supremacy is almost exactly what you would expect from a book with such a title. A brilliant and well-researched thesis analyzing the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints…

Tikkun K’nessiah: Repairing the Church

Robert A. Rees

Rebranding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Chinese-Speaking Regions

Chiung Hwang Chen

Remembering Jane Manning James Quincy D. Newell. Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon

Charlotte Hansen Terry

In this carefully researched work, Quincy D. Newell produces a powerful narrative of Jane Manning James’s life from limited records. Newell reveals what life was like for someone like James, whom she refers to as…

Multiculturalism as Resistance: Latina Migrants Navigate U.S. Mormon Spaces

Brittany Romanello

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 5–32
I cannot help but smile when she calls me hermana, her “sister.” Her reference to me signifies a dual meaning: I am not only like a family member to her, but additionally, the term hermana is used among Spanish-speaking members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as Mormons) to signify solidarity and integration with one another.

Lessons from Baltimore’s Black Mormon Matriarchs on Discovering God’s Compassion Laura Rutter Strickling. On Fire in Baltimore: Black Mormon Women and Conversion in a Raging City.

Patrick Hemming

Wrestling with the Racism of the Book of Mormon

Fatimah S. Salleh

Dialogue 52.3 (Fall 2019): 209–217
A sermon wrestling with the curse of blackness in the Book of Mormon.

Racism

James C. Jones

Dialogue 52.3 (Fall 2019): 203–208
The only way that you can both help the poor and needy and preach the gospel is if you let go of racism “and help others to do the same.”

True Joy Cannot Be Found in the Garden

Jenna Rakuita

Room for Me

A. J. Boully

Imagery and Identity

Daylin Amesimeku

Listening for a Change

Deborah Alexis

“There Is No Equality”: William E. Berrett, BYU, and Healing the Wounds of Racism in the Latter-day Saint Past and Present

Rebecca De Schweinitz

Dialogue 52.3 (Fall 2019): 62–83
De Schweintiz documents how students at BYU still hear racist reasons for the priesthood/temple ban in classes, missions, Gospel Doctrine, sacrament meeting talks and even in books published by the Church.

Review: An Essential Conversation Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, eds. The Mormon Church & Blacks: A Documentary History

Devery S. Anderson

Interview: Father-Daughter Interview on Blacks and the Priesthood

Gregory A. Prince

A beautiful interview wherein Christensen said “If we look at an organization being a circle, there are a lot of people who are trying really, really hard to stay right there, just on the edge.…

Roundtable: The Black Cain in White Garments

Melodie Jackson

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 209–211
Jackson explains “The Church refused to grant the Black body whole recognition and divinity. To Nephi, I was not fair and delightsome. To Joseph, I was a violator of the most sacred principles of society, chastity, and virtue. To Brigham, I was Cain’s curse. To McConkie, I was an unfaithful spirit, a “fence-sitter.” To you, I am colorless, my Blackness swallowed in that whiteness reclaimed, “a child of God.”

Roundtable: Shifting Tides: A Clarion Call for Inclusion and Social Justice

Cameron McCoy

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 201–208
“What can we do to help and make a difference in the fight for racial and social justice?” McCoy responds to the BYU students who asked these questions which he brought up in an annual MLK March on Life held by BYU was ‘stop tiptoeing around the subjects of race, inequality, and inclusion. Many well intentioned white people in this country do not understand how the deeply rooted systems of racism and inequality function.’ He encouraged people to step up and do their own part for obtaining social justice for all.

Roundtable: When Did You Become Black?

Gail Turley Houston

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 193–200
After taking a genelogy DNA test, Houston finds some African ancestory. “Where to begin in answering all those questions? But at the most basic level, I simply liked that I was from Africa. The percentage was small but the jolt large and wondrous. In the nineteenth century, the United States had the one-drop rule about race: if you had one drop of African blood you were considered to be Black.”

Roundtable: A Balm in Gilead: Reconciling Black Bodies within a Mormon Imagination

Janan Graham-Russell

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 185–192
“As much we may hope that one would disregard the explicitly racial teachings of the past, the significance of corporeality in the Mormon imagination is such that Mormonism’s racial wounds run deep. With-out a thoughtful consideration of the impact of the priesthood and temple restrictions, their legacy manifests in implicit and explicit ways.”

Roundtable: The Preacher, the Labor Leader, the Homosexual, and the Jew: The Template for Achieving Great Goals

Alice Faulkner Burch

Burch explains “Individually we can be strong and accomplish wonderful things. Together, united, we can be unstoppable and accomplish great things that are community-changing, world-enhancing, life-uplifting.”

One Devout Mormon Family’s Struggle with Racism

Robert Greenwell

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 155–180
This article tells the impact of LDS racial teachings on a single family history, the Marshalls, from Alabama in the 19th c. to Filmore, Utah in the present.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Mormonism: Dialogue, Race, and Pluralism

Roy Whitaker

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 131–153
This essay provides an outline for how to have a more robust intrafaith dialogue about race among members of the LDS church. Using principles from Martin Luther King, Jr. about dialogue on race, Whitaker argues for the need for greater dialogue to overcome the past.

Mormons & Lineage: The Complicated History of Blacks & Patriarchal Blessings, 1830–2018

Matthew L. Harris

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 83–129
The priesthood revelation of 1978 eased some of the tension when the apostles affirmed that Blacks could now be “adopted into the House of Israel” as full participants in Mormon liturgical rites. But this doctrinal shift did not resolve the vexing question of whether or not Black people derived from the “seed of Cain.”

The Possessive Investment in Rightness: White Supremacy and the Mormon Movement

Joanna Brooks

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 45–81
Brooks explains that “Mormons will have to choose to acknowledge the pivotal and pervasive role of white supremacy in the founding of LDS institutions and the growth of the Mormon movement.”

Negotiating Black Self-Hate within the LDS Church

Darron T. Smith

Dialogue 51.3 (Fall 2018): 29–44
Smith considers “why would any self-aware Black person find Mormonism the least bit appealing given its ignoble history of racial exclusion and marginalization?”

Looking Back, Looking Forward: “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine” 45 Years Later

Lester E. Bush Jr.

It has been forty-five years since Dialogue published Bush’s essay entitled “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview”2 and forty years since Official Declaration 2 ended the priesthood/temple ban.

The Limits of Divine Love | John Lewis Lund, The Church and the Negro

Wilford E. Smith

John L. Lund has gone to a great deal of work to compile under the covers of this one small book pertinent excerpts from scriptures and from writings of Church leaders to clarify the Mormon…

Black Images and White Images

P. Royal Shipp

America’s worth to the world will be measured not by the solutions she seeks to impose on others, but by the degree to which she achieves her own ideals at home. That is a fitting…

The Rule of Law and the Dilemma of Minorities

I. Daniel Stewart

Civil disturbances are rarely born of frivolous causes. Human beings are more inclined to suffer grievances than to pit themselves in what usually ap pears to be a hopeless battle against the authority and power…

Law and Order — A Two Way Street

Dallin H. Oaks

Our society is afflicted with a tumorous disrespect for law. Ordinary citizens and public figures reject the requirements of law and boldly substitute some other set of values to justify clearly illegal behavior. Widely publicized…

Responses and Perspectives: Lester Bush’s Historical Overview: Other Perspectives

Gordon C. Thomasson

Dialogue 8.1 (Spring 1973): 62–72
Responding to Bush, Thomasson wrote in response to Lester Bush’s Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Review which that article caused him to reflect on what he believes and so it became to be very valuable for him personally.

Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview

Lester E. Bush Jr.

Dialogue 8.1 (Spring 1973): 11–68
Lester Bush’s landmark article tells the most comprehensive history of the church’s teachings on race and priesthood, destabilizing the idea that it originated with Joseph Smith or had been consistently taught.

The Challenge of Africa

M. Neff Smart

The city was Lagos, Nigeria, in the early 1970s. The place was the upstairs cinder-block apartment of Sabath Umoh, branch president of the Lagos “Mormon” church. On the card table pulpit was a black, hard-cover…

The New Revelation: A Personal View

J. Nicholls Eastmond Jr.

Because I spent one year of my life as an undergraduate student at a Nigerian University, the June 9, 1978 announcement by the LDS Church First Presidency ended a period of internal unrest, a trial…

A Priestly Role for a Prophetic Church: The RLDS Church and Black Americans

William D. Russell

Dialogue 12.2 (Summer 1979): 37–50
In recent years many RLDS Church members have been proud of the fact that the church has been ordaining blacks into the priesthood since early in its history. Sometimes they have made unfavorable comparisons between RLDS policy and that of their cousins in Utah who denied holy orders to black men and women until last year when half of the restriction was lifted.

Elijah Abel and the Changing Status of Blacks Within Mormonism

Newell G. Bringhurst

Dialogue 12.2 (Summer 1979): 22–36
Elijah Abel, a black man ordained to the priesthood, was restricted in his church participation starting in 1843, even though he was well respected by both members and leaders. Newell G. Bringhurst discusses why the priesthood and temple ban might have occured. One of the reasons was when the pioneers were crossing the plains, a man by the name of William McCary, who had Native American and African American ancestry, caused a lot of grief and trouble for both saints and the leaders of the Church.

Saint Without Priesthood: The Collected Testimonies of Ex-Slave Samuel D. Chambers

Editor

Dialogue 12.2 (Summer 1979): 13–21
The editors of Dialogue in 1979 compiled the testimonies of a former slave, Samuel Chambers, who was a member of the church.

Introduction

Lester E. Bush Jr.

Friday, June 9, 1978. A day not to be forgotten. Like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or the assassination of President Kennedy, most Mormons will remember exactly where they were and what they were doing…

The Fading of the Pharaoh’s Curse: The Decline and Fall of the Priesthood Ban Against Blacks

Armand L. Mauss

Dialogue 14.3 (Fall 1981): 11–45
Mauss situates the 1978 revelation on the priesthood in modern American historical context. Everything changed for the Church during the Civil Rights Movement when people both inside and outside the Church were harshly critcizing the priesthood ban. When the world was changing, it looked like the Church was still adherring to the past.

To Be Native American — and Mormon

Lacee A. Harris

“Lamanite! I am not a Lamanite. They are a wicked people. I am not a wicked person.” I can well remember my father, Albert H. Harris, saying this, both in church and to anyone else…

“Great Spirit Listen”: The American Indian in Mormon Music

P. Jane Hafen

Misconceptions of native Americans began with the misnomer “Indian” based on a navigational error. Mainstream Mormon art, literature, and music, which grants the American Indians a Book of Mormon history and destiny as Lamanites, embraces…

My People, the Indians

Chief Dan George

Was it only yesterday that men first sailed around the moon? You and I § marvel that men should travel so far and so fast. Yet if they have traveled far, then I have traveled…

Helen John: The Beginnings of Indian Placement

J. Neil Birch

Perhaps others than Helen John, Amy Avery, Golden and Thelma Buchanan, and Spencer W. Kimball might have compounded an equally powerful scheme for blessing the lives of Indians, but to these individuals fell that lot.

Captain Dan Jones and the Welch Indians

Ronald Dennis

The first group of Welsh converts to Mormonism arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on 26 October 1849 after a voyage of more than eight months. They had buried more than one-fifth of their number…

The Mormons and the Ghost Dance

Lawrence G. Coates

Late in the nineteenth century, thousands of Indians resentful of reservation life gathered in groups to chant and dance themselves into hypnotic trances until they collapsed from exhaustion. Some Plains Indians, while shuffling steps to…

The Captivity Narrative on Mormon Trails, 1846-65

Stanley B. Kimball

The captivity narrative is one of the oldest literary genres of the New World: some 1,000 examples survive from the sixteenth century. It is also one of the earliest forms of popular literature in the…

Joseph Smith and the Clash of Sacred Cultures

Keith Parry

Dialogue 18.4 (Winter 1984): 65–80
Shortly after the church was organized, one of Joseph Smith’s main priorities during his lifetime was preaching to the Native Americans, who he believed to be the descendants of the Lamanites.

“Lamanites” and the Spirit of the Lord

Eugene England

My parents grew up conditioned toward racial prejudice—as did most Americans, including Mormons, through their generation and into part of mine. But something touched my father in his early life and grew constantly in him until he and my mother were moved at mid-life gradually to consecrate most of their life’s earnings from then on to help Lamanites.

David

Michael Hicks

This blade of stone 
cuts the grass 
to the quick. 

Spencer W. Kimball: A Man for His Times

Edward L. Kimball

Spencer Kimball wrote in his journal in 1951, on the occasion of David O. McKay’s becoming president, “I am positive that the appointments of His Twelve by the Lord and the subsequent deaths control the Presidency…

The Vast Landscape of His Heart

James N. Kimball

As a first cousin once removed from President Spencer Woolley Kimball (which doesn’t mean much in a family as extended as ours), I considered myself a sort of shirt-tail relative. That is, I was clearly…

Spencer W. Kimball, Apostle of Love

Leonard J. Arrington

Although I had heard his addresses in general conference and in at least one stake conference, I was first impressed with Spencer Kimball as a spiritual leader on 6 April 1954, when he spoke in…

Miguel Aju

Margaret Blair Young

Dust-whitened sandals kicked dirt into Miguel Aju’s mouth as he lay by the side of the road. He spat it out and groped for his bottle. Clutching it to him, he closed his eyes and…

“White” of “Pure”: Five Vignettes

Douglas Campbell

Dialogue 29.4 (Winter 1996): 119–135
The Book of Mormon variously uses “white” and “pure” in the same verse in different editions. This article traces the history of those changes, who was behind them, and why.

The Last Code Talker

Michael Fillerup

DZEH-NESH-CHEE-AH-NAH-TSIN-TLITI-TSAH-AS-ZIH. Elk-Nut-Eye-Match-Yucca. His grandfather used to say the bilagaanas always come in twos. The first time he was barely five years old, playing on a sand dune near their hogan west of Valley Store.  He…

The Mark of the Curse: Lingering Racism in Mormon Doctrine

Keith E. Norman

Dialogue 32.1 (Spring 1999): 119–135
Norman discusses instances where the racist teachings that justified the priesthood restrictions before 1978 continue to be taught.

Essay for June 9, 1998

Margaret Blair Young

Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons–Script

Darius Gray

“Let the Truth Heal”: The Making of Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons

Gregory A. Prince

Dialoguing Online: The Best of 10+ Years of Mormons Blogging

Emily W. Jensen

Dialogue Topic Pages Podcast #2: Race

(author)

Editor Taylor Petrey takes listeners into the conversations on race and civil rights within the pages of Dialogue. Since its inception, Dialogue has bravely entered conversations and cultural moments with integrity, hope, and charity. Petrey’s…