Mormons Approve Ordination of Black Men of African Descent

Date June 8, 1978

During the presidency of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, several blacks were ordained to the priesthood, but Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, later prohibited further ordinations. Although later presidents of the church relaxed this policy somewhat, black men of African descent could not be ordained until the twelfth president, Spencer W. Kimball, announced a revelation that all worthy men of any race could be ordained.

Locale Salt Lake City, Utah

Key Figures

• Spencer W. Kimball (1895-1985), president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1973-1985
• David O. McKay (1873-1970), president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1951-1970
• Hugh B. Brown (1883-1975), first counselor to President McKay and a champion of civil rights
• Joseph Smith (1805-1844), founder and first president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• Brigham Young (1801-1877), second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• Elijah Abel (1810-1884), first black known to have received the priesthood in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Summary of Event

Spencer W. Kimball became the prophet and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church) in 1973 at age seventy-eight. In his prior thirty years as an apostle, he became known as a champion of minorities. A temple for the church was under construction in São Paulo, Brazil, scheduled to be completed in 1978, 126 years after Brigham Young announced that blacks were not to be ordained to the Mormon priesthood. Kimball was profoundly touched by the great sacrifices black church members were making for the Brazilian temple knowing that they would not be allowed to enter it. Also weighing on his mind were thousands of potential converts in Nigeria and Ghana, where a small number of blacks had been converted by reading church literature. They converted others, formed their own congregations, and petitioned church headquarters in Salt Lake City to send missionaries. Kimball wondered, if blacks could not hold the priesthood, who would be their leaders and shepherds?

Kimball had the greatest respect for his predecessors; to consider changing one of their dictates was very difficult. Day after day, he left his office and entered a quiet room in the nearby Salt Lake City temple to pray for revelation. The two highest governing bodies of the Church of Jesus Christ are the First Presidency (President Kimball and his two counselors) and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Kimball interviewed all members of these bodies, seeking their views on the ordination of black men of African descent, and found that some members still had reservations.

On June 1, 1978, Kimball met with his counselors and the apostles in the temple. According to Bruce R. McConkie, an apostle, they freely gave their views on the matter and then joined in prayer with Kimball as spokesman. McConkie said that after the prayer, each of them felt the spirit in a “miraculous and marvelous manner, beyond anything any then present had ever experienced.” According to the story, each man knew, independent of the others, that the priesthood should be given to the blacks. A week later, on June 8, Kimball released the announcement to the media.

The road leading to the revelation had been a long one. When Joseph Smith organized the Church of Christ (later named the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) on April 6, 1830, at Fayette, New York, it was widely believed that blacks were descendants of Cain, the cursed son of Adam; that they were intellectually inferior to whites; and that God intended them to be slaves. Disavowing most of those folk beliefs, Smith allowed the few blacks who desired so to be baptized and allowed black males to receive the priesthood. Historians know of only three black men who joined the Church of Christ before Smith’s murder: “Black Pete” joined in 1830, but it is not known if he received the priesthood; Elijah Abel and Walker Lewis joined later, and both received the priesthood.

William McCary received the priesthood in 1846 under Brigham Young’s administration, but because of McCary’s sexual escapades, he was excommunicated in 1847. Perhaps as a result of the McCary case, Young announced that blacks could not participate in Mormon temple ordinances (symbolic washings, anointings, sealing husbands and wives together eternally, and sealing children to parents). In 1852, Young publicly taught that, because they were under God’s curse, blacks could not receive the priesthood. Elijah Abel was allowed to retain his priesthood but was not to participate further in temple ordinances. It is interesting to note that his son Enoch was ordained in 1900, and his grandson Elijah Abel II was ordained in 1935.

When the question of ordaining blacks arose under subsequent church presidents, they cited Scriptures and precedents established by their predecessors. A curious logic prevailed: Since the ban came from God, and God is just, blacks must have done something in the premortal life to deserve the ban (in the sense of John 9:2, “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?”). Around 1969, that circular reasoning was dropped along with the Scriptures that had been used to support it—they could be interpreted otherwise. The new statement was that God instituted the ban for reasons that Mormons did not currently understand. The ban was softened in 1955 when President David O. McKay determined that males with dark skin who were not descended from African blacks, such as Fijians, could be ordained to the priesthood.

In the 1960’s, civil rights demonstrators received a sympathetic hearing from Hugh B. Brown, first counselor to McKay. Brown read a statement at the beginning of the General Conference of the Church in 1963 stating that the church fully supported equal civil rights for all people regardless of race. However, that was not enough. Some national columnists took aim at the Mormons, and demonstrators marched through downtown Salt Lake City to the church office building demanding that the Mormon Church support civil rights bills then being considered by the state legislature. In 1969, Stanford University canceled all future competitions with Brigham Young University (the private university operated by the Mormon Church). Church spokesmen gave a legalistic defense: The church has an unpaid lay ministry, so the priesthood ban did not deny blacks employment or any other civil right.

By 1969, McKay was in ill health, and the leadership of the Mormon Church fell to his counselors. Brown suggested that the time had come to extend the priesthood to all blacks. He viewed it as a matter of policy rather than doctrine and supposed that whatever purposes the ban might have served, its usefulness was long past. Such a change would require the unanimous agreement of the First Presidency and of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Brown almost received that agreement, but then one of the senior apostles persuaded others not to go along with removing the ban. However, after the protests of the turbulent 1960’s quieted, the ground had been prepared for Kimball.

Significance

Most Mormons greeted the revelation with joy, but to those who did not, or who might be confused, McConkie said, “There are statements in our literature by the early Brethren which we have interpreted to mean that the Negroes would not receive the priesthood in mortality. . . . Forget everything I have said, or what President Brigham Young . . . 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.”

Joseph Freeman of Granger, Utah (just outside Salt Lake City), may have been the first black ordained to the priesthood after the revelation. He entered the Salt Lake City temple with his family to receive the sealing and other temple ordinances on June 26, 1978. Missionaries were sent to Africa, and twenty-seven years later there were an estimated six hundred blacks in Africa who were bishops (shepherds of local congregations) or stake presidents (shepherds over about ten congregations).

While tremendous progress was made, some prejudice remained. Church president Gordon B. Hinckley, in the April, 2006, General Conference of the Church, said that he received reports that some church members were making racial slurs and remarked: “I remind you that no man who makes disparaging remarks concerning those of another race can consider himself a true disciple of Christ. Nor can he consider himself to be in harmony with the teachings of the Church of Christ. How can any man holding the . . . Priesthood arrogantly assume that he is eligible for the priesthood whereas another who lives a righteous life but whose skin is of a different color is ineligible?”

Bibliography

Bringhurst, Newell G., and Darron T. Smith, eds. Black and Mormon. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Eight scholars discuss history of the ban, residual racism, and the place of blacks in the Church of Jesus Christ.

Bush, Lester E., Jr. “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8, no. 1 (1973): 11-68. Seminal article on the subject may have helped bring about the change.

Bush, Lester E., Jr., and Armand L. Mauss, eds. Neither White Nor Black: Mormon Scholars Confront the Race Issue in a Universal Church. Midvale, Utah: Signature Books, 1984. Collection of seven essays plus a chronology and authoritative quotes. Excellent resource on breadth of the topic.

Mauss, Armand L. All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Mormon sociologist’s major work on beliefs and treatment of minorities in the Church of Jesus Christ. He found that the Mormon groups he tested were less racist than comparable non-Mormon groups. The racism he did find correlated more with lack of education than with church activity.