Mormons: The Negro Question

“The Peculiar People,” as Mormons call themselves, have often found that their peculiar doctrines put them at odds with their fellow citizens—and once again there is trouble in Zion. Today, the problem is the Mormon attitude toward the Negro. Not since the battles over polygamy has the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faced such a conflict between what it practices and what other men preach.

Mormons believe that Negroes cannot become priests—although Mormons define most active male believers as priests. Non-Mormons are prone to infer from this that Mormons are segregationists. The church replies that it has a right to set the qualifications of its own priesthood, and that excluding Negroes is no more discriminatory than the refusal of many churches (including the Mormons) to ordain women.

Nonetheless, Mormon leaders have been slow to speak up in favor of civil rights. Recently, Negro leaders in Salt Lake City threatened to picket the Mormons’ 133rd semiannual conference unless church leaders broke silence and formally denounced segregation. N.A.A.C.P. leaders finally heard what they had been waiting for last week in an address by Hugh D. Brown, newly chosen First Counselor to David O. McKay, 90, who is the Mormons’ First President, Prophet, Seer, Revelator and Trustee-in-Trust. “We would like it to be known,” said Brown, “that 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.”

Four Sources of Truth. In many ways, Mormons make almost ideal citizens. They are wholesome, industrious and thrifty, devoted to social welfare and higher education. But they are unsympathetic toward the Negro, largely as a consequence of the strange church doctrines formulated by the first Mormon Prophet, Joseph Smith, and amplified by his successors. By these doctrines, Mormons have four sources of divine truth: the Bible, the “continuous revelation” granted to Smith and his successors, and Smith’s two pseudo-Biblical works, The Book of Mormon and The Pearl of Great Price.

Mormons believe that they alone are members of the one true church of Christ, although they deny such commonly held Christian doctrines as original sin and the possibility of eternal damnation. The church teaches that man treads a progressive path to perfection: in a pre-existent state as a soul without a body, in the life on earth, and finally in the afterlife. More than most religious believers, Mormons seem to keep busy seeking perfection from the cradle to the grave. Every worthy boy becomes a priest at the age of twelve, and two out of three Mormons work part or full time in serving the church.

The Seed of Cain. Pre-existence is the source of trouble on the Negro question. According to Mormon belief, only those who led a heroic prelife were eligible to be born into the world as Mormons. Negro souls are not eligible because, as Prophet Smith used to proclaim, they came into the world with the curse of Ham and Cain upon them. Negroes could join the church, and as a consequence of their low status on earth might even earn a higher place among the three levels of Heaven than white men, but it was “revealed” to Brigham Young in 1879 that they could not become Mormon priests. When the rest of mankind has in heaven earned the priesthood, he wrote, “then the curse will be removed from the seed of Cain, and they will possess the priesthood.” The decision relegated Negroes to second-class spiritual citizenship until death, depriving them, among other things, of the power to baptize their non-Mormon ancestors into the church.

The doctrine has kept the number of Mormon Negroes to only a few hundred (among 2,000,000), and the church is not seeking any more. Of 12,000 Mormon missionaries abroad, only a handful are in Africa—finding converts among the white residents of South Africa. Only one-tenth of 1% of the population of Utah are Negroes, and it is the only state outside the South without some kind of anti-discrimination law. There are only two Negroes at the church-run Brigham Young University.

Inside Opposition. Will church teaching on the Negro change? “I don’t know the answer,” says Hugh Brown. “But the channels between heaven and earth are not closed. There will be a solution when the Lord decides the proper time has come.” Many Mormons believe that the solution will have to be a new revelation, as when Acting Prophet William Woodruff ordered Mormons to abandon the practice of multiple marriages in 1890—a few months after the Supreme Court had ruled that federal antipolygamy statutes were constitutional.

Revelations are as hard to define as they are to coax up on order. There is not even any accurate count of them, although the church records 133 divinely inspired statements by Joseph Smith. Later Prophets, including his successor Brigham Young, have seldom announced to the public that they have received a message from God, and any new revelation on the priesthood would require a most awkward reinterpretation of Mormon teaching on preexistence. Since he became Prophet in 1951, McKay has never admitted that God spoke to him. Few Mormons have any hope that revelations on the Negro would come to McKay’s probable successor, President Joseph L. Smith, 86, a stern, old-fangled moralist (and grandnephew of the Founder) who believes that “darkies are wonderful people.”

Doubts about the Saints’ stand on Negroes are widespread enough to challenge the presidential chances of Michigan’s Mormon Governor George Romney, although Romney is a strong advocate of Negro civil rights. Many younger Mormons believe that the church has no choice but to open up the priesthood to the Negro. “The change will come, and within my lifetime,” says Dr. J. D. Williams, 37, a professor of political science and former bishop of the Provo stake (diocese). “The Mormon liberal has for years felt a deep uneasiness over his church’s doctrine that Negroes are not worthy to hold the priesthood.” And he fully anticipates that the central feature of Mormonism —continuous revelation—will provide the way out.