Black Mormons
BLACK MORMONS
“Are there no blessings for me?” ~ Jane Manning James, black pioneer
I attended the Texas Black Film Festival recently, wanting to specifically see a documentary about Black Mormons. (Yes, they do exist!) The documentary was called “Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons.” A more aptly named film I’ve never seen.
It started off with some great information, things I had actually forgotten, truth be told. I had forgotten that Joseph Smith had done one pretty spectacular thing for a white man back in the 1830s. He, an abolitionist, created the first black "preacher" that preached to a white congregation in U.S. History, and the Mormon church was the only religion at the time that didn't have segregated congregations. Bet you didn't know that, huh? Guess what: many Mormons don’t, either. They don’t know (or the old timers conveniently forget) that a black man, Elijah Abel, was a priesthood holder, a high priest that served in the Quorum of the Seventy1, and had all this bestowed upon him by Joseph Smith, himself.
Due to Smith’s opinions on slavery, he allowed blacks to join their church and society as free men, which, let’s give him a thank you for that. However, if they came as slaves, their owners could keep them as slaves, so maybe that thank you came a bit too soon. Baby steps. It wasn’t a commonality, note, for there to be black Mormons. There were less than a dozen in the first decade of the church.
But Joe was killed, Brigham Young got pissed off at a black man in Navoo, Illinois2 that "got uppity" and took it upon himself to marry a bunch of white women in a polygamous ceremony of his own doing, one of the women being a person Young happened to be interested in, and then the Curse of Cain became official doctrine. This doctrine I remembered being taught. They’re still teaching it, just not as blatantly as in the past.
The Curse of Cain Doctrine was official church doctrine, even though recently, the spokesman for the LDS church has vehemently denied that it ever existed. He never denied that blacks were barred from the priesthood, it should be noted. The definition specific to the LDS church is that during the War in Heaven (think Milton’s Paradise Lost) people who are black on this earth are “cursed” with their blackness (or really, their non-whiteness) because they were fence sitters in that war. I don’t know about you, but all the air gets sucked out of the room when I think of that. It's the old song and dance that continued to keep black people oppressed in the Mormon church and, let's be fair, a lot of Christian faiths at the time were oppressing blacks, not to excuse any one.
1 The second tier of leadership in the LDS church, just below the apostles, which include the prophet
2 The first major LDS settlement, remember?
But the LDS church kept it going until 1978. And still have yet to officially retract that they still think of black people as fence sitters, people who didn‘t fight valiantly for Right. They just say that now God has told us that blacks are now white people’s equal. Allow me to point you to my middle finger with my other middle finger.
And if I may just throw this out there, because this drives me nutso, Cain means the son of Adam and Eve, cursed with a mark because he killed his brother. Now. If you believe the Bible to be a historical document, filled with knowledge and facts, then you should remember that Noah came along several generations after Cain and gathered up the good ‘uns and everyone else on earth went the way of the dodo. Which means that all of Cain’s descendents were drowned. I’m just putting that out there. Also, this whole concept is ridiculous at best, horribly offensive at worst.
I’m sitting in the audience as this documentary continues, writing notes furiously, and it becomes evident that it's pro-Mormon. Which, okay. That’s the director’s faith. May I point out that the director was a black woman? And her family were members of the church before 1978 when the church called out "olly olly oxen-free!"
Guess what race the Mormon church has a hard time keeping in the rolls? Blacks.
So, "descendants of Cain" couldn't have the priesthood, which meant they couldn't get to the Penthouse Suite of Heaven with God, not even white people with a black ancestor. "A drop of Negro blood" was the rule. But Philipinos, Tongans, Hawaiians, Hispanics, Latin Americans... all were allowed. So, they say, the church wasn't racist. Even though the idea is that all of those “poor colored folk” (everyone not white) will get to be made white and “delightsome” when they are righteous.1
The mind, she reels.
Hey, wanna know what was going on in 1978 to make them "get a revelation from God?" The Sao Paolo temple was being built (completed and opened: September, 1978.) Turns out, Brazilians? Not so much with the pure white, in case anyone was sleeping in World History. (The country was populated by the local native tribes, the Portuguese, black slaves and freed blacks for starters.)
That means that at least 85% of the LDS males in Brazil had "a drop of Negro blood." Which meant that this multi-million dollar temple was going to sit empty, because you can't go into the temple unless you're yadda yadda. You get the point.
1 Don’t even get me started on how in 1981 the church changed the wording of one verse (2 Ne 30:6) in the BoM to pure and delightsome so people would forget the church is racist and believes only white people are righteous. Please see a few more examples of racist scripture still there at 2 Ne 5:21 and again at 5:23, Jacob 3:5, Alma 3:6, and 4 Ne 1:10 for starters.
And if they don’t have the priesthood, and can’t go to the temple, people aren't going to go to church much, because what's the point? And if people aren't going to church they aren't PAYING TITHING. Bingo! But the "Prophet" at the time "prayed fervently to Heavenly Father, hoping for this cruel Doctrine to be changed." And gosh, right before the time of the temple dedication, it was! He works in mysterious ways.
Simultaneous to all of this was a group of black LDS members named The Genesis Group who essentially were lobbyists to bring the priesthood and the “blessings” that come with it to their people. They in turn would act as water carriers for the church to keep retention rates high among other black members.
The revelation that “Blacks Would Get The Priesthood” was given to the people on June 8, 1978. The Curse of Cain legacy was not repudiated, mind. The LDS’s public affairs office really likes to make it seem that the Genesis Group, prayer, and the “readiness of the people” is why the revelation was given to the members. Uh huh.
So I'm watching this documentary, right, and it turns into a testimony meeting1 with various black church members speaking about how they knew they would be a part of this big event. And they're talking about how proud they are to be Mormons because of this proclamation finally coming to pass. How now they can tell their non-LDS family and friends, “See? They love black people! They finally don’t see us as inferior people, except for how they still say we’re black because of a curse on our heavenly laziness!”
And one woman in the movie, later identified as the director, mentioned how when she was "finally allowed into the temple" that was the first place she was called the "N" word.2 And just recently, while performing Marriages for the Dead (I don’t think it was for Strom Thurman and Harriet Tubman, but you never can tell with these people) with a white woman from her congregation, the woman told her that in the next life the Director would have to come find her, because this white woman wouldn't recognize the Director when she, too, was white, she just wasn't able to picture it. Insert beatific smile here.
Are you catching what that means? In the next life, and this is official LDS doctrine, when the righteous are "perfected" and receive their paradisiacal glory (the key to the Penthouse Suite of Heaven) they will be made White, because race is only on earth, there is no race in Heaven.3
White.
1 I hope you’ve not been thinking I’ve exaggerating about testimony meetings. They have them all the damn time, y’all.
2 She used the word, I will not.
3 Because, evidently, Caucasian isn’t a race? And when did a carpenter from Galilee become a Caucasian?
May I remind you that this was a BLACK FILM FESTIVAL. This was an audience of intellectual, pro-African/black culture people, celebrating their blackness on the first day of Black History Month. And not one person brought up the question of that. Did it go by so fast that no one noticed? Was it so awful that the audience thought it was a joke? I mean, how freaking offensive is this concept, right?
After the show there was a Q & A session with the director, and people in the audience were asking about how she knew this was the right church for her, how it is to be a black person in Utah, and so on. And there I am, sitting by myself, seething with the treatment that blacks in general are getting by a black woman, wondering how she can stomach the idea that for her to be perfect, she has to be white. How can she reconcile her earlier statement of pride in being a black woman with losing that in heaven?
...but I didn't challenge her. I chickened out. I didn't want to seem confrontational against black Mormons, and I didn‘t feel that that place and time would have been appropriate for my argument. I wanted to genuinely help her see that she was living a contradiction, that it was just as damaging to the black culture/race as the idea that blacks were "less, because they were descendants of Cain" and that "they fought less valiantly/were fence sitters in the Pre-Existence."
Blacks turning white in heaven as a reward. The ultimate white-washing.
A side note, but another example of how she still must feel inferior to her white “superiors” was when someone in the audience asked a question about polygamy and why women are barred from ever having the priesthood in the LDS faith. Instead of answering this question, and considering that she grew up in the religion, has studied their doctrine her whole life, she handed the microphone to a white man that accompanied her to answer the question. To make it even sicker, he didn’t even answer the question, just rattled off his testimony that the LDS church “is true.”
I cannot understand the depth of a person’s self hatred to argue for an outfit that says they are inherently evil because of pigmentation in their skin. How someone can say that they hope to be “fixed” in heaven because they sure aren’t perfect here. Because of their skin.
How horrible to sit in church every Sunday and be taught that you sinned before you even came to earth. And up until recently, the Mormon church taught that they were seeing evidence of people becoming “white and delightsome” now! Before anyone tries to pat Spencer W. Kimball on the back for giving them the priesthood in 1978, let’s look at what he said a decade earlier about Native American Indians, aka Lamanites, aka the naval Jews.
“I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today ... they are fast becoming a white and delightsome people.... For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised.... The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation.
At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl-sixteen-sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents--on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather.... These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.”
This was said in General Conference in 1960. General Conference is when every member all over the world listens to the sermons and says “Amen” to indicate their solidarity. And how many are saying to themselves that the white dude that “jokingly” gave blood to get the “colored people’s blood” out of them wasn’t joking?
Mark E. Peterson, remember him? He wrote the pamphlet about how dirty the penis is, and touching it would make you equal to a serial killer. He also liked to chime in on race. In 1954, he gave this address to a group of members at BYU in the capacity of a spokesman for the church:
“Think of the Negro, cursed to the priesthood.... This negro, who, in the pre-existence lived the type of life which justified the Lord in sending him to the earth in the lineage of Cain with a black skin, and possibly being born in darkest Africa-if that negro is willing when he hears the gospel to accept it, he may have many of the blessings of the gospel. In spite of all he did in the pre-existent life, the Lord is willing, if the Negro accepts the gospel with real, sincere faith, and is really converted, to give him the blessings of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost. If that Negro is faithful all his days, he can and will enter the celestial kingdom. He will go there as a servant, but he will get celestial glory”
Oh, did I fail to mention that not only will they be turned white in the hereafter, but they’ll still be cleaning up after the always-white people? I’ll give you a second to chew on that hunk of horse shit.
And back then, the Civil Rights movement was starting to pick up momentum, so naturally, a white man from a mostly white state with hardly any people of color felt obligated to chime in.
“I think I have read enough to give you an idea of what the negro is after. He is not just seeking the opportunity of sitting down in a cafe where white people eat. He isn't just trying to ride on the same streetcar or the same Pullman car with white people. It isn't that he just desires to go to the same theater as the white people. From this, and other interviews I have read, it appears that the negro seeks absorption with the white race. He will not be satisfied until he achieves it by intermarriage. That is his objective and we must face it. We must not allow our feeling to carry us away, nor must we feel so sorry for negroes that we will open our arms and embrace them with everything we have.
[…]
Now we are generous with the negro. We are willing that the Negro have the highest kind of education. I would be willing to let every Negro drive a Cadillac if they could afford it. I would be willing that they have all the advantages they can get out of life in the world. But let them enjoy these things among themselves.”
Again, this was an address to the convention of religious LDS teachers to educate them on how to educate other Mormons by one of their apostles. Don’t try and tell me that church is not inherently racist.
Now, I saved the craziest thing for last. Now that you understand that the LDS culture is pro-white, and that all people of all nations and cultures and races will be made white to indicate their physical perfection, here’s someone that I never ever would have imagined joining the church.
Eldridge Cleaver, radical and key member of the Black Panthers, author of a book of poems that fueled the black movement in the 1960s, became a Mormon several years before he died. A (former) Black Panther, supporting the idea that everything he stood for his whole life would be painted white.
We’ll all know that the zombies are about to rise from their graves and eat us up when Spike Lee joins the ranks, for truly that will signal the End of Days.
portions of this chapter originally appeared on my livejournal in February, 2008
“Are there no blessings for me?” ~ Jane Manning James, black pioneer
I attended the Texas Black Film Festival recently, wanting to specifically see a documentary about Black Mormons. (Yes, they do exist!) The documentary was called “Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons.” A more aptly named film I’ve never seen.
It started off with some great information, things I had actually forgotten, truth be told. I had forgotten that Joseph Smith had done one pretty spectacular thing for a white man back in the 1830s. He, an abolitionist, created the first black "preacher" that preached to a white congregation in U.S. History, and the Mormon church was the only religion at the time that didn't have segregated congregations. Bet you didn't know that, huh? Guess what: many Mormons don’t, either. They don’t know (or the old timers conveniently forget) that a black man, Elijah Abel, was a priesthood holder, a high priest that served in the Quorum of the Seventy1, and had all this bestowed upon him by Joseph Smith, himself.
Due to Smith’s opinions on slavery, he allowed blacks to join their church and society as free men, which, let’s give him a thank you for that. However, if they came as slaves, their owners could keep them as slaves, so maybe that thank you came a bit too soon. Baby steps. It wasn’t a commonality, note, for there to be black Mormons. There were less than a dozen in the first decade of the church.
But Joe was killed, Brigham Young got pissed off at a black man in Navoo, Illinois2 that "got uppity" and took it upon himself to marry a bunch of white women in a polygamous ceremony of his own doing, one of the women being a person Young happened to be interested in, and then the Curse of Cain became official doctrine. This doctrine I remembered being taught. They’re still teaching it, just not as blatantly as in the past.
The Curse of Cain Doctrine was official church doctrine, even though recently, the spokesman for the LDS church has vehemently denied that it ever existed. He never denied that blacks were barred from the priesthood, it should be noted. The definition specific to the LDS church is that during the War in Heaven (think Milton’s Paradise Lost) people who are black on this earth are “cursed” with their blackness (or really, their non-whiteness) because they were fence sitters in that war. I don’t know about you, but all the air gets sucked out of the room when I think of that. It's the old song and dance that continued to keep black people oppressed in the Mormon church and, let's be fair, a lot of Christian faiths at the time were oppressing blacks, not to excuse any one.
1 The second tier of leadership in the LDS church, just below the apostles, which include the prophet
2 The first major LDS settlement, remember?
But the LDS church kept it going until 1978. And still have yet to officially retract that they still think of black people as fence sitters, people who didn‘t fight valiantly for Right. They just say that now God has told us that blacks are now white people’s equal. Allow me to point you to my middle finger with my other middle finger.
And if I may just throw this out there, because this drives me nutso, Cain means the son of Adam and Eve, cursed with a mark because he killed his brother. Now. If you believe the Bible to be a historical document, filled with knowledge and facts, then you should remember that Noah came along several generations after Cain and gathered up the good ‘uns and everyone else on earth went the way of the dodo. Which means that all of Cain’s descendents were drowned. I’m just putting that out there. Also, this whole concept is ridiculous at best, horribly offensive at worst.
I’m sitting in the audience as this documentary continues, writing notes furiously, and it becomes evident that it's pro-Mormon. Which, okay. That’s the director’s faith. May I point out that the director was a black woman? And her family were members of the church before 1978 when the church called out "olly olly oxen-free!"
Guess what race the Mormon church has a hard time keeping in the rolls? Blacks.
So, "descendants of Cain" couldn't have the priesthood, which meant they couldn't get to the Penthouse Suite of Heaven with God, not even white people with a black ancestor. "A drop of Negro blood" was the rule. But Philipinos, Tongans, Hawaiians, Hispanics, Latin Americans... all were allowed. So, they say, the church wasn't racist. Even though the idea is that all of those “poor colored folk” (everyone not white) will get to be made white and “delightsome” when they are righteous.1
The mind, she reels.
Hey, wanna know what was going on in 1978 to make them "get a revelation from God?" The Sao Paolo temple was being built (completed and opened: September, 1978.) Turns out, Brazilians? Not so much with the pure white, in case anyone was sleeping in World History. (The country was populated by the local native tribes, the Portuguese, black slaves and freed blacks for starters.)
That means that at least 85% of the LDS males in Brazil had "a drop of Negro blood." Which meant that this multi-million dollar temple was going to sit empty, because you can't go into the temple unless you're yadda yadda. You get the point.
1 Don’t even get me started on how in 1981 the church changed the wording of one verse (2 Ne 30:6) in the BoM to pure and delightsome so people would forget the church is racist and believes only white people are righteous. Please see a few more examples of racist scripture still there at 2 Ne 5:21 and again at 5:23, Jacob 3:5, Alma 3:6, and 4 Ne 1:10 for starters.
And if they don’t have the priesthood, and can’t go to the temple, people aren't going to go to church much, because what's the point? And if people aren't going to church they aren't PAYING TITHING. Bingo! But the "Prophet" at the time "prayed fervently to Heavenly Father, hoping for this cruel Doctrine to be changed." And gosh, right before the time of the temple dedication, it was! He works in mysterious ways.
Simultaneous to all of this was a group of black LDS members named The Genesis Group who essentially were lobbyists to bring the priesthood and the “blessings” that come with it to their people. They in turn would act as water carriers for the church to keep retention rates high among other black members.
The revelation that “Blacks Would Get The Priesthood” was given to the people on June 8, 1978. The Curse of Cain legacy was not repudiated, mind. The LDS’s public affairs office really likes to make it seem that the Genesis Group, prayer, and the “readiness of the people” is why the revelation was given to the members. Uh huh.
So I'm watching this documentary, right, and it turns into a testimony meeting1 with various black church members speaking about how they knew they would be a part of this big event. And they're talking about how proud they are to be Mormons because of this proclamation finally coming to pass. How now they can tell their non-LDS family and friends, “See? They love black people! They finally don’t see us as inferior people, except for how they still say we’re black because of a curse on our heavenly laziness!”
And one woman in the movie, later identified as the director, mentioned how when she was "finally allowed into the temple" that was the first place she was called the "N" word.2 And just recently, while performing Marriages for the Dead (I don’t think it was for Strom Thurman and Harriet Tubman, but you never can tell with these people) with a white woman from her congregation, the woman told her that in the next life the Director would have to come find her, because this white woman wouldn't recognize the Director when she, too, was white, she just wasn't able to picture it. Insert beatific smile here.
Are you catching what that means? In the next life, and this is official LDS doctrine, when the righteous are "perfected" and receive their paradisiacal glory (the key to the Penthouse Suite of Heaven) they will be made White, because race is only on earth, there is no race in Heaven.3
White.
1 I hope you’ve not been thinking I’ve exaggerating about testimony meetings. They have them all the damn time, y’all.
2 She used the word, I will not.
3 Because, evidently, Caucasian isn’t a race? And when did a carpenter from Galilee become a Caucasian?
May I remind you that this was a BLACK FILM FESTIVAL. This was an audience of intellectual, pro-African/black culture people, celebrating their blackness on the first day of Black History Month. And not one person brought up the question of that. Did it go by so fast that no one noticed? Was it so awful that the audience thought it was a joke? I mean, how freaking offensive is this concept, right?
After the show there was a Q & A session with the director, and people in the audience were asking about how she knew this was the right church for her, how it is to be a black person in Utah, and so on. And there I am, sitting by myself, seething with the treatment that blacks in general are getting by a black woman, wondering how she can stomach the idea that for her to be perfect, she has to be white. How can she reconcile her earlier statement of pride in being a black woman with losing that in heaven?
...but I didn't challenge her. I chickened out. I didn't want to seem confrontational against black Mormons, and I didn‘t feel that that place and time would have been appropriate for my argument. I wanted to genuinely help her see that she was living a contradiction, that it was just as damaging to the black culture/race as the idea that blacks were "less, because they were descendants of Cain" and that "they fought less valiantly/were fence sitters in the Pre-Existence."
Blacks turning white in heaven as a reward. The ultimate white-washing.
A side note, but another example of how she still must feel inferior to her white “superiors” was when someone in the audience asked a question about polygamy and why women are barred from ever having the priesthood in the LDS faith. Instead of answering this question, and considering that she grew up in the religion, has studied their doctrine her whole life, she handed the microphone to a white man that accompanied her to answer the question. To make it even sicker, he didn’t even answer the question, just rattled off his testimony that the LDS church “is true.”
I cannot understand the depth of a person’s self hatred to argue for an outfit that says they are inherently evil because of pigmentation in their skin. How someone can say that they hope to be “fixed” in heaven because they sure aren’t perfect here. Because of their skin.
How horrible to sit in church every Sunday and be taught that you sinned before you even came to earth. And up until recently, the Mormon church taught that they were seeing evidence of people becoming “white and delightsome” now! Before anyone tries to pat Spencer W. Kimball on the back for giving them the priesthood in 1978, let’s look at what he said a decade earlier about Native American Indians, aka Lamanites, aka the naval Jews.
“I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today ... they are fast becoming a white and delightsome people.... For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised.... The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation.
At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl-sixteen-sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents--on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather.... These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.”
This was said in General Conference in 1960. General Conference is when every member all over the world listens to the sermons and says “Amen” to indicate their solidarity. And how many are saying to themselves that the white dude that “jokingly” gave blood to get the “colored people’s blood” out of them wasn’t joking?
Mark E. Peterson, remember him? He wrote the pamphlet about how dirty the penis is, and touching it would make you equal to a serial killer. He also liked to chime in on race. In 1954, he gave this address to a group of members at BYU in the capacity of a spokesman for the church:
“Think of the Negro, cursed to the priesthood.... This negro, who, in the pre-existence lived the type of life which justified the Lord in sending him to the earth in the lineage of Cain with a black skin, and possibly being born in darkest Africa-if that negro is willing when he hears the gospel to accept it, he may have many of the blessings of the gospel. In spite of all he did in the pre-existent life, the Lord is willing, if the Negro accepts the gospel with real, sincere faith, and is really converted, to give him the blessings of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost. If that Negro is faithful all his days, he can and will enter the celestial kingdom. He will go there as a servant, but he will get celestial glory”
Oh, did I fail to mention that not only will they be turned white in the hereafter, but they’ll still be cleaning up after the always-white people? I’ll give you a second to chew on that hunk of horse shit.
And back then, the Civil Rights movement was starting to pick up momentum, so naturally, a white man from a mostly white state with hardly any people of color felt obligated to chime in.
“I think I have read enough to give you an idea of what the negro is after. He is not just seeking the opportunity of sitting down in a cafe where white people eat. He isn't just trying to ride on the same streetcar or the same Pullman car with white people. It isn't that he just desires to go to the same theater as the white people. From this, and other interviews I have read, it appears that the negro seeks absorption with the white race. He will not be satisfied until he achieves it by intermarriage. That is his objective and we must face it. We must not allow our feeling to carry us away, nor must we feel so sorry for negroes that we will open our arms and embrace them with everything we have.
[…]
Now we are generous with the negro. We are willing that the Negro have the highest kind of education. I would be willing to let every Negro drive a Cadillac if they could afford it. I would be willing that they have all the advantages they can get out of life in the world. But let them enjoy these things among themselves.”
Again, this was an address to the convention of religious LDS teachers to educate them on how to educate other Mormons by one of their apostles. Don’t try and tell me that church is not inherently racist.
Now, I saved the craziest thing for last. Now that you understand that the LDS culture is pro-white, and that all people of all nations and cultures and races will be made white to indicate their physical perfection, here’s someone that I never ever would have imagined joining the church.
Eldridge Cleaver, radical and key member of the Black Panthers, author of a book of poems that fueled the black movement in the 1960s, became a Mormon several years before he died. A (former) Black Panther, supporting the idea that everything he stood for his whole life would be painted white.
We’ll all know that the zombies are about to rise from their graves and eat us up when Spike Lee joins the ranks, for truly that will signal the End of Days.
portions of this chapter originally appeared on my livejournal in February, 2008