Black Mormons mark anniversary
By Debbie Hummel
Associated Press
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| Natalie Sheppard of Salt Lake City, who joined the Mormon Church 20 years ago, says she's never felt the church has done a good job of encouraging black membership.
Associated Press |
While gathered inside the faith's Salt Lake City Temple, the officials say God revealed that they should allow black men to become members of the Mormon priesthood, reversing more than a century of church practice.
The church ended the ban with a four-paragraph statement released on June 8, 1978, that said "every faithful, worthy man in the Church may receive the holy priesthood."
Since then, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown significantly in Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean. But some black Mormons in America still feel the church doesn't do enough to encourage black membership, or speak out against racism of the past.
Tamu Smith, a black member of the church in Provo, Utah, believes church leaders remain concerned about how some white Mormons might respond.
Mormon officials have "spoken directly to certain issues in the past. They speak directly about homosexuality, adultery, pornography. ... They have not spoken directly against prejudice and racism," she said.
The issue is a tough one for the church.
Mormons believe that their president — leader of the First Presidency — is a "living prophet" who rules by direct divine revelation, so the black priesthood ban must be seen as God's will or else the divine prophets from the mid-1800s until 1978 were grievously mistaken.
The priesthood does not refer to a set of trained clerics — rather, it is a lay status that virtually all Mormon boys enter at 12 and a prerequisite for even the most mundane church duties.
The first black man to hold the priesthood, Elijah Abel, was ordained in 1836 by Joseph Smith, the church's president and founder. However, what happened between the days of Smith, who spoke out against slavery decades before the Civil War, and 1978 is a matter of debate.
Baptism and membership in the church have always been open to all. But starting in roughly the late 1840s, black males were denied the priesthood "for reasons that we believe are known to God," church spokesman Dale Bills said.
Newell Bringhurst, a history and government professor at the College of Sequoias, in Visalia, Calif., has extensively researched racial issues among Mormons.
Bringhurst, who was raised Mormon but has since left the faith, attributes the ban to remarks made by Brigham Young, the church's president after Smith was assassinated in Nauvoo, Ill. Young once said that blacks were the children of Cain, and "any man having one drop of the seed of Cain" could not gain priesthood. Bringhurst says that view took hold.
A century later, the ban came under increasing scrutiny during the civil rights era. Still, Bringhurst said the church's international expansion more likely prompted its review of black priesthood.
According to a 1988 interview with Ensign magazine, church president Gordon B. Hinckley — a member of the First Presidency at the time of the revelation — described the event as feeling "as if a conduit opened between the heavenly throne and the kneeling, pleading prophet of God."
In the decades after the revelation, the number of LDS members in Africa went from about 12,000 to more than 180,000.
But Natalie Sheppard, a black American who joined the church 20 years ago, says the church has never done a good job of encouraging black membership.
When she moved from Ohio to a Salt Lake City suburb, "I experienced the rudest awakening of my life," Sheppard said.
She recalled a cold day in 1982 when her 6-year-old son — waiting for her to pick him up — was made to stand outside the home of another church member because he was black.
Sheppard picked up her son and drove straight to church headquarters in downtown Salt Lake City, where she demanded to see the church's president. But Spencer W. Kimball was ill, so Sheppard met with other leaders, including the man who would succeed Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson.
"They took me into this room lined with men in black suits. In my anger I did not appreciate the audience I had," Sheppard said. "Ezra Taft Benson said, 'If you joined the church for the people in the church, you didn't join the church for the right reasons."'
Sheppard was satisfied, but she now understands why other black members are hungry for stronger church statements against perceived racism.
Sheppard once held a position with the Genesis Group, an organization for black Mormons, that allowed her to meet with inactive black members.
"They didn't think there were answers being given to them," Sheppard said. "I think that's because of the response that has been given, that the 1978 revelation speaks for itself. I'm not saying that people need to apologize ... but we lose a lot of black members."
This weekend, the church-sponsored Genesis Group for black Mormons is commemorating the 1978 revelation with several events, including performances of the play "I Am Jane," the story of Jane Elizabeth Manning James, a black woman who was active in the church and traveled with Mormon pioneers in the late 1840s.
Tomorrow, on the actual anniversary, singer Gladys Knight will conduct the Saints Unified Voices, a 110-member multiracial choir.
Said Darius Gray, president of Genesis: "This commemoration is an expression of great growth and it comes with the promise of great hope."
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