Across the library

Race and the priesthood

Joseph Smith ordained a Black elder in 1836 and defended slaveholding the same spring. Brigham Young announced the ban in 1852 and preached the mark of Cain to justify it. The 1947 Lowry Nelson letters, the 1978 revelation, and the 2013 disavowal — the whole record, every quote linked to its source.

Between 1836 and 2013, the church's position on race shows up in ordination records, newspapers, a presidential platform, sermons, private letters, scripture, and finally an official disavowal. This page puts the whole record in one place, and every claim links to the source it comes from. The story does not move in a straight line. Joseph Smith ordained a Black elder and defended slaveholding within a few months of each other, and the church that ended the ban in 1978 waited another thirty-five years to disavow the theories behind it.

1836: an elder named Elijah Able

Elijah Able was a Black convert, baptized in September 1832. He was ordained an elder on January 25, 1836 and received his elder's license that March in Kirtland, while Joseph Smith led the church there. That December he was ordained to the Third Quorum of the Seventy. The licenses survive, and the church's own 2013 essay says it plainly:

There is no reliable evidence that any black men were denied the priesthood during Joseph Smith's lifetime.

Race and the Priesthood, Gospel Topics Essays, December 2013

Able was not the only one. Q. Walker Lewis, a barber in Lowell, Massachusetts, was ordained an elder in the 1840s. Three years after Joseph Smith's death, Brigham Young described him in a church council:

We have one of the best Elders, an African.

Brigham Young, 1847, quoted in Race and the Priesthood, Gospel Topics Essays

1836: the letter against the abolitionists

The ordinations are one half of that Kirtland spring. The other half is a letter. In April 1836, the month after Able's license was signed, the church's newspaper published a letter from Joseph Smith to its editor, Oliver Cowdery, written after an abolitionist lecturer came through town.

I do not believe that the people of the North have any more right to say that the South shall not hold slaves, than the South have to say the North shall.

Joseph Smith, letter to Oliver Cowdery, Messenger and Advocate, vol. 2, no. 7 (April 1836), pp. 289–291

His argument was scriptural. It reaches for Genesis — the curse on Canaan, read as a standing decree about the descendants of Ham:

…the first mention we have of slavery is found in the holy bible, pronounced by a man who was perfect in his generation and walked with God.

Joseph Smith, letter to Oliver Cowdery, Messenger and Advocate, vol. 2, no. 7 (April 1836), p. 290

…the curse is not yet taken off the sons of Canaan, neither will be until it is affected by as great power as caused it to come…

Joseph Smith, letter to Oliver Cowdery, Messenger and Advocate, vol. 2, no. 7 (April 1836), p. 290

The letter calls the existence of slavery a lasting monument of the decree of Jehovah, to the shame and confusion of all who have cried out against the South, in consequence of their holding the sons of Ham in servitude. The Joseph Smith of 1836 was not an abolitionist, whatever the revisionist version says. The license and the letter come from the same few months, and both are part of the record.

1844: the platform

Eight years later his position had changed. Running for president of the United States, Smith published a platform that proposed ending slavery gradually, with slaveholders compensated from the sale of public lands:

Petition also, ye goodly inhabitants of the slave states, your legislators to abolish slavery by the year 1850…

Joseph Smith, General Smith's Views of the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States (1844)

Pray Congress to pay every man a reasonable price for his slaves out of the surplus revenue arising from the sale of public lands… Break off the shackles from the poor black man, and hire him to labor like other human beings.

Joseph Smith, General Smith's Views of the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States (1844)

It was the last thing he published on the subject. He was killed that June.

1852: the restriction announced

The ban itself did not start with Joseph Smith. The church's essay puts its start plainly:

In 1852, President Brigham Young publicly announced that men of black African descent could no longer be ordained to the priesthood…

Race and the Priesthood, Gospel Topics Essays, December 2013

Brigham Young announced it in an address to the Utah territorial legislature. No revelation text was ever canonized for it. The ban went into practice on the president's word and stayed there for 126 years on the word of the presidents who followed him.

The mark of Cain, from the pulpit

The explanation given for the ban was the curse and mark of Cain, and it was preached in exactly those terms. Brigham Young, in the Tabernacle on October 9, 1859:

Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings. This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin.

Brigham Young, Intelligence, Etc., Journal of Discourses, Volume 7, pp. 290–291

That curse will remain upon them, and they never can hold the Priesthood or share in it until all the other descendants of Adam have received the promises and enjoyed the blessings of the Priesthood and the keys thereof.

Brigham Young, Intelligence, Etc., Journal of Discourses, Volume 7, pp. 290–291

The scripture cited most often alongside Genesis was the Book of Abraham, where Pharaoh's line is blessed with everything except the priesthood:

…Noah, his father, who blessed him with the blessings of the earth, and with the blessings of wisdom, but cursed him as pertaining to the Priesthood.

Abraham 1:26, Pearl of Great Price

The next verse says Pharaoh was of that lineage by which he could not have the right of Priesthood. A century after Brigham Young, the same reasoning was still in print as settled doctrine. Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine sat on the shelf of a generation of Latter-day Saint homes, and its Cain entry said this:

As a result of his rebellion, Cain was cursed with a dark skin; he became the father of the Negroes, and those spirits who are not worthy to receive the priesthood are born through his lineage.

Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, “Cain”, 1958 first edition

What the book's entries said in 1958, what survived the 1966 revision, and what the post-1978 printings say instead is traced entry by entry in Race in Mormon Doctrine.

1947: the Lowry Nelson letters

By the mid-twentieth century the ban was being treated as eternal. In June 1947, Heber Meeks, president of the Southern States Mission, wrote to Lowry Nelson — a Latter-day Saint sociologist who had spent a year studying rural Cuba — to ask whether the church should open missionary work there, knowing, of course, our concept of the Negro and his position as to the Priesthood, and whether there were groups of pure white blood in the rural sections. Nelson's answer was blunt:

The attitude of the Church in regard to the Negro makes me very sad… I must say that I have never been able to accept the idea, and never shall. I do not believe that God is a racist.

Lowry Nelson to Heber Meeks, June 26, 1947

He told Meeks it would be better for the Cubans if the church stayed out of Cuba entirely unless we are willing to revise our racial theory, and sent copies to church president George Albert Smith. The First Presidency's reply, dated July 17, 1947 and signed by Smith and both of his counselors, stated the position more plainly than any pulpit ever had:

From the days of the Prophet Joseph even until now, it has been the doctrine of the Church, never questioned by any of the Church leaders, that the Negroes are not entitled to the full blessings of the Gospel.

First Presidency to Lowry Nelson, July 17, 1947

Indeed, some of God's children were assigned to superior positions before the world was formed.

First Presidency to Lowry Nelson, July 17, 1947

Then the letter answered a question Nelson had not asked. Nothing in his letters mentioned marriage — he had argued for the equality of races. The Presidency heard intermarriage:

Furthermore, your ideas, as we understand them, appear to contemplate the intermarriage of the Negro and White races, a concept which has heretofore been most repugnant to most normal-minded people from the ancient patriarchs till now. God's rule for Israel, His Chosen People, has been endogamous. Modern Israel has been similarly directed.

First Presidency to Lowry Nelson, July 17, 1947

We are not unmindful of the fact that there is a growing tendency, particularly among some educators, as it manifests itself in this area, toward the breaking down of race barriers in the matter of intermarriage between whites and blacks, but it does not have the sanction of the Church and is contrary to Church doctrine.

First Presidency to Lowry Nelson, July 17, 1947

Nelson wrote back on October 8 — a long letter working through where he believed racial doctrines actually come from — and put what the church's position meant in practice into one sentence:

I am now confronted with this doctrine of my own church which says in effect that white supremacy is part of God's plan for His children; that the Negro has been assigned by Him to be a hewer of wood and drawer of water for his white-skinned brethren.

Lowry Nelson to the First Presidency, October 8, 1947

The Presidency's second reply, dated November 12, 1947, did not engage any of it. It told him to stop reasoning:

We feel very sure that you understand well the doctrines of the Church. They are either true or not true. Our testimony is that they are true. Under these circumstances we may not permit ourselves to be too much impressed by the reasonings of men however well-founded they may seem to be.

First Presidency to Lowry Nelson, November 12, 1947

The same letter told him he was too fine a man to permit yourself to be led off from the principles of the Gospel by worldly learning. And there is one more letter in the file. In 1952, Nelson sent word that he intended to publish an article on the subject. The reply, from the secretary to the First Presidency, granted that he was within his rights — and then added this:

…when a member of the Church sets himself up against doctrines preached by the Prophet Joseph Smith and by those who have succeeded him in the high office which he held, he is moving into a very dangerous position for himself personally.

Joseph Anderson, secretary to the First Presidency, to Lowry Nelson, May 23, 1952

Hold the July letter up against the record above. From the days of the Prophet Joseph is contradicted by the 1836 licenses, and the church's own essay now says so. Assigned to superior positions before the world was formed is the premortal theory the church would later disavow by name — and the intermarriage paragraphs are the other clause of that disavowal. Nelson published anyway. The whole file, all of it scanned, is linked from every quote in this section.

June 1978

The ban ended the same way it began, on the word of the church's president — except this time it was canonized. Official Declaration 2 was sustained that September and has been printed in the Doctrine and Covenants ever since:

He has heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come when every faithful, worthy man in the Church may receive the holy priesthood, with power to exercise its divine authority, and enjoy with his loved ones every blessing that flows therefrom, including the blessings of the temple.

Official Declaration 2, Doctrine and Covenants, 1978

Accordingly, all worthy male members of the Church may be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color.

Official Declaration 2, Doctrine and Covenants, 1978

2013: the disavowal

The declaration ended the practice. It said nothing about the explanations that had held the practice up for a century. Those waited another thirty-five years, until the church published the Gospel Topics essay this page has been quoting:

Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else.

Race and the Priesthood, Gospel Topics Essays, December 2013

Every clause in that sentence points at something quoted above. A sign of divine disfavor or curse is the 1836 letter and the 1859 sermon. Unrighteous actions in a premortal life is the 1947 letter and the 1958 entry. Mixed-race marriages are a sin is the July 1947 letter's answer to the question Nelson never asked. The disavowal names none of these sources. The library holds all of them.