A Touchy Subject: Blacks and Mormonism

The topic of black Latter-day Saints is one that I’ve usually found to be taboo in our culture.  Why is that so?  What is it about the history of blacks and the LDS Church that makes it such a difficult topic for us to address openly?

You may want to ask yourself: what do you know about black Mormons?  You probably know that they were banned from holding the priesthood for much of the church’s past, until the ban was lifted by Official Declaration 2 in 1878.  Before this last semester, that was just about all I knew, too.

I didn’t understand the reasons behind the priesthood ban, and so, to be honest, it was one of those topics that I didn’t really like to think about.  I kind of saw it as a black spot on the history of the Church, and frankly I was afraid to learn more about it.  What if I learned something that undermined my testimony of the gospel?  It was a real fear, to be sure, though I’ve since come to find that it was an unnecessary fear.

I often wonder if much of the rest of the Church’s members don’t feel the same way that I do.  I would venture to guess that they do.  It’s a topic that isn’t focused on, and, surely, it’s not one of the essential principles pertinent to our salvation.  Plus, it is easy to get caught up in suppositions about speculation on such topics.  And so to avoid doing so, the topic is left relatively untouched and unexplored by many members.

But what would be the value of learning about the history of black Mormons?  It turns out, for me at least, that my testimony was greatly strengthened by the things I learned.  It is no longer a scary topic for me to face, and I feel like I can easily answer critics of the Church in regards to the priesthood ban.  This is a skill that is becoming increasingly more important for Latter-day Saints to have as the Church is gaining greater publicity.  The topic of blacks and the priesthood has been in the news a lot recently, and Church members need to know how to respond to questions about it.  To do so, they need to learn about it.

This last February, BYU sponsored several Black History Month events.  These provided the opportunity to learn specifically about the history of blacks as related to the Church and BYU.  In the following posts, I share the experiences I had from participating in these events.


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