On the Tuesday before the 1963 October General Conference, Mr. Stephen Holbrook called on me at the University to tell me that the local NAACP was planning a civil rights demonstration sometime during the coming…
Here at my breast, my dark-eyed child,
Taste of your worth and sleep a while.
Under the tent of the black goat’s wool
Safe from the cold and the wind, be full.
Let me bring home your dark eyes
and the secret of their holiness,
your quick fingers and your fine
pride in the black tent they weave.
The city was Lagos, Nigeria, in the early 1970s. The place was the upstairs cinder-block apartment of Sabath Umoh, branch president of the Lagos “Mormon” church. On the card table pulpit was a black, hard-cover…
Because I spent one year of my life as an undergraduate student at a Nigerian University, the June 9, 1978 announcement by the LDS Church First Presidency ended a period of internal unrest, a trial…
Dialogue 12.2 (Summer 1979): 37–50
In recent years many RLDS Church members have been proud of the fact that the church has been ordaining blacks into the priesthood since early in its history. Sometimes they have made unfavorable comparisons between RLDS policy and that of their cousins in Utah who denied holy orders to black men and women until last year when half of the restriction was lifted.
Dialogue 12.2 (Summer 1979): 22–36
Elijah Abel, a black man ordained to the priesthood, was restricted in his church participation starting in 1843, even though he was well respected by both members and leaders. Newell G. Bringhurst discusses why the priesthood and temple ban might have occured. One of the reasons was when the pioneers were crossing the plains, a man by the name of William McCary, who had Native American and African American ancestry, caused a lot of grief and trouble for both saints and the leaders of the Church.
Dialogue 12.2 (Summer 1979): 13–21
The editors of Dialogue in 1979 compiled the testimonies of a former slave, Samuel Chambers, who was a member of the church.
Friday, June 9, 1978. A day not to be forgotten. Like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or the assassination of President Kennedy, most Mormons will remember exactly where they were and what they were doing…
These two books from our own Mormon culture are typical of a large number of similar publications in the lay press. Well meaning people who have found that modern medicine cannot cure everything are too…