Dialogue Topic Pages Podcast #2: Race

Editor Taylor Petrey takes listeners into the conversations on race and civil rights within the pages of Dialogue. Since its inception, Dialogue has bravely entered conversations and cultural moments with integrity, hope, and charity. Petrey’s narrative shows that these conversations occurred in five different acts, each with its own influence and context.

Note: The term “Negro” is used in the podcast when quoting historical reference to the term.

Act I: Breaking the Taboo

• Stuart Udall, Letter to the Editor, Summer 1967
• Armand L. Mauss, “Mormonism and the Negro: Faith, Folklore, and Civil Rights,” Winter 1967
• Dallin H. Oaks, “Law and Order—A Two Way Street,” Winter 1968.
• Roundtable, “Race, Minorities, and the Struggle for Justice and Order,” Winter 1968.

 

Act 2: Telling the History

• Lester E. Bush, Jr., Review of Stephen Taggert’s Mormonism’s Negro Policy: Social and Historical Origins, Winter 1969.
• Spring 1973 Issue, especially Lester E. Bush, Jr. “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” and the responses to Bush’s article.

 

Act 3: Telling the History to 1978

• Summer 1979 Issue, a response to the 1978 Revelation, especially Newell Bringhurst’s “Elijah Abel and the Changing Status of Blacks within Mormonism” and “The collected testimonies of ex-slave Samuel D. Chambers.”
• Armand L. Mauss, “The Fading of Pharaoh’s Curse: The Decline and Fall of the Priesthood Ban Against Blacks in the Mormon Church,” Fall 1981.

 

Act 4: International Turn

• Mark L. Grover, “Religious Accommodation in the Land of Racial Democracy: Mormon Priesthood and Black Brazilians,” Fall 1984.
• Mark L. Grover, “The Mormon Priesthood Revelation and the São Paulo, Brazil Temple,” Spring 1990.
• Jessie L. Embry, “Separate But Equal? Black Brothers, Genesis Groups, or Integrated Wards?” Spring 1990.
• James Allen, “On Becoming a Universal Church: Some Historical Perspectives,” Spring 1992.
• Jessie L. Embry, “Ethnic Groups and the LDS Church,” Winter 1992.
• Andrew Clark, “The Fading Curse of Cain: Mormonism in South Africa,” Winter 1994.
• Eugene England, “No Respecter of Persons: A Mormon Ethics of Diversity,” Winter 1994.

 

Act 5: Ongoing Racism

• Keith E. Norman, “The Mark of the Curse: Lingering Racism in Mormon Doctrine?” Spring 1999.
• Gregory A. Prince, “David O. McKay and Blacks: Building the Foundation for the 1978 Revelation,” Spring 2002.
• Winter 2017 Issue, especially Ignacio Garcia, “Thoughts on Latino Mormons, Their Afterlife, and the Need for a New Historical Paradigm for Saints of Color”; Robert Goldberg, “Can Mormons Be White in America?”;  Gina Colvin, “There’s No Such Thing as Gospel Culture”; and Moroni Benally, “Decolonizing the Blossoming: Indigenous People’s Faith in a Colonizing Church.”
• Fall 2018 Issue: Commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the 1978 revelation, esp. Lester Bush, “Looking Back, Looking Forward: Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine Forty Five Years Later”; Darron T. Smith, “Negotiating Black Self-Hate within the LDS Church”; Joanna Brooks, “The Possessive investment in Rightness: White Supremacy and the Mormon Movement”; and Matthew Harris, “Mormons and Lineage: The Complicated History of Blacks and Patriarchal Blessings, 1830-2018.”
• Fall 2019 Issue: James C. Jones, “Racism”; Margaret Olson Hemming and Fatimah Salleh, “Wrestling with Racism in the Book of Mormon”; and Rebecca de Schweinitz, “There Is No Equality: William E. Berrett, BYU, and Healing the Wounds of Racism in the Latter-day Saint Past and Present.”

 

Other books and resources

• Armand Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (University of Illinois Press, 2003)
• Gordon B. Hinckley, “The Need for Greater Kindness,” General Conference 2006 Priesthood Session.
• “Race and the Priesthood,” Gospel Topic Essay, 2013.
• Kirstie Stanger Weyland, “Racism at BYU,” October 2019.
• Joanna Brooks, Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and The Problem of Racial Innocence (Oxford University Press, 2020)