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Joseph Fielding Smith’s Evolving Views on Race: The Odyssey of a Mormon Apostle-President

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. In 1963, Joseph Henderson, a non-Mormon from New York, wrote a pointed letter to LDS Church apostle Joseph Fielding Smith asking him about the racial…

Review: Unerasing Shoshone Testaments of Survival, Faith, and Hope Darren Parry, The Bear River Massacre

Although Darren Parry claims to not begrudge the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he does not hold back when addressing the injustices and wrongs that his people have faced at the expense of…

Roundtable: Considering the Next Generation of Indigenous Children

The year was 1984 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and an elementary school was practicing for a Thanksgiving play. Children were on stage dressed as Pilgrims, Native Americans, pumpkins, and turkeys while teachers rushed around helping excited…

Roundtable: The Complications of Columbus and Indigeneity at BYU

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have held their own sets of values and beliefs since time immemorial. Indigenous peoples have rejected the Doctrine of Discovery because it suggests that the United States government is…

Roundtable: Latter-day Saint Indigenous Perspectives on Columbus Introduction

When Brigham Young University (BYU) hosted Clark B. Hinckley’s presentation about his book Christopher Columbus: “A Man Among the Gentiles” for Education Week 2019, many community members responded with concern. In his presentation, Hinckley claimed…

To Be Native American—And Mormon

“Lamanite! I am not a Lamanite. They are a wicked people. I am not a wicked person.” I can well remember my father, Albert H. Harris, saying this, both in church and to anyone else…

Diné Doctor: A Latter-day Saint Story of Healing

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. “They say that they are like firemen. They know what they signed up for. They must fulfill their call for duty.” This is what my mother told me when…

The Lamanite Dilemma: Mormonism and Indigeneity

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. Many times throughout my childhood, I heard various church members or my parents tell me that we had to choose between being Navajo and being Mormon. Our family went…

Finding Agency in Captivity: Resistance, Co-optation, and Replication Among Indentured Indians, 1847–1900

When Mormon settlers entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, they brought with them their institutions and attitudes. These included a perception of Native Americans as fallen Israelites who, the Book of Mormon promised, would…

Racial Categories: Indigenous Australians and Mormonism, 1850s to Present

In February 2008, then prime minister of Australia Kevin Rudd stood before the nation and apologised to Indigenous Australians, people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, for the so-called “Stolen Generations.”[1] These infamous eugenicist…

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Joseph Fielding Smith’s Evolving Views on Race: The Odyssey of a Mormon Apostle-President

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. In 1963, Joseph Henderson, a non-Mormon from New York, wrote a pointed letter to LDS Church apostle Joseph Fielding Smith asking him about the racial…

Review: Unerasing Shoshone Testaments of Survival, Faith, and Hope Darren Parry, The Bear River Massacre

Although Darren Parry claims to not begrudge the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he does not hold back when addressing the injustices and wrongs that his people have faced at the expense of…

Roundtable: Considering the Next Generation of Indigenous Children

The year was 1984 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and an elementary school was practicing for a Thanksgiving play. Children were on stage dressed as Pilgrims, Native Americans, pumpkins, and turkeys while teachers rushed around helping excited…

Roundtable: The Complications of Columbus and Indigeneity at BYU

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have held their own sets of values and beliefs since time immemorial. Indigenous peoples have rejected the Doctrine of Discovery because it suggests that the United States government is…

Roundtable: Latter-day Saint Indigenous Perspectives on Columbus Introduction

When Brigham Young University (BYU) hosted Clark B. Hinckley’s presentation about his book Christopher Columbus: “A Man Among the Gentiles” for Education Week 2019, many community members responded with concern. In his presentation, Hinckley claimed…

To Be Native American—And Mormon

“Lamanite! I am not a Lamanite. They are a wicked people. I am not a wicked person.” I can well remember my father, Albert H. Harris, saying this, both in church and to anyone else…

Diné Doctor: A Latter-day Saint Story of Healing

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. “They say that they are like firemen. They know what they signed up for. They must fulfill their call for duty.” This is what my mother told me when…

The Lamanite Dilemma: Mormonism and Indigeneity

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. Many times throughout my childhood, I heard various church members or my parents tell me that we had to choose between being Navajo and being Mormon. Our family went…

Finding Agency in Captivity: Resistance, Co-optation, and Replication Among Indentured Indians, 1847–1900

When Mormon settlers entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, they brought with them their institutions and attitudes. These included a perception of Native Americans as fallen Israelites who, the Book of Mormon promised, would…

Racial Categories: Indigenous Australians and Mormonism, 1850s to Present

In February 2008, then prime minister of Australia Kevin Rudd stood before the nation and apologised to Indigenous Australians, people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, for the so-called “Stolen Generations.”[1] These infamous eugenicist…

Mormonism and White Supremacy As White Mormon Scholarship

Mormonism and White Supremacy As Cultural Critique

Mormonism and White Supremacy As an Explanation of Mormonism and White Supremacys

Tikkun K’nessiah: Repairing the Church

Rebranding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Chinese-Speaking Regions

Remembering Jane Manning James Quincy D. Newell. Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon

In this carefully researched work, Quincy D. Newell produces a powerful narrative of Jane Manning James’s life from limited records. Newell reveals what life was like for someone like James, whom she refers to as…

Multiculturalism as Resistance: Latina Migrants Navigate U.S. Mormon Spaces

Lessons from Baltimore’s Black Mormon Matriarchs on Discovering God’s Compassion Laura Rutter Strickling. On Fire in Baltimore: Black Mormon Women and Conversion in a Raging City.

Wrestling with the Racism of the Book of Mormon

A sermon wrestling with the curse of blackness in the Book of Mormon. Note: The Dialogue Foundation provides the web format of article as a courtesy. Please note that there may be unintentional differences from…

Racism

The only way that you can both help the poor and needy and preach the gospel is if you let go of racism “and help others to do the same.”

True Joy Cannot Be Found in the Garden

Room for Me

Imagery and Identity

Listening for a Change

“There Is No Equality”: William E. Berrett, BYU, and Healing the Wounds of Racism in the Latter-day Saint Past and Present

2019: 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” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol 52 No. 3 (2019):62–83. De…

Review: An Essential Conversation Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, eds. The Mormon Church & Blacks: A Documentary History

Interview: Father-Daughter Interview on Blacks and the Priesthood

A beautiful interview wherein Christensen said “If we look at an organization being a circle, there are a lot of people who are trying really, really hard to stay right there, just on the edge.…

Roundtable: The Black Cain in White Garments

Jackson explains “The Church refused to grant the Black body whole recognition and divinity. To Nephi, I was not fair and delightsome. To Joseph, I was a violator of the most sacred principles of society,…

Roundtable: Shifting Tides: A Clarion Call for Inclusion and Social Justice

“What can we do to help and make a difference in the fight for racial and social justice?” McCoy responds to the BYU students who asked these questions which he brought up in an annual…

Roundtable: When Did You Become Black?

After taking a genelogy DNA test, Houston finds some African ancestory. “Where to begin in answering all those questions? But at the most basic level, I simply liked that I was from Africa.

Roundtable: A Balm in Gilead: Reconciling Black Bodies within a Mormon Imagination

“As much we may hope that one would disregard the explicitly racial teachings of the past, the significance of corporeality in the Mormon imagination is such that Mormonism’s racial wounds run deep. With-out a thoughtful…

Roundtable: The Preacher, the Labor Leader, the Homosexual, and the Jew: The Template for Achieving Great Goals

Burch explains “Individually we can be strong and accomplish wonderful things. Together, united, we can be unstoppable and accomplish great things that are community-changing, world-enhancing, life-uplifting.”

One Devout Mormon Family’s Struggle with Racism

This article tells the impact of LDS racial teachings on a single family history, the Marshalls, from Alabama in the 19th c. to Filmore, Utah in the present.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Mormonism: Dialogue, Race, and Pluralism

This essay provides an outline for how to have a more robust intrafaith dialogue about race among members of the LDS church. Using principles from Martin Luther King, Jr. about dialogue on race, Whitaker argues…

Mormons & Lineage: The Complicated History of Blacks & Patriarchal Blessings, 1830–2018

The priesthood revelation of 1978 eased some of the tension when the apostles affirmed that Blacks could now be “adopted into the House of Israel” as full participants in Mormon liturgical rites. But this doctrinal…

The Possessive Investment in Rightness: White Supremacy and the Mormon Movement

Brooks explains that “Mormons will have to choose to acknowledge the pivotal and pervasive role of white supremacy in the founding of LDS institutions and the growth of the Mormon movement.”

Negotiating Black Self-Hate within the LDS Church

Smith considers “why would any self-aware Black person find Mormonism the least bit appealing given its ignoble history of racial exclusion and marginalization?”

Looking Back, Looking Forward: “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine” 45 Years Later

It has been forty-five years since Dialogue published Bush’s essay entitled “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview”2 and forty years since Official Declaration 2 ended the priesthood/temple ban.

The Limits of Divine Love: The Church and the Negro by John Lewis Lund

Black Images and White Images

The Rule of Law and the Dilemma of Minorities

Law and Order — A Two Way Street

Responses and Perspectives: Lester Bush’s Historical Overview: Other Perspectives

Responding to Bush, Thomasson wrote in response to Lester Bush’s Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Review which that article caused him to reflect on what he believes and so it became to be very valuable…

Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview

Lester Bush’s landmark article tells the most comprehensive history of the church’s teachings on race and priesthood, destabilizing the idea that it originated with Joseph Smith or had been consistently taught.

The Challenge of Africa

The New Revelation: A Personal View

A Priestly Role for a Prophetic Church: The RLDS Church and Black Americans

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.

Elijah Abel and the Changing Status of Blacks Within Mormonism

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…

Saint Without Priesthood: The Collected Testimonies of Ex-Slave Samuel D. Chambers

The editors of Dialogue in 1979 compiled the testimonies of a former slave, Samuel Chambers, who was a member of the church.

Introduction

The Fading of the Pharaoh’s Curse: The Decline and Fall of the Priesthood Ban Against Blacks

Mauss situates the 1978 revelation on the priesthood in modern American historical context. Everything changed for the Church during the Civil Rights Movement when people both inside and outside the Church were harshly critcizing the…

To Be Native American — and Mormon

“Great Spirit Listen”: The American Indian in Mormon Music

My People, the Indians

Helen John: The Beginnings of Indian Placement

Captain Dan Jones and the Welch Indians

The Mormons and the Ghost Dance

The Captivity Narrative on Mormon Trails, 1846-65

Joseph Smith and the Clash of Sacred Cultures

Shortly after the church was organized, one of Joseph Smith’s main priorities during his lifetime was preaching to the Native Americans, who he believed to be the descendants of the Lamanites.

“Lamanites” and the Spirit of the Lord

David

Spencer W. Kimball: A Man for His Times

The Vast Landscape of His Heart

Spencer W. Kimball, Apostle of Love

Miguel Aju

“White” of “Pure”: Five Vignettes

The Book of Mormon variously uses “white” and “pure” in the same verse in different editions. This article traces the history of those changes, who was behind them, and why.

The Last Code Talker

The Mark of the Curse: Lingering Racism in Mormon Doctrine

Norman discusses instances where the racist teachings that justified the priesthood restrictions before 1978 continue to be taught.

Essay for June 9, 1998

Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons–Script

“Let the Truth Heal”: The Making of Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons

Dialoguing Online: The Best of 10+ Years of Mormons Blogging

Dialogue Topic Pages Podcast #2: Race

Joseph Fielding Smith’s Evolving Views on Race: The Odyssey of a Mormon Apostle-President

Listen to the Out Loud Interview about this article here. In 1963, Joseph Henderson, a non-Mormon from New York, wrote a pointed letter to LDS Church apostle Joseph Fielding Smith asking him about the racial…

Review: Unerasing Shoshone Testaments of Survival, Faith, and Hope Darren Parry, The Bear River Massacre

Although Darren Parry claims to not begrudge the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he does not hold back when addressing the injustices and wrongs that his people have faced at the expense of…

Roundtable: Considering the Next Generation of Indigenous Children

The year was 1984 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and an elementary school was practicing for a Thanksgiving play. Children were on stage dressed as Pilgrims, Native Americans, pumpkins, and turkeys while teachers rushed around helping excited…

Roundtable: The Complications of Columbus and Indigeneity at BYU

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have held their own sets of values and beliefs since time immemorial. Indigenous peoples have rejected the Doctrine of Discovery because it suggests that the United States government is…

Roundtable: Latter-day Saint Indigenous Perspectives on Columbus Introduction

When Brigham Young University (BYU) hosted Clark B. Hinckley’s presentation about his book Christopher Columbus: “A Man Among the Gentiles” for Education Week 2019, many community members responded with concern. In his presentation, Hinckley claimed…

To Be Native American—And Mormon

“Lamanite! I am not a Lamanite. They are a wicked people. I am not a wicked person.” I can well remember my father, Albert H. Harris, saying this, both in church and to anyone else…

Diné Doctor: A Latter-day Saint Story of Healing

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. “They say that they are like firemen. They know what they signed up for. They must fulfill their call for duty.” This is what my mother told me when…

The Lamanite Dilemma: Mormonism and Indigeneity

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. Many times throughout my childhood, I heard various church members or my parents tell me that we had to choose between being Navajo and being Mormon. Our family went…

Finding Agency in Captivity: Resistance, Co-optation, and Replication Among Indentured Indians, 1847–1900

When Mormon settlers entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, they brought with them their institutions and attitudes. These included a perception of Native Americans as fallen Israelites who, the Book of Mormon promised, would…

Racial Categories: Indigenous Australians and Mormonism, 1850s to Present

In February 2008, then prime minister of Australia Kevin Rudd stood before the nation and apologised to Indigenous Australians, people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, for the so-called “Stolen Generations.”[1] These infamous eugenicist…

Mormonism and White Supremacy As White Mormon Scholarship

Mormonism and White Supremacy As Cultural Critique

Mormonism and White Supremacy As an Explanation of Mormonism and White Supremacys

Tikkun K’nessiah: Repairing the Church

Rebranding the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Chinese-Speaking Regions

Remembering Jane Manning James Quincy D. Newell. Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon

In this carefully researched work, Quincy D. Newell produces a powerful narrative of Jane Manning James’s life from limited records. Newell reveals what life was like for someone like James, whom she refers to as…

Multiculturalism as Resistance: Latina Migrants Navigate U.S. Mormon Spaces

Lessons from Baltimore’s Black Mormon Matriarchs on Discovering God’s Compassion Laura Rutter Strickling. On Fire in Baltimore: Black Mormon Women and Conversion in a Raging City.

Wrestling with the Racism of the Book of Mormon

A sermon wrestling with the curse of blackness in the Book of Mormon. Note: The Dialogue Foundation provides the web format of article as a courtesy. Please note that there may be unintentional differences from…

Racism

The only way that you can both help the poor and needy and preach the gospel is if you let go of racism “and help others to do the same.”

True Joy Cannot Be Found in the Garden

Room for Me

Imagery and Identity

Listening for a Change

“There Is No Equality”: William E. Berrett, BYU, and Healing the Wounds of Racism in the Latter-day Saint Past and Present

2019: 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” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol 52 No. 3 (2019):62–83. De…

Review: An Essential Conversation Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, eds. The Mormon Church & Blacks: A Documentary History

Interview: Father-Daughter Interview on Blacks and the Priesthood

A beautiful interview wherein Christensen said “If we look at an organization being a circle, there are a lot of people who are trying really, really hard to stay right there, just on the edge.…

Roundtable: The Black Cain in White Garments

Jackson explains “The Church refused to grant the Black body whole recognition and divinity. To Nephi, I was not fair and delightsome. To Joseph, I was a violator of the most sacred principles of society,…

Roundtable: Shifting Tides: A Clarion Call for Inclusion and Social Justice

“What can we do to help and make a difference in the fight for racial and social justice?” McCoy responds to the BYU students who asked these questions which he brought up in an annual…

Roundtable: When Did You Become Black?

After taking a genelogy DNA test, Houston finds some African ancestory. “Where to begin in answering all those questions? But at the most basic level, I simply liked that I was from Africa.

Roundtable: A Balm in Gilead: Reconciling Black Bodies within a Mormon Imagination

“As much we may hope that one would disregard the explicitly racial teachings of the past, the significance of corporeality in the Mormon imagination is such that Mormonism’s racial wounds run deep. With-out a thoughtful…

Roundtable: The Preacher, the Labor Leader, the Homosexual, and the Jew: The Template for Achieving Great Goals

Burch explains “Individually we can be strong and accomplish wonderful things. Together, united, we can be unstoppable and accomplish great things that are community-changing, world-enhancing, life-uplifting.”

One Devout Mormon Family’s Struggle with Racism

This article tells the impact of LDS racial teachings on a single family history, the Marshalls, from Alabama in the 19th c. to Filmore, Utah in the present.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Mormonism: Dialogue, Race, and Pluralism

This essay provides an outline for how to have a more robust intrafaith dialogue about race among members of the LDS church. Using principles from Martin Luther King, Jr. about dialogue on race, Whitaker argues…

Mormons & Lineage: The Complicated History of Blacks & Patriarchal Blessings, 1830–2018

The priesthood revelation of 1978 eased some of the tension when the apostles affirmed that Blacks could now be “adopted into the House of Israel” as full participants in Mormon liturgical rites. But this doctrinal…

The Possessive Investment in Rightness: White Supremacy and the Mormon Movement

Brooks explains that “Mormons will have to choose to acknowledge the pivotal and pervasive role of white supremacy in the founding of LDS institutions and the growth of the Mormon movement.”

Negotiating Black Self-Hate within the LDS Church

Smith considers “why would any self-aware Black person find Mormonism the least bit appealing given its ignoble history of racial exclusion and marginalization?”

Looking Back, Looking Forward: “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine” 45 Years Later

It has been forty-five years since Dialogue published Bush’s essay entitled “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview”2 and forty years since Official Declaration 2 ended the priesthood/temple ban.

The Limits of Divine Love: The Church and the Negro by John Lewis Lund

Black Images and White Images

The Rule of Law and the Dilemma of Minorities

Law and Order — A Two Way Street

Responses and Perspectives: Lester Bush’s Historical Overview: Other Perspectives

Responding to Bush, Thomasson wrote in response to Lester Bush’s Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Review which that article caused him to reflect on what he believes and so it became to be very valuable…

Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview

Lester Bush’s landmark article tells the most comprehensive history of the church’s teachings on race and priesthood, destabilizing the idea that it originated with Joseph Smith or had been consistently taught.

The Challenge of Africa

The New Revelation: A Personal View

A Priestly Role for a Prophetic Church: The RLDS Church and Black Americans

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.

Elijah Abel and the Changing Status of Blacks Within Mormonism

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…

Saint Without Priesthood: The Collected Testimonies of Ex-Slave Samuel D. Chambers

The editors of Dialogue in 1979 compiled the testimonies of a former slave, Samuel Chambers, who was a member of the church.

Introduction

The Fading of the Pharaoh’s Curse: The Decline and Fall of the Priesthood Ban Against Blacks

Mauss situates the 1978 revelation on the priesthood in modern American historical context. Everything changed for the Church during the Civil Rights Movement when people both inside and outside the Church were harshly critcizing the…

To Be Native American — and Mormon

“Great Spirit Listen”: The American Indian in Mormon Music

My People, the Indians

Helen John: The Beginnings of Indian Placement

Captain Dan Jones and the Welch Indians

The Mormons and the Ghost Dance

The Captivity Narrative on Mormon Trails, 1846-65

Joseph Smith and the Clash of Sacred Cultures

Shortly after the church was organized, one of Joseph Smith’s main priorities during his lifetime was preaching to the Native Americans, who he believed to be the descendants of the Lamanites.

“Lamanites” and the Spirit of the Lord

David

Spencer W. Kimball: A Man for His Times

The Vast Landscape of His Heart

Spencer W. Kimball, Apostle of Love

Miguel Aju

“White” of “Pure”: Five Vignettes

The Book of Mormon variously uses “white” and “pure” in the same verse in different editions. This article traces the history of those changes, who was behind them, and why.

The Last Code Talker

The Mark of the Curse: Lingering Racism in Mormon Doctrine

Norman discusses instances where the racist teachings that justified the priesthood restrictions before 1978 continue to be taught.

Essay for June 9, 1998

Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons–Script

“Let the Truth Heal”: The Making of Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons

Dialoguing Online: The Best of 10+ Years of Mormons Blogging