By Matthew L. Harris
Oxford University Press, 2024
Reviewed by Eric Johnson
NOTE: This article was published in the March/April 2025 Mormonism Researched newsletter, a free publication. To subscribe, please visit the registration site.
The most important decision made in the past century by the leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was allowing the Black male membership access to the LDS priesthood after they were previously banned from this privilege.
The reversal was announced on June 1, 1978 by twelfth LDS Church President Spencer W. Kimball. It was claimed that he had received a “revelation [that] removed all restrictions with regard to race that once applied to the priesthood” (Official Declaration 2).
Before 1978, Black members were not allowed to do the crucial temple work for themselves because they could not hold the Aaronic or Melchizedek priesthoods. Because of this ban, Blacks were deemed unqualified for exaltation in the same way other non-Black Latter-day Saints could attain.
A book titled Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality was published in July 2024 by the reputable Oxford University Press. Authored by Matthew L. Harris, a history scholar who teaches at Colorado State University Pueblo, the book required years of research by someone who “specializes in race and religion, civil rights, Mormon history, African American history, legal history, and American religious history.”
He had access to priceless material that allowed him to discover information never before released to the public. (If the church leaders would like to offer us at MRM access to their archives, we promise we will be there within five minutes!) On page xiv of the preface, Harris writes,
“In researching this story, I have had unprecedented access to the personal papers, meeting minutes, and diaries of influential church presidents and apostles. I have also had access to dozens of oral histories, which, like the personal papers of the prophets and apostles, provide never-before-seen glimpses into how Latter-day Saints both embraced and subsequently rejected the church’s race theology.”
It is impossible to cover each important aspect of a 460-page book in a short review. Thus, understand this is a book that ought to be read to get the full picture. Let’s cover three points to give an idea of what Second-Class Saints offers.
- Policy or Doctrine?
When the topic of the priesthood of Blacks comes up, many Latter-day Saints argue that this teaching was nothing more than a church “policy.” However, many church leaders such as Joseph F. Smith and his son Joseph Fielding Smith—the sixth and tenth presidents, respectively—denied such an idea. (When someone argues this way, we ask if the reversal of a “policy” requires unanimous general authority approval or a “revelation.”)
According to Harris, Joseph Fielding Smith declared in 1924 in an official church magazine “that Mormon racial teachings were ‘doctrine,’ that Joseph Smith Jr. taught them as doctrine, and that under no circumstances could Black members hold the priesthood” (15).
Smith doubled down in his 1931 book The Way to Perfection when he “insisted that because God had placed a curse upon ‘negroes,’ they were a ‘less favored lineage,’ which barred them from the ‘holy priesthood.’” As Harris explains, “They had committed an unspecified sin in the preexistence, he claimed, and were being punished” (16).
Referring to Blacks, Harris also describes how “Smith said they were entitled to mortal bodies, could hear the gospel and receive patriarchal blessings, but because they followed Satan in the preexistence their ‘bodies had to be of an inferior class’” (17).
Harris discusses a statement released in August 1949 by the First Presidency saying, among other things, “that the ban was a ‘direct commandment from the Lord on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization’” (26). Harris bemoans that “it ignored the fact that Black men had been ordained to the priesthood during Joseph Smith Jr.’s tenure as a founding prophet, and it didn’t acknowledge that at least one of them had participated in limited temple rituals” (26).
Asking if the 1949 statement should have been considered scripture, Harris so badly wants the answer to be “no.” He points out how the leaders did not include the First Presidency statement in official magazines or declare it from a conference pulpit.
Regardless, he admits that the top leaders of the mid-twentieth century thought this was a doctrine, ending chapter 1 by quoting Apostle John A. Widtsoe who “immediately recognized what the First Presidency had done. He studied it carefully, then wrote at the top of his copy, ‘Church doctrine regarding Negroes’” (27).
2. The importance of Spencer W. Kimball in removing the ban
Harris provides a convincing case that it was twelfth President Spencer W. Kimball who did the heavy lifting to get the ban overturned. He put his neck and reputation on the line to make the reversal possible. This is the same Kimball who is often demonized by some progressive Latter-day Saints today for writing the book The Miracle of Forgiveness in 1969. Among other things, Kimball is harshly criticized for that book because he called homosexuality and similar sexual acts a “threat to family life” while harshly saying this “sexual sin” was an “abominable practice” and even a “crime against nature.”
To overturn a doctrine in Mormonism, each member of the top fifteen leaders needs to agree, with no holdouts At that time there was great opposition from apostles Bruce R. McConkie, Mark E. Petersen, and Ezra Taft Benson, the future successor to Kimball.
Harris writes,
“Perhaps no one was more conflicted over Mormon racial teachings than Kimball. He once told his son Edward that the ban may have been a ‘possible error’ . . . He once told a Latter-day Saint that there was ‘no scripture to prove that the negroes were neutral in the War in Heaven. . .’” (102)
Still, Harris paints Kimball as a racist before he became the president, writing on page 130:
“When Spencer W. Kimball attended a Broadway play in New York City with his wife, he was uncomfortable sitting next to people from diverse backgrounds. ‘The show itself was very good and entertaining,’ he mused, ‘but the people that surrounded us made us wonder if we were in America—the colored people and the foreign element, the Puerto Ricans. It was almost unbelievable.”
When Kimball finally became president in 1973, he had decided to lift the ban, even though he knew it would not be easy to get the general authorities onboard. Besides McConkie, Petersen, and Benson, others defending the priesthood ban included Delbert L. Stapley, Boyd K. Packer, L. Tom Perry, David B. Haight, Marvin J. Asthon, and Howard W. Hunter.
Apparently, Hugh B. Brown was the only apostle in favor of removing the ban. Unless Kimball could make a reversal happen during his tenure, the next two presidents (Benson and Hunter) would have probably never led the charge. This would have meant the earliest the ban could have been rescinded would be, at the earliest, 1995 when Gordon B. Hinckley took over as the 15th president.
Despite his previous racial prejudices, “Kimball’s private papers reveal that his distaste for the ban had grown over time, catalyzed by stories of pain and anguish he heard from Black and biracial Latter-day Saints” (199-200).
Harris points out how, in 1969, ninth President David O. McKay had attempted to lift the ban without the support of the other general authorities. The effort failed.
“Kimball knew that if the ban were to end, he would have to bring the Brethren along slowly and methodically. He wouldn’t force or cajole them. What he did was something far more subtle and brilliant: he would use the newly announced Brazil temple as leverage. The road to the priesthood for Black Mormons went through Brazil” (204).
Kimball announced in May 1975 that the church would build a new temple in São Paulo, Brazil, a place where interracial marriages resulted in the majority of the population having at least some black blood. Yet the Brazilians—generally a friendly people whose appearance is not “African” black—became the perfect poster children to show why the ban should be abolished.
Kimball worked hard to get each member of the “Brethren” to make Declaration 2 a reality. What this shows is that overturning the priesthood ban was nothing less than a political and pragmatic maneuver. Jesus did not appear from heaven saying ‘it’s time.’ This chapter in the book is probably the most important because it explains the process of how Kimball made it happen.
3. Disagreement among the Brethren regarding the Preexistence
Once the priesthood ban had been lifted, the leaders did not seem to be on the same page. For example, what about the preexistence? Did those who “toed the line” in the previous spirit life and barely earned the right to mortality become cursed with black skin, as some leaders had taught in earlier days? There was not complete agreement.
However, as Harris explains on page 250, Apostle LeGrand Richards said, “’Some time ago, the Brethren decided that we should never say that.’ Richards didn’t say that Brethren no longer believed in the preexistence theory, only that the Brethren shouldn’t teach it publicly.”
As an apostle at the 1960 general conference, Kimball
“asserted that dark-skinned Lamanites became ‘as light as Anglos’ when they left their reservations to live in the homes of Latter-day Saints as part of the church’s Indian Placement Program. Kimball theorized that Native Americans had been ‘growing white and delightsome’ and offered as evidence that children in the program ‘are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation” (251).
In 1981, 2 Nephi 30:6 was changed from reading “a white and a delightsome people” to “a pure and delightsome people.” It was a verse Kimball had previously referenced to support his view that those with dark skin could have their appearance whiten with obedience; during his tenure, this verse was changedA. (For more, see MRM’s article at www.mrm.org/white-and-delightsome)
Conclusion
I recommend Second-Class Saints as it offers a much better overview on the issue of the priesthood ban than anything available on the LDS Church website, including the tap-dancing Gospel Topics essay written a decade ago.
Despite a few biases, Harris does a commendable job providing an objective layout of the land. With access to first-hand material that few scholars get to study, the author used his opportunity to lay out the history of Blacks in the church and show how the priesthood ban was finally overturned.