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8. The Curse of African Lineage in Mormon History Any man having one drop of the seed of [Cain] . . . in him cannot hold the priesthood, and if no other prophet ever spake it before I will say it now. —Brigham Young, 1852 When all the other children of Adam have had the privilege of receiving the priesthood . . . it will be time enough to remove the curse from Cain and his posterity. —Brigham Young, 1854 Both the Latter-day Saints and the nation passed through tumultuous and fundamental social changes during the century or more after these declarations.1 In some of these changes, the Mormons were simply in tandem with the nation; other changes caused great tension between the two. The main outline of the national race relations story is well known. It is the Latter-day Saint strand of the story that is the main subject of this chapter. In this scenario, a church and people struggle to come to terms with a glaring but inherited contradiction in an otherwise racially egalitarian and universalistic religious framework. The contradiction was toxic enough for the church itself, but perhaps the most adverse consequence was to delay for generations the extension of the powerful Mormon missionary program to a segment of humanity that it might have benefited greatly. Africans and African Americans presented an anomaly to the usual LDS eagerness for missionary outreach to the varied peoples of the earth, for the church itself resisted proselyting among black populations for more than a century. The anomaly has been difficult to explain, especially for recent church leaders and spokesmen. As a result, even though the troublesome church policy has finally changed, a contradictory and confusing legacy of racist religious folklore hangs like a cloud over LDS relationships with American blacks, even those who have joined the church. How did this predicament arise for the Mormons, and what has developed since? The Curse of African Lineage in Mormon History 213 The Mormon Posture toward Blacks before the Age of Civil Rights As a result of the meticulous research primarily of two scholars (both of Mormon background),2 we now have quite a full account of the changing definitions of the place of blacks within the Mormon church.3 With so much already in print on that topic,I need provide only a brief overview from such sources. The most important historical point is that the LDS Church, which in principle has always had a universal lay priesthood for its male members, denied access to that priesthood until 1978 for anyone known to have any black African ancestry. A derivative policy, for obvious practical reasons, called for avoiding the formal proselyting among blacks in any country (Bringhurst 1981b, 132–34, 151). The origins of these policies are obscure.They almost certainly did not originate with the founding prophet, Joseph Smith, and there is no contemporaneous documentation indicating that they did. Smith doubtless shared with otherAmericans of the time the belief that blacks were descendants of biblical lineages under divine curse, but he does not seem to have connected such remote lineages to ineligibility for the priesthood, as did Brigham Young and others. Smith himself, after all, had written the second LDS Article of Faith rejectinginheritedpunishment,atleastfor“Adam’stransgression,”andhehad certainly dictated the text of 2 Nephi 26:33 in the Book of Mormon asserting that “all are alike unto God,” including “black and white, bond and free.” Origins of the Church Policy and Doctrine about Blacks At least until after Smith’s death in 1844, then, there seems to have been no church policy of priesthood denial on racial grounds, and a small number of Mormon blacks were actually given the priesthood. The best known of these, Elijah Abel, received the priesthood offices of both elder and seventy, apparently in the presence of Smith himself (Bringhurst 1979).4 Thus the egalitarian motif generally found in early Mormonism originally applied to priesthood access as well.The late 1840s,however, brought an especially chaotic period in Mormon history,one that threatened a total fragmentation and disappearance of this new religious movement. The main surviving body of Mormons moved in phases across the Great Plains, eventually to a new gathering place in Utah under Brigham Young, starting in mid-1847. After the Mexican War, Utah became part of a large federal territory, with Young as governor, and in 1852 the first territorial legislature met. The collective trauma of their expulsion, as well as the...

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