“Do They See Me?”: Race and Mormon History

In a 1973 article, Mormon scholar Eugene England described the decision of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to deny the priesthood to black men as a “cross” that white Mormons had to bear. England saw it as an Abrahamic sacrifice. God, he wrote, “asks us to sacrifice not only our political and social ideals and the understanding and good will of our colleagues and friends, but seems to ask us to sacrifice the very essence of His own teachings—the divine potential of all His children.”¹ England believed that the racism of white Mormons had ultimately forced God’s hand, causing Him “to institute a lower law” in which black men would not have full membership in God’s Church or be able to participate in all of its ordinances.² On June 8, 1978, Spencer W. Kimball announced that he had received a divine revelation rescinding the ban. In spite of the announcement, Mormons have continued to struggle with the racial exclusivity. For instance, at a 2015 conference on being black and Mormon, an African American woman described feeling ostracized because the paintings of heaven in a Mormon temple she visited only included white angels. “Do they see me?” she asked herself.³ The implicit answer was no.

Black Mormons could ask a similar question about official church histories. There has been an attempt among some Mormon historians, however, to excavate the lives of early black church members and to locate the origins of the black priesthood and temple bans. In 1973, for example, Lester Bush, Jr., argued that restrictions on the priesthood had originated not with Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founding prophet, but with his successors.⁴ Scholars like Russell Stevenson (Black Mormon, 2013) have contributed to the debates surrounding the nature of blackness within early Mormonism. This work has tended to be biographical, adding individuals like Jane Manning James and Elijah Abel to the pantheon of Mormon pioneers. The most recent works in this subfield are under review here—Angela Pulley Hudson’s Real Native Genius and W. Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color. These two books differ from previous explorations of race within Mormonism in that their racial analysis brings American Indians and African Americans into the same frame. They also seek to reach a broader academic audience by using Mormonism to understand the intersections of race, sexuality, and religion in the nineteenth century.

At first glance, Hudson’s Real Native Genius fits comfortably within the Mormon historiography. Her subjects—Warner “William” McCary and his wife Lucy Stanton—are familiar to Mormon historians and appear in many histories of the faith. In other ways, however, Hudson’s book substantially departs from standard narratives in Mormon history. She joins the best scholars in Mormon history in placing her work in conversation with wider developments in the field. She is equally adept in feminist theory, the antebellum South, and Native American history. As a result, the book places McCary and his wife at the intersection of several discourses.

Like many biographers, Hudson begins her book with McCary’s birth. He was born in Natchez, Mississippi, in the early nineteenth century. At the time, it was a vibrant port city where the population included Native Americans who worked as “domestics, peddlers, sailors, prostitutes, and occasional laborers”; free blacks who sometimes owned substantial property as well as slaves; white plantation owners; and mixed raced people of various professions (p. 32). Hudson locates the beginnings of McCary’s Indian performances in his experiences in the city. The death of his master in 1813 manumitted McCary’s siblings but left the three-year-old boy a slave. In his autobiography, McCary denied that the black woman whom...