Blacks in Mormonism: Race, the Priesthood Ban, and the Church

The Record in Three Acts

Fourteen dated entries carry the whole arc: an open door, a closure that outlived everyone who announced it, and a revelation that reopened it in a single week.

Act II — The Door Closes (1852–1978)

In 1852, addressing the Utah territorial legislature, Brigham Young publicly announced that men of Black African descent could no longer be ordained to the priesthood — the wording the church’s essay uses. The same session passed “An Act in Relation to Service,” legalizing slavery in Utah territory. Over the following decades the restriction expanded: Black men could not be ordained; Black men and women could not receive the endowment or be sealed in temples. Since Latter-day Saint theology places those ordinances at the door of exaltation, the ban did not merely restrict office — it restricted, in the faith’s own terms, salvation’s highest blessings, for an entire lineage, for over a century. Missionaries were directed away from Black populations. Membership remained open; nearly everything that made membership matter did not.

The people inside that century are the story. Elijah Abel kept his priesthood after 1852 — one of at least two exceptions — but he was denied his temple endowment twice: first under Brigham Young, and again in 1879 under John Taylor. He died in 1884, two weeks after returning from a third mission — a man who served the church to his last month and was never allowed inside its temples.

Jane Manning James — a free Black woman who joined in 1841, walked to Nauvoo, lived in Joseph Smith’s household, and crossed the plains among the earliest pioneers — petitioned church leaders for her endowment again and again across two decades. Every petition was denied. In 1894 she was permitted only a proxy ceremony attaching her to the Smith family as a servant. She kept attending, kept testifying, and died in 1908 with Joseph F. Smith — the church’s president — speaking at her funeral. Her endowment and sealings were finally performed by proxy in 1979, the year after the ban ended: seventy-one years after her death.

How was it justified? Over the century, leaders and members advanced theories: that Black Africans carried the curse of Cain; the curse of Ham; that they had been “less valiant” in a premortal war in heaven. First Presidency statements in 1949 and 1969 defended the restriction as divine in origin, and by mid-century most members believed it had always existed — the memory of Elijah Abel’s ordination had been so thoroughly reworked that a 1908 account claimed Joseph Smith himself annulled it, contradicting the same leader’s own 1895 statement. Every one of those theories is now repudiated by the church itself. Which brings us to the sentence this entire topic turns on.

What the Book of Mormon Says About Black People

Directly: nothing — the Book of Mormon never mentions Africa or people of African descent, and the priesthood ban is found nowhere in it. The verses at issue are about its own peoples: passages describing a “skin of blackness” coming upon the Lamanites (2 Nephi 5:21) and similar marks of division. For a century-plus, many members read those verses literally and racially — and folded them into justifications for the ban.

Two things have changed. First, scholarship: researchers at Scripture Central and elsewhere argue the “skin” language functions as covenant symbolism — a mark of separation, not a racial taxonomy — noting the book’s own insistence that God “denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free” (2 Nephi 26:33). Second, the institution: current church materials teach that the Book of Mormon condemns racism and that past racial readings were wrong.

Critics respond that the plain text still racializes skin and that the modern reading is retrofit; the research organization Mormonr catalogs the primary sources on both sides. We take the full verse-by-verse walk in our Book of Mormon guide.

After 1978: The Church Black Members Built

The post-revelation story is mostly a growth story — and mostly an African one, with names the record preserves. Anthony Obinna, who saw the Salt Lake Temple in a dream in 1965 and organized a congregation in Nigeria years before missionaries could come, became the first Nigerian baptized in 1978. Joseph W. Billy Johnson had been gathering believers in Ghana since 1964. Their waiting congregations were baptized within months of the revelation; the first all-Black-led stake followed in Aba, Nigeria, in 1988.

And the unresolved part, stated plainly: the church has never issued a formal apology for the ban, and leaders have said one is not planned. The 2013 essay attributes the ban’s origin to Brigham Young in a context of American racism — but stops short of calling it a mistake, leaving members and scholars to debate whether it was policy or doctrine, human or divine in origin. Black Latter-day Saints themselves hold every position in that debate. Their century inside the church — Abel’s three missions, Jane’s sixty years of denied petitions, the Nigerians who built congregations before missionaries ever arrived — is the part of the record that neither side gets to use as a prop, and the part this page exists to keep in view.