A New Header, A New Day?

Note: Yesterday?s release of newly revised and edited volumes of LDS scriptures?including the unprecedented header to Official Declaration 2?has derailed a bit our planned wrap-up of the posts from JI?s Black History Month series.

On the last day of Black History Month 2012, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) released a statement, ?Race and the Church: All Are Alike Unto God.? The statement read in part, ?The Church unequivocally condemns racism, including any and all past racism by individuals both inside and outside the Church.?

This ?official statement? came only a day after racist comments from Randy Bott?one of BYU?s most celebrated professors?were printed in a Washington Post story on members of African descent within the Church. Bott rehearsed well-worn theological rationales to justify the ban on black men holding the priesthood, a ban lifted in 1978 after the leading members of the Church hierarchy received a direct revelation to do so. Due to blacks’ supposed descent from the divinely-cursed Cain and Canaan, Bott said the ban was not racist, but a ?blessing.? Blacks, he explained, had until 1978, not been spiritually mature enough to handle the authority of the priesthood. [i]

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Neither Black Nor White: The Messiness of Racial Categorization and Black Mormon History

My Great Grandfather Antonio Alejo Aguilar with his First Wife

When I was ten years old, my great grandfather died.  He was ninety-six years old and had been one of the main objects of my affection since I was a toddler.  When we visited his house, he fed us cups of apricot nectar and regaled us with stories of his childhood in Mexico.  He told us about sucking the juice out of fresh cactus fruit, sneaking into the kitchen of his house and watching the maids cook, and attending medical school in Mexico City.  The stories from his adolescence were much darker.  When grandpa was sixteen, he had joined a regiment of federales and had fought in the Mexican Revolution.  A cannon ball came close enough to his head to shave off his hair, leaving him mostly bald for the rest of his life.  He also watched as Pancho Villa rode into one of the border towns of the United States and Mexico and shot a man he expected of sympathies with the Mexican government while the man?s wife bawled and cried for his life.  As a result of the stories that my grandfather told, I thought of him as being completely Mexican.  It was only after his death that I was realized how complicated that identity had been for him. 

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Food and Faith

Southwestern States Mission: Interactions with African Americans, Part 1

Note: This post contains racial epithets.

In the last two weeks? posts, I have established that Mormon missionaries in the Southwestern States Mission (especially those in eastern Texas) had occasion to interact with and observe many African Americans. This week and next I will attempt to better understand the nature of those interactions. Unfortunately, at present, all of my sources were made by missionaries, so the account is one-sided.

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Southwestern States Mission: Epithets for African Americans [edited]

Note: this post contains racial epithets.

As described last week, Mormon missionaries in the Southwestern States Mission (especially those in eastern Texas) had occasion to interact with and observe many African Americans. The missionaries in this study referred explicitly to African Americans in ninety-one diary entries. In this (and next week’s) post I will evaluate the racial epithets the missionaries used.

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Call for Submissions: JWHA Article/Book Awards

JWHA Best Article Award Criteria

Award Criteria

Judges will select the best articles (privileging works that are most relevant to Community of Christ history or theology, regardless of the time period they encompass) based on the following criteria:

Articles published in the calendar year prior to the award.

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The Public/Private World of Mormon Dances and Courtship

In February of 1892, Twenty-two year old Amelia Cannon mentioned the upcoming Valentine?s Day in her journal: ?Valentine?s Eve. I expect none of the fruits of this holiday. Two years ago this winter was the last time I was the recipient of a love token on Valentine?s Day.?[1]  It was not that Amelia was lacking in male attention?as her schedule was full of social engagements with various young men?yet her mentioning of the holiday references the weight that Valentine?s Day, a holiday centered upon romantic love and courtship, carried and still carries. Of course, Valentine?s Day seems no better time to ponder how the actual practice of courtship (and later dating) has changed in the United States. As a historian of American gender history, I have spent a lot of time reading and reviewing Beth L. Bailey?s aptly titled 1988 monograph From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America.  Bailey surmises that due to changes in consumption, the economy, and gender roles between men and women courtship began to occur more in public places instead of the ?sheltering and controlling contexts of home and local community.? [2] Socializing in public spaces afforded courting couples more anonymity and privacy then they previously held. As I have delved further and further into my research, I have wondered how the example of Mormon courtship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century fit with other trends which affected the way men and women courted? Did Mormon courtship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries evolve into a private practice in a public world?

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Two Communal Studies Awards/Grants

For those who, you know, do the communal studies thing, these might be of interest.

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Southwestern States Mission: The Number of African Americans

What follows is a very short, simple post, with one idea: in 1900, more African-Americans lived in eastern Texas than lived in the Mormon Culture Region. The missionary diaries often note the presence of African-Americans, but do so less frequently than the proportion of African-Americans in the population would suggest. This post will briefly describe the population sizes; later posts will analyze interactions involving missionaries and African-Americans.

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The cosmology of the “priesthood” restriction

In this post, I use the term ?cosmological priesthood? to describe the sacerdotal network of heaven and earth as mediated through the Nauvoo Temple. This network comprised priesthood, salvation, kinship, and government relationships. Participants in the Nauvoo temple quorums referred to their organization and this cosmology as simply, the ?priesthood.? Before reading this post, I heartily recommend reading this excerpt from my adoption paper that shortly introduces and contextualizes this usage, and more preferably pp. 56-81 of the paper.

The cosmological priesthood incorporated familial relationships, and as reified in Temple practice on earth, the most exalted station of human kind was to be king and priest, or queen and priestess over one?s progeny, biological or adoptive, throughout all eternity.[n1] The primary justification for sealing children to parents from Nauvoo to the early twentieth century was to establish heirship to the cosmological priesthood. As the governing quorums declared in preparation for the return of the temples in Utah, ?Which of them, if he understands the laws of God, can feel indifferent as to whether his wife shall be his for eternity or for time only; or whether his children shall be born in the covenant and be legal heirs to the priesthood or have to become such by adoption??[n2] Though addressed to men, implicit in this statement is the belief that both men and women had to become heirs to the priesthood network of heaven.

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