Repudiating Racism: A Black Latter-day Saint’s Response

This week’s events have produced some of the most succinct, thoughtful and probing essays on the history and implications of race and Mormonism perhaps yet written: here, here, here, and here.  Indeed, I love that we indignant white folks have raised our voices against the doggedly persistent and  painfully antiquated racial ideologies within our religion. Truly, I do.  I love that we?ve circled the wagons, that we?ve stormed the castle walls (pardon all of my martial metaphors, but they seem appropriate considering the climate.)  Our esprit de corps is admirable and convincing.  The problem is that some of our intellectualizing has perhaps had the counter-effect of privileging the white voices in our community over others who need to be heard from just as much, or moreso.  To that end, I present for your consideration the story and words of a a former student of mine, an African-American convert to the Church and a returned missionary– I’ll call her “Kris” . . . . well, because that’s actually her name.  Four years ago,  as a recent graduate in history, she took an internship in a neighboring state and attended the local singles’ ward.  One Sunday . . . . indeed, let’s give privilege to Kris’s voice, in a letter that she penned to her stake president following a disturbing incident in her ward.

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Guest Post: Professor Bott, Elijah Abel, and a Plea from the Past

Paul Reeve is an associate professor in history at the University of Utah.  He is the author of the award winning Making Space on the Western Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes (2007), co-editor with Ardis Parshall of Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia  (2010), and co-editor with Michael Van Wagenen of Between Pulpit and Pew: The Supernatural World in Mormon History and Folklore (2011). He is the co-editor with Jared T. of H-Mormon, an H-Net group set to launch in the next few weeks. His current book, Religion of a Different Color explores the racialization of Mormons and is under contract with Oxford University Press. Please join us in giving Paul a warm welcome!

There have already been a number of excellent responses to Professor Bott?s racist remarks to the Washington Post.  I write not in an effort to dog pile on Professor Bott, but in the hope of honoring what I believe was the intent of an unknown writer of an important document in Mormon racial history, Elijah Abel?s obituary (Deseret News, vol. 33, no. 50 (31 December 1884), 800). 

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Teaching Official Declaration 2

This is a guest post from Rachel Cope, professor of religion at Brigham Young University.

As a Mormon, I believe, first and foremost, in the atoning sacrifice of the Savior, and I recognize my need to submit to his grace. I also believe that Joseph Smith?a prophetic figure?had visions, restored gospel truths, and translated a sacred text by the power of God. Consequently, doctrine seeps into my understanding of history, and history is intertwined throughout my doctrinal perspectives. Reverence and trust, rather than skepticism and doubt, dominate my view of the past. How history is written and interpreted, then, is important to me as a woman of faith who also happens to be a Professor of Religion at Brigham Young University.

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Lucy Emily Woodruff Smith’s 1893-94 Diary: What it Reveals about Lucy, her Husband, and Ourselves, Part I

With the increased attention to George Albert Smith since his turn in the line-up of Prophets for the 2012 Relief Society and Priesthood curriculum, President Smith has captured the imagination of LDS members for his vulnerability, his personal struggles with chronic mental and physical illness, and his perceptibly gentle and compassionate nature.  Indeed, his very flawed humanness has made him recently a kind of accessible hero-prophet?one with whom some Mormons feel a more intense kinship.  With that keen interest, it?s timely to talk about his wife, Lucy.

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Book Review: Mason, Patrick Q. The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

In The Mormon Menace, Patrick Mason adeptly traces the contours of anti-Mormonism in the late nineteenth-century South and explains how proselytizing, polygamy, and extra-legal violence shaped the South’s response to Mormonism. Mason attends to the ways in which southern honor, defined by a communal estimation of the individual and often deployed to protect or avenge the virtuous female, provided justification for illicit actions against Mormon missionaries. While granting that anti-Mormon violence paled in comparison to racial and political attacks against African Americans, Mason contends that “Mormonism was unique in the way it inspired southerners to set aside general norms of civility and religious tolerance” (13).

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Call For Papers–July 28, 2012, Conference on the History of Mormonism in Latin America and the US-Mexico Borderlands

Call for Papers

The History of Mormonism in Latin America and the U. S.-Mexico Borderlands

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for a conference on the history of Mormonism in Latin America and the U.S. Mexico Borderlands to be held in El Paso, Texas on July 28, 2012 in conjunction with a 100^th Anniversary Commemoration of the ?Exodus? of settlers from the Mormon Colonies in northern Mexico to the United States.

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Black Methodists, White Mormons: Race and Antipolygamy

(cross-posted at Religion in American History)

The latest issue of Religion and American Culture arrived in my mailbox last week, and I was excited to see the first article dealt with a topic sure to interest JI readers: “‘Until This Curse of Polygamy Is Wiped Out’: Black Methodists, White Mormons, and Constructions of Racial Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century,” written by James B. Bennett, associate professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. 

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The Mormons and the Ghost Dance: A Literature Review

On December 29, 1890, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry surrounded a group of ninety Minneconjou Lakota men just west of Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. The wives and children of the Lakota warriors were camped a few yards to the south of the council ground. The Cavalry was engaged in disarming the warriors, who military leaders believed were part of a wide-ranging indigenous conspiracy to push back white settlement. The Lakota men were known to be adherents of the Ghost Dance, a religious phenomenon that originated with the Paiute prophet Wovoka in Nevada and had spread from the Great Basin to the Plains in 1889-1890. During the disarming, a struggle ensued between the troopers and a young Lakota who thought he could hide his rifle under his blanket, and a shot fired into the air. Chaos?and death?followed, as the five hundred members of the Seventh Cavalry proceeded to slaughter not only the by-then largely disarmed men but also the women and children as they fled the scene. Although exact numbers are unknown, perhaps as many as three hundred Lakotas died. It was shown in the aftermath of Wounded Knee that the Ghost Dance was not a broad-based scheme to overthrow U.S. authority, and, more to the point, that most if not all of the Lakotas who lost their lives on December 29, 1890 had died innocently after surrendering without resistance.[1] Although Latter-day Saints had nothing to do with the massacre at Wounded Knee, since 1890 commentators have speculated that Mormons were somehow connected and even the primary movers behind the Ghost Dance movement.

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Darius Gray Interview in The Daily Beast

In the wake of the successful nationwide broadcast of Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons on the Documentary Channel, the political website The Daily Beast interviewed the film’s co-producer (and director and star, etc.) Darius Gray to highlight the documentary and the place of blacks in the church. Here are a few snippits:

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From the Archives: A Bickertonite Missionary Among the Lakotas

Last week my wife and I spent five days conducting field research for my dissertation in the National Archives, Central Plains Region branch in Kansas City, Missouri. Although I’m not writing on a Mormon topic, we flagged anything that might have a Mormon connection in the Bureau of Indian Affairs files we were examining. On Friday, my wife Hope turned to me with an excited look on her face, and handed me this piece of paper:

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