“Crows Can Now Eat Crickets”: An attempt to complicate our understanding of LDS reactions to the 1978 Revelation on the race-based Priesthood and Temple Ban

What follows is a sort of follow-up to Joey’s excellent post last week analyzing reactions to the 1978 revelation ending the race-based priesthood and temple ban. I am admittedly far outside of my own field here, and it is entirely possible I’m not aware of some study that has already been written and published. Please feel free to point out any such work in the comments, and to otherwise respond to the post.

In December 2007, perennial presidential candidate and prominent Mormon Mitt Romney was asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” about the 1978 revelation that signaled a shift in LDS church policy and lifted the ban that had previously denied people of African descent ordination to the priesthood and entrance into LDS temples. Romney’s response was a familiar one to most Mormons:

I can remember when I heard about the change being made. I was driving home from ? I think it was law school, but I was driving home ? going through the Fresh Pond rotary in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I heard it on the radio and I pulled over and literally wept. Even to this day, it?s emotional.

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“No Race Suicide in Utah:” Eugenics, Race, and a 1907 Postcard

This is a guest post by Cassandra Clark, a PhD student at the University of Utah whose work focuses on how religious communities thought about religious discourse and race.  Cassandra is the mother two lovely daughters – both of whom bear the names of Presidents!.  She also attended the University of Northern Colorado where she earned a MA in history and teaches courses at the community college in Salt Lake.

Filed away in the archives of the Church History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are two copies of a 1907 postcard with the by-line, ?No Race Suicide in Utah!?[1]  The scene printed on the postcard depicts an old bearded gentleman, decked out in a black suit and top hat, carrying a baby on each arm with eight children following him.  Each child is adorned in brightly colored dress, and several of them hold toys while two clutch balloon strings.   The artist, identified as C.R. Miller, printed ?No Race Suicide in Utah!? in all capital letters on one fourth of the top right hand corner of the card.

As I held this postcard in my hands, I realized that this one piece of material culture provided a physical representation of the conclusions I drew about Mormon involvement in the American eugenics movement.  The eugenics movement, or the scientific program pioneered by Charles Darwin?s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, encompassed two main objectives. First, the promotion of ?positive eugenics,? or the proliferation of the ?white? race by emulating Victorian gender roles and large family sizes, and second, ?negative eugenics,? or the sterilization of all people deemed ?unfit? because of their lifestyles and economic status.[2] For members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints living in the midst of the American West, eugenics became a vehicle

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Remember Zelmo Beaty: Race, Religion, and Basketball in Salt Lake City

Michael J. Altman received his Ph.D. in American Religious Cultures from Emory University and is an Instructor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. Mike’s areas of interest are American religious history, theory and method in the study of religion, the history of comparative religion, and Asian religions in American culture. He is currently completing a book manuscript analyzing representations of Hinduism in nineteenth century America. This post originally appeared at Mike’s personal blog. He graciously allowed the Juvenile Instructor to repost it in its entirety.

One of my favorite weekly podcasts is Slate’s Hang Up and Listen, a sports podcast that deconstructs sports media and culture with a wry wit that deflates American sports of all its self-seriousness. If sports talk radio is Duck Dynasty, Hang Up is 30 Rock.

Every week host Josh Levin signs off with the phrase “remember Zelmo Beaty.” Beaty, a basketball star in the 60s and 70s passed away recently and this past week Hang Up and Listen reminded us why we should indeed remember him. Stefan Fatsis’ obituary of Beaty opened by staking out Beaty’s importance as a pioneer for black players in professional basketball. But what caught this religious historian’s attention was the confluence of race and religion that surrounded Beaty’s move to Salt Lake City to play for the Utah Stars of the American Basketball Association in 1970.

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Conversations: Elijah Abel/Ables and the Politics of Race within Mormon History

Recently, two biographies were published on Elijah Abel/Ables, a black Mormon man who held the priesthood in the nineteenth century with the blessing of Joseph Smith and many of his contemporaries.  Rather than attempt a traditional review, I decided to write a conversations post with Russell Stevenson, the author of one of the two biographies.  Stevenson is an independent scholar with a master?s degree in history from the University of Kentucky.  He recently self-published Black Mormon: The Story of Elijah Ables. 

In order to make the post easier to read, I have arranged the questions I asked and Stevenson?s responses into categories.

General Questions

The Spelling of Abel?s Name

Amanda: In your book, you use a spelling of Elijah Abel’s name that many readers will be unfamiliar with.  Where does it come from?  Why did you decide to go with that spelling?

JMH: Special Issue on Mormonism and Race

Journal of Mormon History

Call for Articles

Special Issue on Mormonism and Race

To be published in the summer issue of 2014

Finished papers due July 31, 2013

Special Editors:

Max Perry Mueller: mpmuell@fas.harvard.edu

Prof. Gina Colvin: gina.colvin@canterbury.ac.nz

Goals of the Journal?s special issue on Mormonism and race:

This special issue of the Journal of Mormon History aims to broaden and deepen the conversation on Mormonism and race beyond the historical focus on the ban on black men from the Mormon priesthood, and its emphasis on the U.S. experience. In particular we aim to understand ?race? beyond the black-white (European-African) binary. We welcome articles ranging in historical focus from the Mormon movement?s founding to the present day. Articles exploring international encounters, race and gender, and race and politics, and race and class are of particular interest.

Requirements:

Papers should be original work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included. Submissions will be judged on originality, technical strength, primary sources, significance, and interest to our readers. Papers should range from 6,000 to 8,000 words. Please submit manuscripts simultaneously to both of the Special Editors listed above. Include separately a brief CV or biography.

One Family? Race and Mormonism in John Turner’s “Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet”

Today I?m flying west, from Boston to Chicago, for the American Academy of Religion?s annual conference. Depending on how the plane banks west, we might fly directly over Lowell, Massachusetts, the onetime home of Walker Lewis, a black Mormon whom Brigham Young once described as ?one of the [Mormons?] best Elders, an African.?

The timing of this indirect mention of the black Mormon convert?Spring of 1847?is important. Young and most of the leaders of the Latter-day Saints in exile and exodus?passing the winter of 1846-47 in Winter Quarters?were debating the place of black men, or at least a black man, in their community. William McCary, the ?Nigger Prophet,? as some of the Mormons leaders called him, was causing quite a stir in camp.

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Arizona, Race, and Mormon Political Identity

In recent years, historians have looked beyond Utah’s borders to Arizona as a fruitful place to explore the dynamics of race, gender, and class among Mormons in the American West. Two works that have appeared of late include Mormons as prominent actors in Arizona’s history, Daniel J. Herman’s Hell on the Range: A Story of Honor, Conscience, and the American West (2010) and Katherine Benton-Cohen’s Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (2011). Herman examines the Rim County War of the 1880s, which violently drew together Mormons, cowboys, New Mexican sheepherders, Jewish merchants, mixed-blood ranchers, and eastern corporations. Many Mormons, with their “code of conscience,” stood opposed to Southern whites’ “culture of honor” (although Herman is careful to note that these categories were always porous). Benton-Cohen analyzes interracial interactions in Cochise County between Mormons, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Apaches, Chinese merchants, white Midwestern transplants, white female reformers, Serbian miners, and New York mine managers. She asks how racial categories developed along with national identities in the borderlands. In both works, the authors use Mormons to complicate facile notions of ?whiteness.?[1]

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“the seemingly simple issue of heaven”: Jon Butler on Mormonism in American Grace

Over at The Immanent Frame, the always insightful and provocative Jon Butler offers “a historian’s reaction to American Grace,” a sweeping treatment of  “how religion divides and unites us” in contemporary America that has rightly gained a fair amount of publicity and praise since its release last October. Butler’s thoughtful critique wonders whether authors Robert Putnam and David Campbell allow the “many and complex “beliefs'” they survey to “float too free from their historical moorings.”

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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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Lecturing about Race and Mormonism at Harvard College

First, thanks to Kristine and Matt for their kind invitation to join you folks. Second thanks to all members of JI for your kind welcome.

For my first (trepidation filled) post for your august community, I want to briefly share my fresh experience having lectured this past week on Mormonism for a Harvard College undergrad course on American religious history (led by Prof. Marie Griffith, formerly of Princeton).

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