The inside story of how the LDS church ended its ban on Black people in the temple

For 126 years, Black men in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints were barred from holding the priesthood. Both Black women and men weren’t allowed in the temple.

It was a longstanding and controversial racially motivated ban that wasn’t lifted until 1978, after the Civil Rights Movement took hold in America.

But Matthew Harris outlines in his new book that the lifting of the ban wasn’t the end of the story. Matthew Harris is the author of “Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality.”

Full conversation

MATTHEW HARRIS: Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism when he founded in 1830, Black men were allowed to hold the priesthood. But, his successor, Brigham Young implemented a policy or a ban in 1852. It began when a couple of Black men had taken polygamous white wives and Brigham Young didn’t like that. Mormons were known to practice polygamy, or plural marriage as they put it in the early days of the church, and when Black men started taking white wives, that’s when he started this priest and temple ban.

LAUREN GILGER: So what did it mean for Black people within the church? Like, did they participate in the church in other ways, or there are just not that many of them?

HARRIS: Well, in the 19th century, there were not a lot of Black Latter-day Saints and they did have some privileges in the church. They could enjoy limited temple privileges. The operative word is limited, they couldn’t get married in the temple, which is one of the higher church ordinances, that you could be married as a man and a wife.

But in the 20th century, their participation was up and down, depending on who the church president was and depending on where they worshiped. Some of the local lay leaders called bishops, allowed them to speak in church, others did not.

GILGER: So I want to talk then about the bulk of the book here, which is about when this started to change, right? Like, talk about the sort of outside pressure what was happening in the world around the LDS church when the people in the hierarchy started to reconsider this kind of, in the mid 20th century.

HARRIS: The church started to globalize in the mid 20th century after the second World War, and globalization means just what it sounds like. They wanted to bring the gospel into every Kindred nation tongue and people, which is a biblical injunction. But, they realized right away that that would be difficult to do if they couldn’t go into sub-Saharan Africa because of the priesthood temple ban.

Also, the NAACP during the civil rights movement and other civil rights groups started to really, really pressure the church to lift its ban because they saw the theology underlying the ban as intrinsically connected with racial equality, that is civil rights. And so, they started to put pressure on the church to lift the ban so that they could support civil rights.

GILGER: So for this book, you went deep into the archives of the church, right and found private papers from people who were in the hierarchy of the church at the time when this discussion started to happen. What did they show you about how this came about and the sort of motivation that the church leaders had at the time for changing this?

HARRIS: Well, I was fortunate that I got access to the private papers of several key people in this story, including the prophet or Mormon president who lifted the ban, a guy named Spencer W. Kimball. So I got access to his papers, his journals, his diaries, his correspondence, and also the meeting minutes of the First Presidency, in the Quorum of the 12 Apostles, the two highest governing bodies in the church. Yeah, and I got access to private papers of other leaders as well. This story had never been told before because nobody ever had access to the papers that I had access to.

GILGER: The church president at the time, right, began to you wrote, kind of believe that this was morally wrong and started to think about it differently, it sounds like?

HARRIS: Yeah. So, Spencer W. Kimball was the church president from 1973 to 1985. And before he was the church president, he saw how difficult it was on Black people, particularly in South America, where he had ecclesiastical responsibility as an apostle. And so, a lot of Black people in South America would approach him and they would say they would say, “Elder Kimball” — that’s the title of a Mormon apostle — “Elder Kimball, we want to hold the priesthood, but we can’t”.

And he would go home that night and he would write in his diary, how much experiences like that pained him because he wanted these faithful Latter-day Saints to enjoy the full privileges of the church, but they couldn’t because of this ban.

GILGER: OK. So, this finally changed in 1978 when Kimball made this official declaration and it was that he would have had a revelation from God, right?

HARRIS: Yeah. So, revelation in the Mormon parlance means something interesting. It means it’s a process, not an event, and the process was in Mormon scripture, there has to be a consensus of the two highest governing bodies of the church, the Quorum of the 12 Apostles and the First Presidency. So that’s the revelation, is the consensus, and one of the fascinating chapters of the book is I talk about how President Kimball got that consensus. It took him five years to do it. He wanted to lift the ban the minute he became the church president in 1973, but he had to get by, in from the Quorum of the 12 Apostles and the First Presidency.

GILGER: Talk about the back and forth there. Like, what was the conversation like?

HARRIS: Well, one of the, the selling points that he used was a temple that had been announced in Brazil. And what Kimball told his associates is that they just, they were building this temple in this heavily biracial country, and none of these folks, these Brazilians, would be able to attend the temple because you had to hold the temple recommend, you had to have the priesthood,and of course, the band precluded that. So they were donating their money and their time to build the temple, and it was a building that they wouldn’t be able to enter despite sacrificing so much to make it happen.

GILGER: So talk about what came next, right? Like the, the official revelation, this official change in church policy after, you know, so many years was a, it was a really big moment in, in the LDS church, I’m sure. But it, it sounds like that was not the end of the story here when it comes to how the church has kind of dealt with this legacy?

HARRIS: Not at all. In fact, when they announced the ban, it read more like a PR statement. It just simply said that, “Latter-day Saints of all races and ethnicities can now enjoy the privileges of the temple and hold the priesthood, if they were worthy”. But it didn’t, it didn’t address the underlying rationales or doctrines that the church had used to sustain the ban for 126 years. And in Mormon discourse, Black people were denied the priesthood because of this so called ‘biblical curse’ that derived from the Old Testament, that Black people were cursed from God.

And they didn’t really address that, and they didn’t say in 1978 this is no longer the teaching of the church. A lot of the Latter-day Saint leaders simply taught that the curse had been lifted in 1978. And for the, yeah, for the next three decades, of course, Black Latter-day Saints were offended by that and they pushed the church to repudiate that theology which they did in 2013.

GILGER: So they did and, and, and relatively recently, yeah. Talk a little bit about what this legacy, what this kind of reckoning has done for the church and the Black community within it and, and the wider Black community as well, its acceptance in America and in countries that are multi racial around the world?

HARRIS: Well, by lifting the ban, of course, that meant that the church could now globalize in sub-Saharan Africa and in other majority Black regions of the world. But, the church hasn’t done a very good job dealing with the residual fallout from the race, even though they repeated it in 2013, as I noted. The church sort of wants to move on and forget about the past teachings on race, and it’s hard to move on unless you fully owned it. And there are a lot of people in the Black community, for example, who are asking the church leaders to issue a formal apology for its past teachings and that has yet to happen.