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Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality
An in-depth account--grounded in new archival discoveries--of the most consequential development in Mormon history since the end of polygamy
On June 9, 1978, the phones at the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) were ringing nonstop. Word began to spread that a momentous change in church policy had been announced and everyone wanted to was it true? The answer would have profound implications for the church and American society more broadly.
On that historic day, LDS church president Spencer W. Kimball announced a revelation lifting the church's 126-year-old ban barring Black people from the priesthood and Mormon temples. It was the most significant change in LDS doctrine since the end of polygamy almost 100 years earlier.
Drawing on never-before-seen private papers of LDS apostles and church presidents, including Spencer W. Kimball, Matthew L. Harris probes the plot twists and turns, the near-misses and paths not taken, of this incredible story. While the notion that Kimball received a revelation might imply a sudden command from God, Harris shows that a variety of factors motivated Kimball and other church leaders to reconsider the ban, including the civil rights movement, which placed LDS racial policies and practices under a glaring spotlight, perceptions of racism that dogged the church and its leaders, and Kimball's own growing sense that the ban was morally wrong.
Harris also shows that the lifting of the ban was hardly a panacea. The church's failure to confront and condemn its racial theology in the decades after the 1978 revelation stifled their efforts to reach Black communities and made Black members the target of racism in LDS meetinghouses. Vigilant members pestered church leaders to repudiate their anti-Black theology, forcing them to live up to the creed in Mormon scripture that "all are alike unto God." Deeply informed, engagingly written, and grounded in deep archival research, Harris provides a compelling and detailed account of how Mormon leaders lifted the priesthood and temple ban, then came to reckon with the church's controversial racial heritage.
On June 9, 1978, the phones at the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) were ringing nonstop. Word began to spread that a momentous change in church policy had been announced and everyone wanted to was it true? The answer would have profound implications for the church and American society more broadly.
On that historic day, LDS church president Spencer W. Kimball announced a revelation lifting the church's 126-year-old ban barring Black people from the priesthood and Mormon temples. It was the most significant change in LDS doctrine since the end of polygamy almost 100 years earlier.
Drawing on never-before-seen private papers of LDS apostles and church presidents, including Spencer W. Kimball, Matthew L. Harris probes the plot twists and turns, the near-misses and paths not taken, of this incredible story. While the notion that Kimball received a revelation might imply a sudden command from God, Harris shows that a variety of factors motivated Kimball and other church leaders to reconsider the ban, including the civil rights movement, which placed LDS racial policies and practices under a glaring spotlight, perceptions of racism that dogged the church and its leaders, and Kimball's own growing sense that the ban was morally wrong.
Harris also shows that the lifting of the ban was hardly a panacea. The church's failure to confront and condemn its racial theology in the decades after the 1978 revelation stifled their efforts to reach Black communities and made Black members the target of racism in LDS meetinghouses. Vigilant members pestered church leaders to repudiate their anti-Black theology, forcing them to live up to the creed in Mormon scripture that "all are alike unto God." Deeply informed, engagingly written, and grounded in deep archival research, Harris provides a compelling and detailed account of how Mormon leaders lifted the priesthood and temple ban, then came to reckon with the church's controversial racial heritage.
488 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2024
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October 25, 2024
Matt Harris has cemented his place among the great writers of Mormon history. Second Class Saints ranks among the best works in Mormon history EVER! This is not a typical book review. It’s as much a personal reflection on the history of the priesthood restriction policy, or as Eugene England called it “The Mormon Cross”. I became acquainted with Matt Harris while he was researching this book. He had come across correspondence between my father and Hugh B. Brown. The topics of their communication usually revolved around Ezra Taft Benson and his right-wing politics and the former priesthood restriction. Matt reached out to me to inquire about my dad and if I had any other correspondence. I pulled some boxes from the attic that I had taken from my parents’ house following my dad’s passing. I brought the boxes home with the intention of reviewing the contents but never got around to it. Dad was a behind the scenes minor player. He was a prodigious letter writer. Sometimes in his own name, sometimes in pseudonyms. More on that later.
The priesthood restriction was the cross of more than one generation, but it gathered steam post WWII as academics began to delve into its origins. It became abundantly clear that the restriction was not of divine origin and was based on racist tropes that had existed for generations across most of American Christianity. The problem within Mormonism is that the racist origins were clothed in official sanction that grew and festered in LDS culture. Ironically, Joseph Smith, the Church’s first prophet ordained black men. Brigham Young cemented the ban, even though there was significant disagreement among the leadership at the time. Perhaps the single greatest mistake in the history of the Church.
Matt does an exceptional job of detailing the painful history from the beginning of the ban. Brigham’s forceful personality prevailed over those that disagreed, chief among them Orson Pratt. Sadly, generations were subjected to apologetic explanations for the ban as members attempted to grapple with the obvious fallacies of the arguments put forth. Those explanations sadly took on the force of “prophetic infallibility” and doctrine.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of the book is look at the palace intrigue that played out among the senior church leadership. And how President Kimball masterfully brought about change. Because the Quorum of the Twelve operates by consensus he needed to bring his brethren along. He knew there was no other way to make it happen. It became clear that this topic had been on his mind for years. He anguished over it. He knew it had to happen, but the question was how.
From student protests against BYU, government investigations for civil rights violations, challenges to tax exempt status, the loss of some of the greatest LDS intellectuals, the negative impact on the faith in areas of the world, such as the Caribbean, and Brazil where race mixing made the mechanics of the restriction practically unworkable, and his own son who left the church, Pres. Kimball was heavily burdened by this. But he also realized that the change could not come from executive fiat alone. He clearly had made the decision, years before, that change was needed but the question was how and when. There were hardliners that needed to pass on. So, he waited. With each passing year the pressure on the Church grew.
There came a time in 1977-78 that Pres. Kimball seems to have determined that it was time to move forward. He recognized that there were four apostles that were not on board, Benson, Stapley, Peterson, McConkie. Pres. Kimball went to McConkie and asked him to take a fresh look and a deep dive into the doctrinal basis of the restriction. McConkie produced a memo in which he concluded there was no doctrinal basis. It is fascinating his turn around given some of the strident things he had said in the past. He then circulated the memo to the Q12. The day of the fateful June meeting Peterson was on assignment out of the country, and Stapley was in the hospital. The timing may have been strategic on Pres. Kimball’s part.
Pres. Kimball told the Q12 that it was time to make the change. Benson asked to table the matter until the full Quorum was in attendance. Pres. Kimball said, no that “today was an up or down decision.” The Q12 jointly made the decision to proceed, and Pres. Kimball stated that he had been considering the issue for a long time. That he had anguished over the human toil the restriction had caused and that it was time to remove the restriction. The day it was announced I was on my mission in Jersey City. The morning of June 9, 1978 was like every other day. It was a sunny and beautiful day. As I sat at my cast-off desk studying, the phone rang. It was our ward mission leader. He asked if we had heard the big news. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He explained the announcement that the restriction on ordaining black men to the priesthood had ended. I was shocked. I immediately called my dad. He was weeping as he confirmed the change. Over the next couple of weeks many black men across the mission were ordained. In my year in the mission, I had heard some attitudes of racism and even had a few debates with other missionaries about the policy.
Several months earlier we were teaching a black family when the policy came up. It was very common when teaching people from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Venezuela to encounter people with African ancestry. When it was clear we were teaching people of black ancestry and they were progressing, we taught them about the restriction. It was awful and often resulted in people asking us not to come back. I often walked away angry and sad. I wrote to Dad and asked for an explanation. He wrote back with a long letter expounding the history of the restriction. There was nothing in any of our missionary materials that explained what he wrote. At the conclusion of his long explanation of the policy and practice he said, “Despite the foregoing, I have had some very strong impressions on this topic. When I feel you are ready, I will share my experiences with you.”
After my mission we had several long talks about the topic. He related years of fasting and prayer in which the answer came to him that the policy was not of God, that he would see a change in his lifetime and that he should be patient and wait. That really was his motivation for his civil rights work. That personal revelation kept him “in”. There were a fair number of people in the ‘60s who either left the Church or were excommunicated over the restriction. I wondered if some of them may have had a similar experience as dad but then took it upon themselves to call the Church to repentance, rather than “wait on the Lord” and work from within to bring about change. I feel it was the efforts of dad and many others who were writing the Brethren and asking questions, but staying faithful, that had more influence than those that abandoned the institution and became harsh critics.
Dad had a co-worker named Jim Gillespie. Jim was the head of the local NAACP and Dad became a member. I distinctly remember Jim coming to the house to pick Dad up for meetings. In the 1950s and ‘60s the NAACP was considered subversive by some. White members were viewed as dangerous leftists. Dad and Jim were very concerned about the potential repercussions for their government employment. They also knew that the NAACP meetings were being surveilled.
In spring of 2022 I became aware of a letter written to David O. McKay in 1964 by a man named David Gillespie. The letter was discovered in the LDS Archives by Matt Harris. Matt and I talked about the letter and I began to wonder if the letter was written by my dad in collaboration with Jim Gillespie. As I read the letter, I began to suspect that dad was the author. The letter was an anguished statement from a black LDS father married to a white woman. It describes the pain of not being able to baptize his children and other events he would be excluded from as a black member.
I compared the letter to other letters written by dad, including my mission letters. They are written in the same style, punctuation, structure, font, and salutation. The name of the letter writer was like his other anonymous letters using pseudonyms, often combined with one of my siblings' names.
Matt Harris found the letter in John Fitzgerald’s papers at the University of Utah archives. John was a close friend of dad, and they collaborated a lot on research on priesthood restrictions. Jim Gillispie’s son was very light skinned, blue eyed and was married to a white LDS girl, which fits with the story of “David” in the letter. The crowning clue is the return address. It was the apartment building where my parents lived until the year before I was born. The letter was written 10 years after they moved. Lastly, here is no record of birth or death of David Gillispie. He did not exist. All the pieces fit together. Dad was the author!
Realizing this gave me a great deal of admiration for dad. I wonder how that and other letters influenced the dialogue among the general authorities. It was one of many efforts, and prayers that maybe pushed the needle leading to the change 13 years later. I don’t know, but I sure am proud of him.
I am left to wonder what the church would look like today if the ban had never been imposed. I’m convinced we would be bigger, stronger, more diverse, more tolerant. We wouldn’t have lost Biddy Mason who became the founder of the AME in Los Angles and towering figure in California. And who knows who else. We could have been at the fore of the Civil Rights movement as a people rather than having some LDS look upon Martin Luther King as a communist. My mind could wander for hours on what might have been.
One last comment. I had a series of church callings that involved close contact with many of the apostles. When I had the opportunity, I asked them if they could share with me the experience of the meeting when the decision was made in 1978. Three of them were in the meeting, Hinckley, Packer, Perry. The common thread was that everyone experienced it differently. But the commonality was that it was an overwhelming sense of peace, love, and joy. Not quite the elaboration that grew in some circles of heavenly manifestations.
The priesthood restriction was the cross of more than one generation, but it gathered steam post WWII as academics began to delve into its origins. It became abundantly clear that the restriction was not of divine origin and was based on racist tropes that had existed for generations across most of American Christianity. The problem within Mormonism is that the racist origins were clothed in official sanction that grew and festered in LDS culture. Ironically, Joseph Smith, the Church’s first prophet ordained black men. Brigham Young cemented the ban, even though there was significant disagreement among the leadership at the time. Perhaps the single greatest mistake in the history of the Church.
Matt does an exceptional job of detailing the painful history from the beginning of the ban. Brigham’s forceful personality prevailed over those that disagreed, chief among them Orson Pratt. Sadly, generations were subjected to apologetic explanations for the ban as members attempted to grapple with the obvious fallacies of the arguments put forth. Those explanations sadly took on the force of “prophetic infallibility” and doctrine.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of the book is look at the palace intrigue that played out among the senior church leadership. And how President Kimball masterfully brought about change. Because the Quorum of the Twelve operates by consensus he needed to bring his brethren along. He knew there was no other way to make it happen. It became clear that this topic had been on his mind for years. He anguished over it. He knew it had to happen, but the question was how.
From student protests against BYU, government investigations for civil rights violations, challenges to tax exempt status, the loss of some of the greatest LDS intellectuals, the negative impact on the faith in areas of the world, such as the Caribbean, and Brazil where race mixing made the mechanics of the restriction practically unworkable, and his own son who left the church, Pres. Kimball was heavily burdened by this. But he also realized that the change could not come from executive fiat alone. He clearly had made the decision, years before, that change was needed but the question was how and when. There were hardliners that needed to pass on. So, he waited. With each passing year the pressure on the Church grew.
There came a time in 1977-78 that Pres. Kimball seems to have determined that it was time to move forward. He recognized that there were four apostles that were not on board, Benson, Stapley, Peterson, McConkie. Pres. Kimball went to McConkie and asked him to take a fresh look and a deep dive into the doctrinal basis of the restriction. McConkie produced a memo in which he concluded there was no doctrinal basis. It is fascinating his turn around given some of the strident things he had said in the past. He then circulated the memo to the Q12. The day of the fateful June meeting Peterson was on assignment out of the country, and Stapley was in the hospital. The timing may have been strategic on Pres. Kimball’s part.
Pres. Kimball told the Q12 that it was time to make the change. Benson asked to table the matter until the full Quorum was in attendance. Pres. Kimball said, no that “today was an up or down decision.” The Q12 jointly made the decision to proceed, and Pres. Kimball stated that he had been considering the issue for a long time. That he had anguished over the human toil the restriction had caused and that it was time to remove the restriction. The day it was announced I was on my mission in Jersey City. The morning of June 9, 1978 was like every other day. It was a sunny and beautiful day. As I sat at my cast-off desk studying, the phone rang. It was our ward mission leader. He asked if we had heard the big news. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He explained the announcement that the restriction on ordaining black men to the priesthood had ended. I was shocked. I immediately called my dad. He was weeping as he confirmed the change. Over the next couple of weeks many black men across the mission were ordained. In my year in the mission, I had heard some attitudes of racism and even had a few debates with other missionaries about the policy.
Several months earlier we were teaching a black family when the policy came up. It was very common when teaching people from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Venezuela to encounter people with African ancestry. When it was clear we were teaching people of black ancestry and they were progressing, we taught them about the restriction. It was awful and often resulted in people asking us not to come back. I often walked away angry and sad. I wrote to Dad and asked for an explanation. He wrote back with a long letter expounding the history of the restriction. There was nothing in any of our missionary materials that explained what he wrote. At the conclusion of his long explanation of the policy and practice he said, “Despite the foregoing, I have had some very strong impressions on this topic. When I feel you are ready, I will share my experiences with you.”
After my mission we had several long talks about the topic. He related years of fasting and prayer in which the answer came to him that the policy was not of God, that he would see a change in his lifetime and that he should be patient and wait. That really was his motivation for his civil rights work. That personal revelation kept him “in”. There were a fair number of people in the ‘60s who either left the Church or were excommunicated over the restriction. I wondered if some of them may have had a similar experience as dad but then took it upon themselves to call the Church to repentance, rather than “wait on the Lord” and work from within to bring about change. I feel it was the efforts of dad and many others who were writing the Brethren and asking questions, but staying faithful, that had more influence than those that abandoned the institution and became harsh critics.
Dad had a co-worker named Jim Gillespie. Jim was the head of the local NAACP and Dad became a member. I distinctly remember Jim coming to the house to pick Dad up for meetings. In the 1950s and ‘60s the NAACP was considered subversive by some. White members were viewed as dangerous leftists. Dad and Jim were very concerned about the potential repercussions for their government employment. They also knew that the NAACP meetings were being surveilled.
In spring of 2022 I became aware of a letter written to David O. McKay in 1964 by a man named David Gillespie. The letter was discovered in the LDS Archives by Matt Harris. Matt and I talked about the letter and I began to wonder if the letter was written by my dad in collaboration with Jim Gillespie. As I read the letter, I began to suspect that dad was the author. The letter was an anguished statement from a black LDS father married to a white woman. It describes the pain of not being able to baptize his children and other events he would be excluded from as a black member.
I compared the letter to other letters written by dad, including my mission letters. They are written in the same style, punctuation, structure, font, and salutation. The name of the letter writer was like his other anonymous letters using pseudonyms, often combined with one of my siblings' names.
Matt Harris found the letter in John Fitzgerald’s papers at the University of Utah archives. John was a close friend of dad, and they collaborated a lot on research on priesthood restrictions. Jim Gillispie’s son was very light skinned, blue eyed and was married to a white LDS girl, which fits with the story of “David” in the letter. The crowning clue is the return address. It was the apartment building where my parents lived until the year before I was born. The letter was written 10 years after they moved. Lastly, here is no record of birth or death of David Gillispie. He did not exist. All the pieces fit together. Dad was the author!
Realizing this gave me a great deal of admiration for dad. I wonder how that and other letters influenced the dialogue among the general authorities. It was one of many efforts, and prayers that maybe pushed the needle leading to the change 13 years later. I don’t know, but I sure am proud of him.
I am left to wonder what the church would look like today if the ban had never been imposed. I’m convinced we would be bigger, stronger, more diverse, more tolerant. We wouldn’t have lost Biddy Mason who became the founder of the AME in Los Angles and towering figure in California. And who knows who else. We could have been at the fore of the Civil Rights movement as a people rather than having some LDS look upon Martin Luther King as a communist. My mind could wander for hours on what might have been.
One last comment. I had a series of church callings that involved close contact with many of the apostles. When I had the opportunity, I asked them if they could share with me the experience of the meeting when the decision was made in 1978. Three of them were in the meeting, Hinckley, Packer, Perry. The common thread was that everyone experienced it differently. But the commonality was that it was an overwhelming sense of peace, love, and joy. Not quite the elaboration that grew in some circles of heavenly manifestations.
October 28, 2024
My review for the Association of Mormon Letters:
https://www.associationmormonletters....
Let’s cut to the chase. Second-Class Saints by Matthew Harris should, if grappled with appropriately, force a reckoning. The implications of the book reverberate far beyond it merely being a more detailed retelling of events surrounding this pivotal event in Mormon history. It will be impossible for anyone who reads it to be unaffected by what it clearly and irrefutably shows about the history of the priesthood and temple ban and the “revelation” that overturned it. I have put revelation in quotation marks in the foregoing because this highlights the other massive and potentially game-changing contribution of this book. It pulls the curtain back on a process that since the founding of the LDS church has been shrouded in mystery: the process of revelation; the actual logistics of how prophets and apostles produce revelation for the entire church, and what it takes to overturn, change, or disavow longheld doctrine.
Harris’s frankly at times astounding book demystifies this process as it was involved in one of the two most consequential revelations in the history of the church (the abandonment of polygamy being the other) and, by so doing, opens up the door to new ways of framing some of the big doctrinal and policy issues that impact the church today. Despite the thorough and rigorous historical account presented here (and make no mistake, the book is meticulously documented and researched), it is this second contribution that I think will (or at least should) lead to the publication of this book serving as a watershed, an inflection point. Mormon history, and especially the privileges, roles, functions, and methods of Latter-day Saint prophets, seers, and revelators, will be understood and viewed in terms of pre- and post-Second-Class Saints.
Harris indicates that this book has been underway for nearly fifteen years. To aid him in telling a new, more complete history of these events, he was given unprecedented access to all new material, both from the church archives as well as private correspondence and journals, some of them quite sensitive, from the personal collections of members of prominent church families, including the family of President Spencer W. Kimball. This new information fills in the massive gaps that have heretofore existed in accounts of this revelation. These gaps have occurred because, as Harris says, “the church hasn’t made available the appropriate records to tell it. Nor has the church itself told the story reliably, for official documents are shrouded in faith-promoting narratives” (p. x). Harris’s goal with the book is to show how “the inclusion of Black people in the church was as much the product of human agency as it was divine revelation” (p. xi). He overwhelmingly succeeds.
Harris states in the preface that his book aims to place discussions, doctrines, and the revelation on the priesthood and temple ban within its proper historical, social, and political context, with a particular focus on the fifty years leading up to the overturning of the ban. He stresses that his book is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of the motivations for the ban or racism in the church. What his book does is go behind the scenes in the meetings, letters, discussions, arguments, and jockeying for position and influence that took place in these crucial decades.
Past historians have had to be content with having a limited view of the internal proceedings and being forced to correlate political and societal pressures with the moves taken by church leadership, who have always insisted that their decisions reflect God’s will, not a capitulation to “the world.” What Harris’s unprecedented access shows us is that these social and political factors (predominantly the Civil Rights Movement and athletic protests and government pressures on BYU to actively recruit Black students or be stripped of its federal funding) were being discussed often in meetings and were constantly on the mind of church leadership. These pressures, combined with the need to take the gospel to all the world by internationalizing the church into countries with a sizeable Black population (made particularly stark in Brazil, where a temple had recently been announced), was what led to the ban being overturned.
Harris describes his account as “unvarnished”. The book will be a welcome relief to those who are tired of apologetic treatments of the ban. There is not a hint of apologetics in the book. As noted by Harris, some may fault him for this. But for me, and I think for many other readers, this will come as a welcome relief. The apologetics have so taken over this discussion that hearing the actual facts comes across as almost anti-Mormon to many. Borderline heretical. The fact that this book forces a reckoning with prophets, seers, and revelators as actual humans with biases, weaknesses, stubbornness, and tempers is a huge contribution in and of itself.
Harris shows how the overturning of the ban was a contest of wills between the church liberals, like Hugh B. Brown and Adam S. Bennion, who felt deeply morally opposed to the ban and pressed for it to be overturned for decades, hard-liners, like Joseph Fielding Smith, Mark E. Peterson, and Bruce R. McConkie, whose racist doctrinal interpretations (quoted selectively, but disturbingly enough to make the point) cemented the theological justification in place (not to mention the wild conspiracy theorism of Ezra Taft Benson), and moderates, people like David O. McKay and Spencer W. Kimball, who harbored racist sympathies but had their hearts touched by the lived experience of Black members and also realized the practical necessity of overturning the ban. This contest of wills played out over decades, and it was only Kimball’s deft maneuvering that brought the hard-liners to their side and led to the ban being overturned.
This history will be a surprise to those church members who view the priesthood “revelation” in the simplified light that it is portrayed, both in the Official Declaration 2 that has been canonized and in official church accounts such as the essay on “Race and the Priesthood” on the church website. Some newer accounts, such as the Deseret Book published Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood, indicate that there was a lack of consensus among the hard-liners and the liberals on the doctrinal justifications for the ban, but what Harris reveals by pulling back the curtain on the inner details of the proceedings, is that the lack of consensus was the reason why the ban was not overturned full stop. Readers may be surprised to hear that President Kimball had decided to overturn the ban years before the revelation was received. Others had been working for decades longer, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, even surreptitiously. The account of Hugh B. Brown’s decades-long campaign to remove the ban and last-ditch attempt to get McKay to overturn it before he died, only to be blocked by a late-breaking move by the hard-liners, is fascinating, frustrating, and reads with the intensity and cloak-and-dagger intrigue of a police novel.
Just as shocking is the account of how several of the hard-liners, chiefly Bruce R McConkie, fabricated faith-promoting narratives surrounding the overturning of the ban, such as that the event resembled the Day of Pentecost at the Kirtland Temple, not just in spirit but in detail. This led to the claim that all of the former church presidents had appeared to the Brethren in the temple or that Jesus Christ himself had appeared. Though the details of the original accounts are unclear, unsurprisingly, these stories were further embellished by lay leaders and members and spread like wildfire. Kimball was furious when these narratives came to his attention and demanded they be corrected. He rebuked McConkie, who then promptly threw his sister May Pope, who had recorded his provocative, tantalizing, and purposely vague accounts in her diary, under the bus, claiming that she had spread misinformation (disturbingly, his son, who had been spreading rumors as well, was more than happy to smear and disparage her).
As a detailed history of the inner goings-on of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles during these crucial decades, the book is a resounding success. But Harris states that his goal is also to put the stories of those Latter-day Saints who were affected by the ban front and center, which he also does superbly. In fact, it is these stories that underline and reinforce the real human cost of the ban and produce the book’s most moving moments, such as the account of Kimball’s visit to South America in the 1960s where he encountered a mixed-race boy “named Rodriquez, [who] also pleaded with Kimball to serve a church mission, and, when he learned that he couldn’t, said, “I accept the Church and I am willing to wait for the millennium wherein there will be a change of my body and when I can trade this life for another. Please remember me in your prayers” (p. 200). Also moving are the many accounts of members who had their lives upended and their priesthood and temple blessings stripped following the institution of the fraught “one-drop” rule, which required any member who was found to have any Black African ancestry to disclose this to their leaders. The sadness, bewilderment, and hardship in these stories is, at times, heartbreaking and infuriating.
Harris also details how lobbying by Black members over decades, as well as scholarly work and agitation and advocacy by Mormon intellectuals, contributed to the necessary attitudinal changes that led to the ban being overturned. Readers may be surprised at how progressive scholars, professors, and activists were targeted explicitly by church leadership for their views and for publishing historical truths that conflicted with the official narrative. Some lost their jobs or were pushed out of the church as a result of their advocacy. Others chose not to align themselves with a church that they felt was clearly racist.
The joy expressed by many Latter-day Saints when the long-awaited revelation is announced is palpable, and it is clear that many embraced this change with open arms. Harris’s treatment of the decades following the ban, however, will put a pause to any celebration. He details how many justifications for the ban remained official doctrine long after it was overturned, most visibly McConkie’s racist scriptural interpretations in Mormon Doctrine, which remained in print for decades afterward and was only pulled after extensive lobbying despite still being a best-seller. Racism in the church is still pervasive, leading to talks and statements being made in more recent years explicitly condemning racial prejudice. The church took a step towards repudiating former doctrinal teachings by publishing its “Race and the Priesthood” essay in 2013, but it has been reticent to offer any explicit admission of the racist origins of the ban, much less an apology. Dallin H. Oaks famously said that the church doesn’t “ask for apologies, nor do we give them.”
As an isolated historical incident, this refusal to apologize seems curious, even trivial. After all, can’t the church just look forward and not backward? But I think Harris’s book reveals the real stakes in doing so for church leadership. The book makes it clear that the decisions to institute the ban, solidify justifications as doctrine, begin to question the doctrine, change positions, and eventually overturn the ban and the doctrine were made by men. Whatever role God plays in the governance of the church and the revelations that pertain to it, most of the historical data seem to be accounted for by the agency of men. If church leaders issued a formal apology, indicating that the ban was never inspired, was racist from the beginning, and that former church leaders simply got it wrong on the doctrine and the policy, it would potentially undermine the basis for their authority as prophets, seers, and revelators. This, in turn, would open the door to real questions and debate regarding the morality of denying women the priesthood (questions that couldn’t be silenced by a round of excommunications) and the efficacy of the church’s position on LGBTQ issues and other doctrinal issues. Are these man-made policies? Are the “doctrines” that justify them really eternal and unchanging, as leaders continually teach and have particularly doubled down on in recent years? Or is there room for the faithful to suggest that even these things might change in the future? Is it true, as the popular adage says, that “a doctrine is only a policy that hasn’t been changed.” More importantly, can the history of the priesthood and temple ban provide clues as to how this change might happen?
These are discussions that need to seriously happen in the church. These are difficult topics that deserve more thought and less dismissal, with a perfunctory wave towards the infallibility of the leaders of the church or apologetic recontextualizations of absolutist doctrinal statements from former church leaders. For as Harris shows with force and clarity, the doctrines and policies of the church are crafted, elaborated, changed, and overturned by a counsel of men who are very aware of and influenced by the prevailing social and political ideologies and struggles of their day. The status quo can only hold insofar as the internal and external pressures permit. There will always be a breaking point. Whether that constitutes the revealed will of God or an apostolic consensus on a practical necessity may be indiscernible in the outcome, but it means everything in terms of the theological details and how members understand and engage with the church.
That is what is at stake in reckoning with Harris’s Second-Class Saints. I hope that it gets the hearing it deserves and that members grapple seriously with its important yet difficult implications. To paraphrase Harris’s statement about the centrality of the Brazil temple for the extension of priesthood to Black Mormons, “the road to understanding doctrine, revelation, and policy goes through the history of the priesthood and temple ban.” I hope his marvelous book helps us begin to more fully understand.
https://www.associationmormonletters....
Let’s cut to the chase. Second-Class Saints by Matthew Harris should, if grappled with appropriately, force a reckoning. The implications of the book reverberate far beyond it merely being a more detailed retelling of events surrounding this pivotal event in Mormon history. It will be impossible for anyone who reads it to be unaffected by what it clearly and irrefutably shows about the history of the priesthood and temple ban and the “revelation” that overturned it. I have put revelation in quotation marks in the foregoing because this highlights the other massive and potentially game-changing contribution of this book. It pulls the curtain back on a process that since the founding of the LDS church has been shrouded in mystery: the process of revelation; the actual logistics of how prophets and apostles produce revelation for the entire church, and what it takes to overturn, change, or disavow longheld doctrine.
Harris’s frankly at times astounding book demystifies this process as it was involved in one of the two most consequential revelations in the history of the church (the abandonment of polygamy being the other) and, by so doing, opens up the door to new ways of framing some of the big doctrinal and policy issues that impact the church today. Despite the thorough and rigorous historical account presented here (and make no mistake, the book is meticulously documented and researched), it is this second contribution that I think will (or at least should) lead to the publication of this book serving as a watershed, an inflection point. Mormon history, and especially the privileges, roles, functions, and methods of Latter-day Saint prophets, seers, and revelators, will be understood and viewed in terms of pre- and post-Second-Class Saints.
Harris indicates that this book has been underway for nearly fifteen years. To aid him in telling a new, more complete history of these events, he was given unprecedented access to all new material, both from the church archives as well as private correspondence and journals, some of them quite sensitive, from the personal collections of members of prominent church families, including the family of President Spencer W. Kimball. This new information fills in the massive gaps that have heretofore existed in accounts of this revelation. These gaps have occurred because, as Harris says, “the church hasn’t made available the appropriate records to tell it. Nor has the church itself told the story reliably, for official documents are shrouded in faith-promoting narratives” (p. x). Harris’s goal with the book is to show how “the inclusion of Black people in the church was as much the product of human agency as it was divine revelation” (p. xi). He overwhelmingly succeeds.
Harris states in the preface that his book aims to place discussions, doctrines, and the revelation on the priesthood and temple ban within its proper historical, social, and political context, with a particular focus on the fifty years leading up to the overturning of the ban. He stresses that his book is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of the motivations for the ban or racism in the church. What his book does is go behind the scenes in the meetings, letters, discussions, arguments, and jockeying for position and influence that took place in these crucial decades.
Past historians have had to be content with having a limited view of the internal proceedings and being forced to correlate political and societal pressures with the moves taken by church leadership, who have always insisted that their decisions reflect God’s will, not a capitulation to “the world.” What Harris’s unprecedented access shows us is that these social and political factors (predominantly the Civil Rights Movement and athletic protests and government pressures on BYU to actively recruit Black students or be stripped of its federal funding) were being discussed often in meetings and were constantly on the mind of church leadership. These pressures, combined with the need to take the gospel to all the world by internationalizing the church into countries with a sizeable Black population (made particularly stark in Brazil, where a temple had recently been announced), was what led to the ban being overturned.
Harris describes his account as “unvarnished”. The book will be a welcome relief to those who are tired of apologetic treatments of the ban. There is not a hint of apologetics in the book. As noted by Harris, some may fault him for this. But for me, and I think for many other readers, this will come as a welcome relief. The apologetics have so taken over this discussion that hearing the actual facts comes across as almost anti-Mormon to many. Borderline heretical. The fact that this book forces a reckoning with prophets, seers, and revelators as actual humans with biases, weaknesses, stubbornness, and tempers is a huge contribution in and of itself.
Harris shows how the overturning of the ban was a contest of wills between the church liberals, like Hugh B. Brown and Adam S. Bennion, who felt deeply morally opposed to the ban and pressed for it to be overturned for decades, hard-liners, like Joseph Fielding Smith, Mark E. Peterson, and Bruce R. McConkie, whose racist doctrinal interpretations (quoted selectively, but disturbingly enough to make the point) cemented the theological justification in place (not to mention the wild conspiracy theorism of Ezra Taft Benson), and moderates, people like David O. McKay and Spencer W. Kimball, who harbored racist sympathies but had their hearts touched by the lived experience of Black members and also realized the practical necessity of overturning the ban. This contest of wills played out over decades, and it was only Kimball’s deft maneuvering that brought the hard-liners to their side and led to the ban being overturned.
This history will be a surprise to those church members who view the priesthood “revelation” in the simplified light that it is portrayed, both in the Official Declaration 2 that has been canonized and in official church accounts such as the essay on “Race and the Priesthood” on the church website. Some newer accounts, such as the Deseret Book published Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood, indicate that there was a lack of consensus among the hard-liners and the liberals on the doctrinal justifications for the ban, but what Harris reveals by pulling back the curtain on the inner details of the proceedings, is that the lack of consensus was the reason why the ban was not overturned full stop. Readers may be surprised to hear that President Kimball had decided to overturn the ban years before the revelation was received. Others had been working for decades longer, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, even surreptitiously. The account of Hugh B. Brown’s decades-long campaign to remove the ban and last-ditch attempt to get McKay to overturn it before he died, only to be blocked by a late-breaking move by the hard-liners, is fascinating, frustrating, and reads with the intensity and cloak-and-dagger intrigue of a police novel.
Just as shocking is the account of how several of the hard-liners, chiefly Bruce R McConkie, fabricated faith-promoting narratives surrounding the overturning of the ban, such as that the event resembled the Day of Pentecost at the Kirtland Temple, not just in spirit but in detail. This led to the claim that all of the former church presidents had appeared to the Brethren in the temple or that Jesus Christ himself had appeared. Though the details of the original accounts are unclear, unsurprisingly, these stories were further embellished by lay leaders and members and spread like wildfire. Kimball was furious when these narratives came to his attention and demanded they be corrected. He rebuked McConkie, who then promptly threw his sister May Pope, who had recorded his provocative, tantalizing, and purposely vague accounts in her diary, under the bus, claiming that she had spread misinformation (disturbingly, his son, who had been spreading rumors as well, was more than happy to smear and disparage her).
As a detailed history of the inner goings-on of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles during these crucial decades, the book is a resounding success. But Harris states that his goal is also to put the stories of those Latter-day Saints who were affected by the ban front and center, which he also does superbly. In fact, it is these stories that underline and reinforce the real human cost of the ban and produce the book’s most moving moments, such as the account of Kimball’s visit to South America in the 1960s where he encountered a mixed-race boy “named Rodriquez, [who] also pleaded with Kimball to serve a church mission, and, when he learned that he couldn’t, said, “I accept the Church and I am willing to wait for the millennium wherein there will be a change of my body and when I can trade this life for another. Please remember me in your prayers” (p. 200). Also moving are the many accounts of members who had their lives upended and their priesthood and temple blessings stripped following the institution of the fraught “one-drop” rule, which required any member who was found to have any Black African ancestry to disclose this to their leaders. The sadness, bewilderment, and hardship in these stories is, at times, heartbreaking and infuriating.
Harris also details how lobbying by Black members over decades, as well as scholarly work and agitation and advocacy by Mormon intellectuals, contributed to the necessary attitudinal changes that led to the ban being overturned. Readers may be surprised at how progressive scholars, professors, and activists were targeted explicitly by church leadership for their views and for publishing historical truths that conflicted with the official narrative. Some lost their jobs or were pushed out of the church as a result of their advocacy. Others chose not to align themselves with a church that they felt was clearly racist.
The joy expressed by many Latter-day Saints when the long-awaited revelation is announced is palpable, and it is clear that many embraced this change with open arms. Harris’s treatment of the decades following the ban, however, will put a pause to any celebration. He details how many justifications for the ban remained official doctrine long after it was overturned, most visibly McConkie’s racist scriptural interpretations in Mormon Doctrine, which remained in print for decades afterward and was only pulled after extensive lobbying despite still being a best-seller. Racism in the church is still pervasive, leading to talks and statements being made in more recent years explicitly condemning racial prejudice. The church took a step towards repudiating former doctrinal teachings by publishing its “Race and the Priesthood” essay in 2013, but it has been reticent to offer any explicit admission of the racist origins of the ban, much less an apology. Dallin H. Oaks famously said that the church doesn’t “ask for apologies, nor do we give them.”
As an isolated historical incident, this refusal to apologize seems curious, even trivial. After all, can’t the church just look forward and not backward? But I think Harris’s book reveals the real stakes in doing so for church leadership. The book makes it clear that the decisions to institute the ban, solidify justifications as doctrine, begin to question the doctrine, change positions, and eventually overturn the ban and the doctrine were made by men. Whatever role God plays in the governance of the church and the revelations that pertain to it, most of the historical data seem to be accounted for by the agency of men. If church leaders issued a formal apology, indicating that the ban was never inspired, was racist from the beginning, and that former church leaders simply got it wrong on the doctrine and the policy, it would potentially undermine the basis for their authority as prophets, seers, and revelators. This, in turn, would open the door to real questions and debate regarding the morality of denying women the priesthood (questions that couldn’t be silenced by a round of excommunications) and the efficacy of the church’s position on LGBTQ issues and other doctrinal issues. Are these man-made policies? Are the “doctrines” that justify them really eternal and unchanging, as leaders continually teach and have particularly doubled down on in recent years? Or is there room for the faithful to suggest that even these things might change in the future? Is it true, as the popular adage says, that “a doctrine is only a policy that hasn’t been changed.” More importantly, can the history of the priesthood and temple ban provide clues as to how this change might happen?
These are discussions that need to seriously happen in the church. These are difficult topics that deserve more thought and less dismissal, with a perfunctory wave towards the infallibility of the leaders of the church or apologetic recontextualizations of absolutist doctrinal statements from former church leaders. For as Harris shows with force and clarity, the doctrines and policies of the church are crafted, elaborated, changed, and overturned by a counsel of men who are very aware of and influenced by the prevailing social and political ideologies and struggles of their day. The status quo can only hold insofar as the internal and external pressures permit. There will always be a breaking point. Whether that constitutes the revealed will of God or an apostolic consensus on a practical necessity may be indiscernible in the outcome, but it means everything in terms of the theological details and how members understand and engage with the church.
That is what is at stake in reckoning with Harris’s Second-Class Saints. I hope that it gets the hearing it deserves and that members grapple seriously with its important yet difficult implications. To paraphrase Harris’s statement about the centrality of the Brazil temple for the extension of priesthood to Black Mormons, “the road to understanding doctrine, revelation, and policy goes through the history of the priesthood and temple ban.” I hope his marvelous book helps us begin to more fully understand.
June 18, 2025
This is the most significant book that I’ve read in the past 10 plus years that has helped me the most in my ongoing effort to hang on to and be able to continue to embrace the faith of my young adult years. In retrospect I’m embarrassed that I did not have the maturity to decide to not join through baptism the Church of Jesus Christ as a 17 year old in the Fall of 1976, approximately 1 1/2 years before the temple ban was discontinued. Yes, I could say I followed my parents, especially my father, who at that time I literally worshipped the ground he tread upon.
But that is a weak excuse to me because I had also been raised to always do the right thing, irregardless of the consequences. I took great pride in being able to go contrary to the popular grain and just to follow my internal moral compass.
So it was painful to read this book, remembering that I never stood up and spoke out, hence enabling the travesty of the 1852 - 1978 LDS Priesthood/Temple ban of the Black race.
This book is the story of that ban, without apologetics. And it’s unfounded perpetuation for over 125 years. The book’s clarity and honesty is truly soul liberating for me now.
But that is a weak excuse to me because I had also been raised to always do the right thing, irregardless of the consequences. I took great pride in being able to go contrary to the popular grain and just to follow my internal moral compass.
So it was painful to read this book, remembering that I never stood up and spoke out, hence enabling the travesty of the 1852 - 1978 LDS Priesthood/Temple ban of the Black race.
This book is the story of that ban, without apologetics. And it’s unfounded perpetuation for over 125 years. The book’s clarity and honesty is truly soul liberating for me now.
June 23, 2024
Finally—A book that reveals the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Truths about Racism and Discrimination of Blacks in the LDS Church
As an active Black member of the LDS Church, I found this book to be faith affirming and enlightening. While at times an uncomfortable and sobering read, the author provides a well researched work that is fair and balanced with the goal of transparency, reckoning and healing. Uncomfortable Truths can be difficult to hear, accept and understand—even when we expect men and women who are called of God to be infallible humans. At the end of the day, each of us is evolving and striving to do and be better as we follow the teaching and example of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This book goes a long way toward this end as it helps the reader see the long and difficult journey of becoming Christ-Like can be. Thank you Matthew L. Harris for investing your time and efforts in bringing this work forward.
As an active Black member of the LDS Church, I found this book to be faith affirming and enlightening. While at times an uncomfortable and sobering read, the author provides a well researched work that is fair and balanced with the goal of transparency, reckoning and healing. Uncomfortable Truths can be difficult to hear, accept and understand—even when we expect men and women who are called of God to be infallible humans. At the end of the day, each of us is evolving and striving to do and be better as we follow the teaching and example of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This book goes a long way toward this end as it helps the reader see the long and difficult journey of becoming Christ-Like can be. Thank you Matthew L. Harris for investing your time and efforts in bringing this work forward.
August 13, 2024
If you have a mental picture, as I did, of LDS Church president Spencer Kimball praying one or a handful of times over days/weeks/months before receiving the revelation to end the temple and priesthood restriction that limited the involvement of black members of the LDS church, be prepared. This book is your red pill.
Harris shows—with meticulous notes and unprecedented access to public and private papers—that Kimball was committed for years to ending the practice. He watched for decades as Hugh Brown spent every last bit of social, political, and spiritual capital he had with McKay and his fellow apostles, hoping and ultimately failing to convince them to end the ban. As early as 1954, Kimball was convinced there was no divine foundation, in ancient scripture or modern revelation, to the ban and by 1969 he was in the minority of apostles that supported ending the practice by ordaining Monroe Fleming, a long-time Black member who knew the apostles from his work at the Hotel Utah.
Upon being sustained as Church president in 1973, Kimball began a years long process of winning over the other apostles to his cause. He assigned multiple apostles, some repeatedly, to visit Sao Paulo, where they would meet Saints who would be barred from the temple under construction but who were still donating to build it. He tasked McConkie, the (self-appointed?) quorum scripturist, with dismantling the traditional arguments for the ban. Ultimately, Kimball sidestepped the two apostles he couldn't convince, Mark Petersen and Delbert Stapley, by convening quorum meetings while they were out of the country and in the hospital, respectively. Rather than get to shape the discussion, as their seniority would have allowed them, these two were simply informed afterward that the decision was already made, to which they tepidly agreed.
This book severely raised my esteem for apostles Kimball, Brown, and Adam Bennion. There were a number of other Church members, (e.g. Sterling McMurrin, Lowell Bennion, Lowry Nelson) who opposed the ban and worked, where they could, to end it. There are so many Black pioneers whose stories we should tell and celebrate—from early Church history Jane Manning James, Elijah Abel, Q Walker Lewis; long-time members Len and Mary Hope whose Cincinnati congregation was segregated; BYU's first black professor Wynetta Martin; the first Genesis presidency Ruffin Bridgeforth, Darius Gray, and Eugene Orr; the first black man to be ordained after the 1978 revelation Joseph Freeman; the first black general authority and his wife Helvecio and Ruda Martins.
As much as my esteem for these persons has soared, the legacies of those who fought so hard to maintain the ban, whom Harris refers to as "the hard-liners", have suffered: Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce McConkie, Harold Lee, and Ezra Taft Benson. These men preached and published damaging and harmful ideas. And while I like to think, perhaps naively optimistic, that their spirits have repented of the racism they defended while alive, we still have to wrestle with their mortal legacies and ultimately repudiate the things they said and did in God's name to perpetuate prejudice.
Today, there is reason to hope and reason to weep, regarding racism in the LDS church. Presidents Hinckley and Nelson have each taken steps to transform the Church's relationship with the NAACP from one of enmity to one of mutual respect. The Church officially repudiates all justifications that have ever been given for the ban. However, many members still hold to the idea, that for some unknown reason, God allowed and/or endorsed the restriction, even if They did not support or author it. There are no proposals as to what this reason is, mind you, and no possibilities that could ever justify the centuries of discrimination. Moreover, Church leaders have adopted a position that they will not apologize for the past, preferring instead to look to the future. It's no surprise, therefore, that one Black saint remarked in 2017, "I have been in this church for nearly four decades and the racism in the church is stronger today than it was when I joined."
Like Pres. Kimball before us, we have years of work ahead.
Harris shows—with meticulous notes and unprecedented access to public and private papers—that Kimball was committed for years to ending the practice. He watched for decades as Hugh Brown spent every last bit of social, political, and spiritual capital he had with McKay and his fellow apostles, hoping and ultimately failing to convince them to end the ban. As early as 1954, Kimball was convinced there was no divine foundation, in ancient scripture or modern revelation, to the ban and by 1969 he was in the minority of apostles that supported ending the practice by ordaining Monroe Fleming, a long-time Black member who knew the apostles from his work at the Hotel Utah.
Upon being sustained as Church president in 1973, Kimball began a years long process of winning over the other apostles to his cause. He assigned multiple apostles, some repeatedly, to visit Sao Paulo, where they would meet Saints who would be barred from the temple under construction but who were still donating to build it. He tasked McConkie, the (self-appointed?) quorum scripturist, with dismantling the traditional arguments for the ban. Ultimately, Kimball sidestepped the two apostles he couldn't convince, Mark Petersen and Delbert Stapley, by convening quorum meetings while they were out of the country and in the hospital, respectively. Rather than get to shape the discussion, as their seniority would have allowed them, these two were simply informed afterward that the decision was already made, to which they tepidly agreed.
This book severely raised my esteem for apostles Kimball, Brown, and Adam Bennion. There were a number of other Church members, (e.g. Sterling McMurrin, Lowell Bennion, Lowry Nelson) who opposed the ban and worked, where they could, to end it. There are so many Black pioneers whose stories we should tell and celebrate—from early Church history Jane Manning James, Elijah Abel, Q Walker Lewis; long-time members Len and Mary Hope whose Cincinnati congregation was segregated; BYU's first black professor Wynetta Martin; the first Genesis presidency Ruffin Bridgeforth, Darius Gray, and Eugene Orr; the first black man to be ordained after the 1978 revelation Joseph Freeman; the first black general authority and his wife Helvecio and Ruda Martins.
As much as my esteem for these persons has soared, the legacies of those who fought so hard to maintain the ban, whom Harris refers to as "the hard-liners", have suffered: Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce McConkie, Harold Lee, and Ezra Taft Benson. These men preached and published damaging and harmful ideas. And while I like to think, perhaps naively optimistic, that their spirits have repented of the racism they defended while alive, we still have to wrestle with their mortal legacies and ultimately repudiate the things they said and did in God's name to perpetuate prejudice.
Today, there is reason to hope and reason to weep, regarding racism in the LDS church. Presidents Hinckley and Nelson have each taken steps to transform the Church's relationship with the NAACP from one of enmity to one of mutual respect. The Church officially repudiates all justifications that have ever been given for the ban. However, many members still hold to the idea, that for some unknown reason, God allowed and/or endorsed the restriction, even if They did not support or author it. There are no proposals as to what this reason is, mind you, and no possibilities that could ever justify the centuries of discrimination. Moreover, Church leaders have adopted a position that they will not apologize for the past, preferring instead to look to the future. It's no surprise, therefore, that one Black saint remarked in 2017, "I have been in this church for nearly four decades and the racism in the church is stronger today than it was when I joined."
Like Pres. Kimball before us, we have years of work ahead.
August 28, 2024
In June 1978 I had just finished 5th grade and was on a family vacation to Portland for the Rose Festival. I still remember my parents' excitement as they pointed out the front page headlines of the Oregonian, heralding the end of the priesthood/temple ban.
That was the first I knew there had been a ban. Over the years, I was able to fill in many of the blanks in the story as I read and listened and observed. But this book blew me away with all its additional details. It's one of those books where I used two bookmarks: one for the page I was reading, and the other to mark the spot in the footnotes for the chapter in question. I found myself constantly flipping to the back to see what the source was for this or that tidbit.
Looking beyond the events and people chronicled in Second-Class Saints, I wonder if similar events are happening behind the scenes and on the sidelines today for eventual changes in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints's doctrine/policies towards same-sex marriage and female priesthood ordination.
I acknowledge the big difference between that happening and the revelation of 1978 is that there always was at least a tacit understanding that the priesthood would be given to Blacks someday. Still, if there are to be major shifts in those areas, they will probably come about through similar patterns as those chronicled in this book.
I understand from the interview of author Matthew Harris on the Gospel Tangents podcast that he's now working on a book about Hugh Brown. If it's even only half as good as Second-Class Saints, I can't wait to read it.
That was the first I knew there had been a ban. Over the years, I was able to fill in many of the blanks in the story as I read and listened and observed. But this book blew me away with all its additional details. It's one of those books where I used two bookmarks: one for the page I was reading, and the other to mark the spot in the footnotes for the chapter in question. I found myself constantly flipping to the back to see what the source was for this or that tidbit.
Looking beyond the events and people chronicled in Second-Class Saints, I wonder if similar events are happening behind the scenes and on the sidelines today for eventual changes in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints's doctrine/policies towards same-sex marriage and female priesthood ordination.
I acknowledge the big difference between that happening and the revelation of 1978 is that there always was at least a tacit understanding that the priesthood would be given to Blacks someday. Still, if there are to be major shifts in those areas, they will probably come about through similar patterns as those chronicled in this book.
I understand from the interview of author Matthew Harris on the Gospel Tangents podcast that he's now working on a book about Hugh Brown. If it's even only half as good as Second-Class Saints, I can't wait to read it.
September 6, 2025
An impeccable work of history (finally) addressing a critical (and heartbreaking and frustrating) narrative in Mormonism.
June 18, 2024
I feel odd giving five stars to a book that caused me so much anguish, but seeing as how I'm the first person to review the book on Goodreads, I think it is necessary.
Harris' treatment of Official Declaration 2 is extremely thorough and even-handed. Harris acknowledges both patterns of Church leaders teaching racist theology, as well as the ways in which Church leaders are attempting to repair relationships with the Black community.
There are two ways that I think this book shines. First, it does a tremendous job of moving cognitive information into sympathetic information. I have grown up knowing about the priesthood ban as well as a vague understanding of how it hurt Black members. This book revealed to me the deep anguish Black and mixed-race members felt during the ban and continue to feel as we approach the 50th anniversary of the revelation. For those looking to "lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice," this is an excellent introduction to the terrain.
Second, this book provides invaluable insight into the political component of leadership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some may be startled to learn that the picture behind the scenes is rarely as tranquil as many would like to believe, but understanding how tumultuous church politics can be is important for Latter-day Saints to understand since we all exercise leadership within our assignments. I personally am inspired by the accounts of spirited debate on the parts of leaders like Hugh B. Brown as well as the quiet contemplation of leaders like Spencer W. Kimball. I hope to emulate them.
I highly recommend this book to all my Latter-day Saint friends as an important supplement to their study of church history.
Harris' treatment of Official Declaration 2 is extremely thorough and even-handed. Harris acknowledges both patterns of Church leaders teaching racist theology, as well as the ways in which Church leaders are attempting to repair relationships with the Black community.
There are two ways that I think this book shines. First, it does a tremendous job of moving cognitive information into sympathetic information. I have grown up knowing about the priesthood ban as well as a vague understanding of how it hurt Black members. This book revealed to me the deep anguish Black and mixed-race members felt during the ban and continue to feel as we approach the 50th anniversary of the revelation. For those looking to "lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice," this is an excellent introduction to the terrain.
Second, this book provides invaluable insight into the political component of leadership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some may be startled to learn that the picture behind the scenes is rarely as tranquil as many would like to believe, but understanding how tumultuous church politics can be is important for Latter-day Saints to understand since we all exercise leadership within our assignments. I personally am inspired by the accounts of spirited debate on the parts of leaders like Hugh B. Brown as well as the quiet contemplation of leaders like Spencer W. Kimball. I hope to emulate them.
I highly recommend this book to all my Latter-day Saint friends as an important supplement to their study of church history.
February 19, 2025
I knew quite a bit of the early history of the race ban and context of the Civil rights movement & protests vs BYU from my own research — so the strength of this for me is certainly the new access to archives and primary source documents that gave window to the inner workings of SLC. I have heard critiques from Black members of it being light on experiences and viewpoints of Black members…. Which is valid. But this is a groundbreaking work ties everything together, from start to finish.
Here’s a tl of my emotional reaction reading it
🤬
🥺1978
🤬
PS I love you elder Hugh B brown 🤍 you never got to see the day you fought for every day on your life as a GA, and knew in your heart, that everyone around you was wrong about.
PPS Matt is one of the kindest scholars you’ll ever meet and I appreciate the encouragement he’s given me to follow my own research, one day
Here’s a tl of my emotional reaction reading it
🤬
🥺1978
🤬
PS I love you elder Hugh B brown 🤍 you never got to see the day you fought for every day on your life as a GA, and knew in your heart, that everyone around you was wrong about.
PPS Matt is one of the kindest scholars you’ll ever meet and I appreciate the encouragement he’s given me to follow my own research, one day
May 1, 2025
I think every Latter-day Saint should read this book. Incredibly well-researched and so illuminating of the Church’s history of racial discrimination and how decisions and changes are made within the Church.
While the book did not specifically analyze this, I found that understanding the history helped reveal the Church’s blind spots (i.e., how did we end up with such a harmful policy and for so long? Where are we at risk to be wrong again?). My thoughts: 1) the idea that the “world” is bad and should be carefully protected against; 2) the belief that we are the one true church and therefore cannot be wrong, make mistakes, or be influenced by “the world”; and 3) an over reliance/over confidence in prophetic authority without recognizing that prophets are human and also make mistakes.
The book was very sobering to read and made me cry at times. But I think it is so important to sit with and understand our past, because we cannot heal or improve without doing so.
While the book did not specifically analyze this, I found that understanding the history helped reveal the Church’s blind spots (i.e., how did we end up with such a harmful policy and for so long? Where are we at risk to be wrong again?). My thoughts: 1) the idea that the “world” is bad and should be carefully protected against; 2) the belief that we are the one true church and therefore cannot be wrong, make mistakes, or be influenced by “the world”; and 3) an over reliance/over confidence in prophetic authority without recognizing that prophets are human and also make mistakes.
The book was very sobering to read and made me cry at times. But I think it is so important to sit with and understand our past, because we cannot heal or improve without doing so.
July 20, 2024
4.5 stars.
The research is prodigious and I am actually surprised at how many private sources Matthew Harris was able to compile; lends significant credence to his work.
As an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ I appreciate the candid manner Mr. Harris addressed the topic. It isn’t always a pleasant experience reading about the racism of the past and it’s especially difficult when the racial bias is delivered by spiritual leaders - a few of the quotes attributed to prominent figures are tough to stomach- but it’s necessary in the healing process.
Very good book. Easy to understand even if you aren’t LDS.
The research is prodigious and I am actually surprised at how many private sources Matthew Harris was able to compile; lends significant credence to his work.
As an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ I appreciate the candid manner Mr. Harris addressed the topic. It isn’t always a pleasant experience reading about the racism of the past and it’s especially difficult when the racial bias is delivered by spiritual leaders - a few of the quotes attributed to prominent figures are tough to stomach- but it’s necessary in the healing process.
Very good book. Easy to understand even if you aren’t LDS.
August 8, 2025
I can say pretty confidently at this point in my reading lifetime that I can spot a unicorn history book. For me that means 1. History is laid out bare, without trying to awkwardly force an agenda but to have an omniscient narrator just state the facts 2. The book has an excellent narrative aspect that makes it a true page turner (I put “A Fever in the Heartland” in this category, it was a hard book to put down) and 3. That the book will be able to stand the tests of time and public opinion and pressure and be just as relevant in 50 years from now. This history book is a unicorn history book.
I may be biased as a leftie who is also LDS, but I found this book to be an immense breath of fresh air while simultaneously finding parts so frustrating that my jaw would drop and I would shake my head and get angry. I always knew that there was a priesthood ban but I didn’t realize how…petty and stupid the whole thing was. I didn’t realize that people like Hugh B Brown and David O McKay and even Spencer W Kimball had worked *very hard* behind the scenes trying to get the rest of the old white men on board to, I don’t know, be Christlike human beings who saw Black people as human beings. But it took so long. It took too long and caused too much damage to Black saints. I really saw how Spencer W Kimball was specifically called and prepared to take on some straight up racists in the 15 (and also some fence sitters) and was very specific in his approach to convince these men to remove their prejudices and be worthy of their priesthood callings. I don’t think I could’ve had the patience to work 3 years as the church head to get 14 other men on board with me.
But was the ban removal enough? That’s what the history book also does a good job of showing. In many ways, it was. But in many ways, it wasn’t. In the ways that it wasn’t, I mean that many LDS people I know choose to hold their pearls of racism because they still hold to belief systems that were taught to them in the 60s and even up until the 2010s I would venture to say.
One of the most disturbing encounters I had with a former friend (who is LDS and white) was during 2020 in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement. She was angry that I was calling out racism online and said straight up “I don’t have the privilege of being Black”. And that right there shows how the LDS church still contends with racism today. The ban was removed. The wound was healed….but the scar remains.
I just wish I could convince every Latter-day Saint to read this book to just get a glimpse of how many faithful, wonderful human beings who also happen to have Black skin were denied ordinances and callings for so long and how their lives matter/ed. And to show how societal pressures and politics do have a massive sway in church policies, even when the top leadership claims it doesn’t.
I may be biased as a leftie who is also LDS, but I found this book to be an immense breath of fresh air while simultaneously finding parts so frustrating that my jaw would drop and I would shake my head and get angry. I always knew that there was a priesthood ban but I didn’t realize how…petty and stupid the whole thing was. I didn’t realize that people like Hugh B Brown and David O McKay and even Spencer W Kimball had worked *very hard* behind the scenes trying to get the rest of the old white men on board to, I don’t know, be Christlike human beings who saw Black people as human beings. But it took so long. It took too long and caused too much damage to Black saints. I really saw how Spencer W Kimball was specifically called and prepared to take on some straight up racists in the 15 (and also some fence sitters) and was very specific in his approach to convince these men to remove their prejudices and be worthy of their priesthood callings. I don’t think I could’ve had the patience to work 3 years as the church head to get 14 other men on board with me.
But was the ban removal enough? That’s what the history book also does a good job of showing. In many ways, it was. But in many ways, it wasn’t. In the ways that it wasn’t, I mean that many LDS people I know choose to hold their pearls of racism because they still hold to belief systems that were taught to them in the 60s and even up until the 2010s I would venture to say.
One of the most disturbing encounters I had with a former friend (who is LDS and white) was during 2020 in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement. She was angry that I was calling out racism online and said straight up “I don’t have the privilege of being Black”. And that right there shows how the LDS church still contends with racism today. The ban was removed. The wound was healed….but the scar remains.
I just wish I could convince every Latter-day Saint to read this book to just get a glimpse of how many faithful, wonderful human beings who also happen to have Black skin were denied ordinances and callings for so long and how their lives matter/ed. And to show how societal pressures and politics do have a massive sway in church policies, even when the top leadership claims it doesn’t.
December 27, 2025
This was hard to read, and I'm so glad I did. I felt so much compassion for those marginalized Saints. I also learned a great deal about church administration. Councils aren't just a bunch of yes men; there are real fights and disagreements.
August 23, 2024
Gosh dangit this book was every bit as good as I hoped it would be! With access to some excellent primary sources, Harris tells the history of temple and priesthood ban that was directed at Black people. It is a painful story, at times embarrassing and frustrating. Yet, through the struggles, there are stories of heroism, perseverance, and charity. We get a candid look into the behind the scenes workings of the leaders of the LDS church. Revelation is sometimes fought for, and I am grateful for all that fought for the revelation that lifted the ban. There are so many great lessons I've learned from better understanding this history. Put this on your reading list, share it with a friend, and read it again
May 2, 2025
I think everyone in and adjacent to Mormonism aka The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should read this book.
The Church is doing a better job of facing the dicier aspects of its history, but there is still so much that today’s members don’t fully understand. I learned so much about the heroes and villains in church leadership as black people endured racism and barriers to acceptance.
I couldn’t help but notice parallels between this saga and the LGBTQ+ community’s ongoing struggle within the LDS church. I’m glad the church is changing but damn, we allow way too many people to be hurt while we wait for it to catch up.
The Church is doing a better job of facing the dicier aspects of its history, but there is still so much that today’s members don’t fully understand. I learned so much about the heroes and villains in church leadership as black people endured racism and barriers to acceptance.
I couldn’t help but notice parallels between this saga and the LGBTQ+ community’s ongoing struggle within the LDS church. I’m glad the church is changing but damn, we allow way too many people to be hurt while we wait for it to catch up.
March 26, 2025
The single most important book about 20th century Mormon history you'll ever read. And I never thought I would say that about a book that wasn't David O McKay & the Rise of Modern Mormonism. But Matt Harris gives a fascinating look at how institutional racism works and how it can be defeated.
Though this is carried at Deseret Book and AFAIK Harris is practicing LDS, it's far from apologetic. Harris holds all the Church leaders accountable for their racism while still taking a practical approach. He can't be accused of "presentism," (a very overused term in LDS history writing) and he does a great job of presenting the context of the time. Harris creates insightful, well-rounded looks at figures like Hugh B Brown, Ezra Taft Benson and Spencer Kimball. More importantly, he shows the frustration and pain that the relatively few Black Mormons before 1978 felt through figures like Darius Grey and Jane Manning James.
The best part of the book, for me, was how Harris showed the change of heart so many LDS leaders had once they read and heard the stories of the Black Mormons in their fold.
I highly recommend the looooong interviews with Matt Harris on Mormon Stories as a companion to the book. There are like 40 hours of interviews there in which Harris gets into a lot of things he couldn't fit into the book, and Harris and the MS staff have conversations with many Black Mormon people, including a fascinating conversation with Darron Smith, who has done research specifically into the lives of non-LDS Black athletes at BYU. I hope Mormon Stories releases transcripts of the interviews as they are almost like an annotated edition of the book.
Even if you have little interest in Mormon history, I'd say to read this. It shows how institutional racism is created and enabled, undermined and (hopefully) defeated. It shows how much healing the Church still needs to do and how their current policies of sweeping the past under the rug hurt Black members. Absolutely vital.
Though this is carried at Deseret Book and AFAIK Harris is practicing LDS, it's far from apologetic. Harris holds all the Church leaders accountable for their racism while still taking a practical approach. He can't be accused of "presentism," (a very overused term in LDS history writing) and he does a great job of presenting the context of the time. Harris creates insightful, well-rounded looks at figures like Hugh B Brown, Ezra Taft Benson and Spencer Kimball. More importantly, he shows the frustration and pain that the relatively few Black Mormons before 1978 felt through figures like Darius Grey and Jane Manning James.
The best part of the book, for me, was how Harris showed the change of heart so many LDS leaders had once they read and heard the stories of the Black Mormons in their fold.
I highly recommend the looooong interviews with Matt Harris on Mormon Stories as a companion to the book. There are like 40 hours of interviews there in which Harris gets into a lot of things he couldn't fit into the book, and Harris and the MS staff have conversations with many Black Mormon people, including a fascinating conversation with Darron Smith, who has done research specifically into the lives of non-LDS Black athletes at BYU. I hope Mormon Stories releases transcripts of the interviews as they are almost like an annotated edition of the book.
Even if you have little interest in Mormon history, I'd say to read this. It shows how institutional racism is created and enabled, undermined and (hopefully) defeated. It shows how much healing the Church still needs to do and how their current policies of sweeping the past under the rug hurt Black members. Absolutely vital.
December 30, 2024
This book stirred a lot of emotions. Growing up in a small town settled by Mormon pioneers, there wasn’t much diversity. I never questioned anything the prophets and apostles said and would defend the church and the doctrine when I needed to. I can’t defend the treatment of my black brothers and sisters in the past, but how I admire them for being faithful! They amaze me, and my love for them has increased due to this well-researched book. I’m also impressed with those faithful scholars and general authorities from the past who tried so hard to have the ban lifted to no avail. Thank you Matthew Harris for the years of determined research and trust building to produce this comprehensive work.
4.5 Stars. A reference regarding the temple film was weak and misleading and caused me to lower my rating from 5 stars.
4.5 Stars. A reference regarding the temple film was weak and misleading and caused me to lower my rating from 5 stars.
December 7, 2025
I keep trying over and over to write a coherent review that doesn't come across as overly personal or condescending, and I keep failing, so I am just going to keep this short and avoid the details. I know this is a bold claim, but every member or former member of the LDS church should read this book! It provides meticulous research about how things work behind the scenes in the upper levels of church leadership and provides an amazing and enlightening account of the decades-long battle to give all races in the church the same blessings. Plus, the timing is perfect, since next week's Come Follow Me topic is Official Declaration 2.
November 6, 2025
I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in learning more about the history of blacks in the priesthood and the church. I suggest that you read it with open eyes and hearts because as a member it was rough at parts. Feel free to message me about it if you read it.
I appreciate the unbiased view the book presented of the facts. It was well sourced and I appreciate all sides of the story that was presented. This book has given me a deeper understanding of the church, of its leaders, and of all the events surrounding this difficult time. It eye opening and life changing.
I appreciate the unbiased view the book presented of the facts. It was well sourced and I appreciate all sides of the story that was presented. This book has given me a deeper understanding of the church, of its leaders, and of all the events surrounding this difficult time. It eye opening and life changing.
August 16, 2025
A must read for every member of the Church. I’m grateful for the progress we’ve made, but we have a long way to go. Looking forward to more from Harris.
August 26, 2024
This book was even better than expected. Honestly, the best book I’ve read all year. Almost every page was full of new information for me. Last little bit failed off for me but the first 250 pages were phenomenal
May 15, 2025
This clarified so much of my confusion. I am sad and disappointed to learn about the history of the priesthood ban. But it is a relief to finally understand what was happening. The book ends on a positive note and demonstrates progress and hope for the future.
May 26, 2025
Superbly researched and well crafted, Harris delves into the politics, persuasions, and predilections surrounding Black Mormons and their status in the LDS Church in the 20th Century.
Neither apologist nor critic, Harris seeks to lay bare the facts, inviting the reader to draw conclusions and be aware of the history and process behind one of the most perplexing policies in the church's history.
Highly recommend.
Neither apologist nor critic, Harris seeks to lay bare the facts, inviting the reader to draw conclusions and be aware of the history and process behind one of the most perplexing policies in the church's history.
Highly recommend.
August 7, 2025
Every Latter-day Saint needs to read this book! We often think of the 1978 Revelation on the Priesthood as something that just happened "in the Lord's timing." However, Harris (a practicing Latter-day Saint himself: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...) illustrates how church leaders spent years studying, wrestling, and politicking in order to get the ban lifted. Harris discusses the history of how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has treated Black people (in and outside of the church). Most Latter-day Saints have probably heard the argument that the ban's origins are unknown. Harris abolishes this idea as he breaks down what Brigham Young and other early leaders taught about Black people, and how these teachings carried into the 20th century, influencing Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruce R. McConkie, and other leaders.
This isn't an easy book to read. It's rather disturbing to come face to face with the explicit and implicit racist things said and done by apostles of Jesus Christ. Yet I believe with Harris that the church will not heal from its racist history, and will not live up to its ideal of being a welcoming place for all of God's children, until we come face to face with its history. And no, reading the Gospel Topics Essay on Race and the Priesthood (while helpful), isn't enough to truly understand and confront this issue.
This isn't an easy book to read. It's rather disturbing to come face to face with the explicit and implicit racist things said and done by apostles of Jesus Christ. Yet I believe with Harris that the church will not heal from its racist history, and will not live up to its ideal of being a welcoming place for all of God's children, until we come face to face with its history. And no, reading the Gospel Topics Essay on Race and the Priesthood (while helpful), isn't enough to truly understand and confront this issue.
August 10, 2025
“Don’t go baptize a lot of [Negroes]—we will turn into the Assembly of God Church. We want leaders; we want the church to be a white Church.” - Spencer W Kimball
Pretty eye opening account of the history of racism within the Mormon church
Pretty eye opening account of the history of racism within the Mormon church
December 29, 2024
This was absolutely stellar. I have a wide array of thoughts that I compiled while reading, so forgive me if they’re incoherent and messy.
To begin, I was struck by how the presidency and leaders perpetuated the idea that questioning doctrine/the church was inherently bad. Is that not what Joseph Smith did? He was a person confused with teachings, so he doubted. Meanwhile, if modern members doubt, it’s a moral failing. I rebuke that. In a church founded in America, shouldn’t we preach the oh-so-American ideals of freedom and free speech/thought? Similarly, the quote from Oaks (I think?? I didn’t write it down, but it seems like him, anyway) that members should not criticize apostles, even if the criticism is true, is CRAZY!! Does he hear himself?? lol. I also found it insane that when people in the church become involved with social issues, they are branded as being led astray.
The priesthood ban itself is so abhorrent that I don’t even know where to begin. I don’t remember when I learned about it for the first time, but I was probably way too old. That seems to happen a lot with church teachings and practices. Anyway. One thing I find particularly insane is that the church leaders hated Black people so bad, that even someone who was white passing could not receive the priesthood simply because of their “cursed blood.” To merely be associated with Blackness was a curse to these bigots. It fills me with so much sadness to think about the Black members who joined the church and were made to feel like they were subhuman, that their Black skin was something that needed to be changed in order to be godly. Just awful.
I don’t doubt that the prophets who opposed the ban and tried to improve relations with the Black community did it with sincerity, but so much of it does feel like, “Look at me! I’m a good white guy! Not like those bad white guys!” Without a genuine apology of wrongdoing—without a statement about the ban coming from human prejudice and NOT from God—I fear many of the attempts to move forward seem quite hollow. The church’s stance can be summarized with another Oaks quote that fills me with rage: “The church doesn’t ‘seek apologies’ . . . and we don’t give them.” Is an apology not repentance? Which the church encourages? And that’s not to say that individual members of authority haven’t made steps towards improvement. I admire the efforts made to unite with the NAACP and the church’s official declaration that Black Lives Matter. I must say that it surprises me that they said that, but it makes me happy regardless. It is nice to see that genuine steps have been made since the insane racist, rightwing influence of early apostles.
The church’s historically strong stance against interracial marriage discredits much of the early work. It makes it seem like the undoing of the priesthood ban was simply to increase membership numbers in majorly Black countries. I cannot believe they were still preaching against interracial marriage, what, 10 years ago?? And not just interracial marriage—interracial marriage involving white people and people of color. They couldn’t care less if a Black person married an Indigenous person, but heaven forbid a Black person marries a white person and they have a ‘cursed’ child. Makes my blood boil. Like what do I even say anymore.
I had a seminary teacher in junior high who frequently used McConkie quotes. I had never heard of this apostle, but I liked his quotes about doctrine and spirituality. Color me surprised to learn through this book that he was essentially a white supremacist. The fact that his racist book was in print for so long is shameful. To use God as a scapegoat for personal prejudice is blasphemous, and to see the way so many people did that and STILL do that is just awful. I hate it. On the flip side of that seminary class, I had a teacher my sophomore year of high school that was very adamant in telling us that the ‘skin of blackness’ in the Book of Mormon was NOT a curse—being cut off from God was. I appreciated back then that he was clear in explaining that to us, and I appreciate it even more now after learning that maybe 5 years prior, that distinction might not have been accepted or taught. That teacher also told us he was a feminist, and I did just stalk his Facebook and see a post where he sang a song for the LGBTQ+ community while wearing a rainbow tie in his seminary office. I think I’m gonna message him and tell him how I still think about how awesome he is.
I don’t think that even covers a little bit of my thoughts from this book, but I’ll stop for my own sanity. This was an impeccable work of research, and I’m so glad to see that people are willing to share church history, because that’s what this is—the good, the bad, and the ugly. May we always strive to become better and apologize for our mistakes.
“God created the races—but not racism.”
To begin, I was struck by how the presidency and leaders perpetuated the idea that questioning doctrine/the church was inherently bad. Is that not what Joseph Smith did? He was a person confused with teachings, so he doubted. Meanwhile, if modern members doubt, it’s a moral failing. I rebuke that. In a church founded in America, shouldn’t we preach the oh-so-American ideals of freedom and free speech/thought? Similarly, the quote from Oaks (I think?? I didn’t write it down, but it seems like him, anyway) that members should not criticize apostles, even if the criticism is true, is CRAZY!! Does he hear himself?? lol. I also found it insane that when people in the church become involved with social issues, they are branded as being led astray.
The priesthood ban itself is so abhorrent that I don’t even know where to begin. I don’t remember when I learned about it for the first time, but I was probably way too old. That seems to happen a lot with church teachings and practices. Anyway. One thing I find particularly insane is that the church leaders hated Black people so bad, that even someone who was white passing could not receive the priesthood simply because of their “cursed blood.” To merely be associated with Blackness was a curse to these bigots. It fills me with so much sadness to think about the Black members who joined the church and were made to feel like they were subhuman, that their Black skin was something that needed to be changed in order to be godly. Just awful.
I don’t doubt that the prophets who opposed the ban and tried to improve relations with the Black community did it with sincerity, but so much of it does feel like, “Look at me! I’m a good white guy! Not like those bad white guys!” Without a genuine apology of wrongdoing—without a statement about the ban coming from human prejudice and NOT from God—I fear many of the attempts to move forward seem quite hollow. The church’s stance can be summarized with another Oaks quote that fills me with rage: “The church doesn’t ‘seek apologies’ . . . and we don’t give them.” Is an apology not repentance? Which the church encourages? And that’s not to say that individual members of authority haven’t made steps towards improvement. I admire the efforts made to unite with the NAACP and the church’s official declaration that Black Lives Matter. I must say that it surprises me that they said that, but it makes me happy regardless. It is nice to see that genuine steps have been made since the insane racist, rightwing influence of early apostles.
The church’s historically strong stance against interracial marriage discredits much of the early work. It makes it seem like the undoing of the priesthood ban was simply to increase membership numbers in majorly Black countries. I cannot believe they were still preaching against interracial marriage, what, 10 years ago?? And not just interracial marriage—interracial marriage involving white people and people of color. They couldn’t care less if a Black person married an Indigenous person, but heaven forbid a Black person marries a white person and they have a ‘cursed’ child. Makes my blood boil. Like what do I even say anymore.
I had a seminary teacher in junior high who frequently used McConkie quotes. I had never heard of this apostle, but I liked his quotes about doctrine and spirituality. Color me surprised to learn through this book that he was essentially a white supremacist. The fact that his racist book was in print for so long is shameful. To use God as a scapegoat for personal prejudice is blasphemous, and to see the way so many people did that and STILL do that is just awful. I hate it. On the flip side of that seminary class, I had a teacher my sophomore year of high school that was very adamant in telling us that the ‘skin of blackness’ in the Book of Mormon was NOT a curse—being cut off from God was. I appreciated back then that he was clear in explaining that to us, and I appreciate it even more now after learning that maybe 5 years prior, that distinction might not have been accepted or taught. That teacher also told us he was a feminist, and I did just stalk his Facebook and see a post where he sang a song for the LGBTQ+ community while wearing a rainbow tie in his seminary office. I think I’m gonna message him and tell him how I still think about how awesome he is.
I don’t think that even covers a little bit of my thoughts from this book, but I’ll stop for my own sanity. This was an impeccable work of research, and I’m so glad to see that people are willing to share church history, because that’s what this is—the good, the bad, and the ugly. May we always strive to become better and apologize for our mistakes.
“God created the races—but not racism.”
October 5, 2025
I am conflicted about "Second-Class Saints." It is very well-researched. It chronicles a critical element of LDS history, arguably one of the top two most important episodes the Mormon church has experienced in its 200 year history. Harris is clearly a very skilled archivist and story teller. He is profoundly sensitive to the underrepresented cross-sections of the Mormon church, particularly its long-suffering black members.
The issue with "Second-Class Saints" in my view is that it presents itself as a work of history, but it isn't. It is a work of polemics. I don't have an issue with this, strictly speaking, apart from the fact that I find it to be somewhat of a bait-and-switch for Harris to draw in readers with the implied promise of a historical survey of the events underpinning the priesthood ban and its eventual removal, and then for readers to instead get a largely one-sided indictment of 19th and 20th century LDS leadership. To be clear, nothing prevents Harris from playing the role of a polemicist. He is free to do so. Further, I am not necessarily contending that his indictment is ill-advised or wrong-headed. He is, in my thinking, correct on many counts. Rather, I am annoyed that he bills this as a work of history when it is actually something else.
A work of history should present its characters' as the multi-dimensional people that they are. In "Second-Class Saints," there are very, very clear heroes and villains. Harris's prose in this volume is pregnant throughout with words that make no attempt to obscure his opinions on the priesthood ban, those who apparently promulgated and extended it, and those who fought against it. Each character is sharply one-dimensional. Fielding Smith, McConkie, and Benson are portrayed with vanishingly few reedeming qualities. Spencer Kimball, Hugh B. Brown, Lowell Bennion, Lester Bush, and numerous others are brave warriors fighting the good fight against the racists. Again, this may all be well and true. My point is that good history recognizes -- or attempts to recognize -- the complexities of knotty phenomena like the priesthood ban. Harris seems to make no attempt to provide broad context, plumb the situational contexts of the story's villains, or consider what else might have been going on inside and outside the church during the decades that the ban spanned.
I am not an expert by any stretch on the time period Harris surveys, but basic reason suggests that the villainous LDS leaders were grappling with a lot more than the priesthood ban between the 1850s and the 1970s. This does not justify the ban. I frankly tend to agree with Harris's polemics, and I've long harbored deep-seeded issues with the work of Fielding Smith, Benson, McConkie, Skousen, and their ilk. Yet I still understand that they didn't wake up every morning and think, "How am I going to stick it to black Mormons today?" Their actions and inactions were earth-shakingly harmful and hurtful to thousands -- maybe a lot more than that -- inside and outside the church. But these were multi-dimensional men, and neither I nor Harris knows the contents of their hearts. Yet Harris seemingly made little effort to understand them. They were bad, and that's that.
So "Second-Class Saints" is an uneven work, in my estimation. It is so important to LDS scholarship, and to black Mormons in particular. I'm thrilled Harris spent so much time learning about this ugly chapter of LDS history and cared about his community enough to share it with us. The story of the priesthood ban has needed for a long time to be told. I am simply more of a fan of more balanced treatment of contentious issues. This is not balanced. Others might respond that such an awful thing as the priesthood ban does not warrant balance; there is only one conscionable perspective. I would disagree with such an assessment. There needs to always be room for care, balance, and allowance for other viewpoints.
The issue with "Second-Class Saints" in my view is that it presents itself as a work of history, but it isn't. It is a work of polemics. I don't have an issue with this, strictly speaking, apart from the fact that I find it to be somewhat of a bait-and-switch for Harris to draw in readers with the implied promise of a historical survey of the events underpinning the priesthood ban and its eventual removal, and then for readers to instead get a largely one-sided indictment of 19th and 20th century LDS leadership. To be clear, nothing prevents Harris from playing the role of a polemicist. He is free to do so. Further, I am not necessarily contending that his indictment is ill-advised or wrong-headed. He is, in my thinking, correct on many counts. Rather, I am annoyed that he bills this as a work of history when it is actually something else.
A work of history should present its characters' as the multi-dimensional people that they are. In "Second-Class Saints," there are very, very clear heroes and villains. Harris's prose in this volume is pregnant throughout with words that make no attempt to obscure his opinions on the priesthood ban, those who apparently promulgated and extended it, and those who fought against it. Each character is sharply one-dimensional. Fielding Smith, McConkie, and Benson are portrayed with vanishingly few reedeming qualities. Spencer Kimball, Hugh B. Brown, Lowell Bennion, Lester Bush, and numerous others are brave warriors fighting the good fight against the racists. Again, this may all be well and true. My point is that good history recognizes -- or attempts to recognize -- the complexities of knotty phenomena like the priesthood ban. Harris seems to make no attempt to provide broad context, plumb the situational contexts of the story's villains, or consider what else might have been going on inside and outside the church during the decades that the ban spanned.
I am not an expert by any stretch on the time period Harris surveys, but basic reason suggests that the villainous LDS leaders were grappling with a lot more than the priesthood ban between the 1850s and the 1970s. This does not justify the ban. I frankly tend to agree with Harris's polemics, and I've long harbored deep-seeded issues with the work of Fielding Smith, Benson, McConkie, Skousen, and their ilk. Yet I still understand that they didn't wake up every morning and think, "How am I going to stick it to black Mormons today?" Their actions and inactions were earth-shakingly harmful and hurtful to thousands -- maybe a lot more than that -- inside and outside the church. But these were multi-dimensional men, and neither I nor Harris knows the contents of their hearts. Yet Harris seemingly made little effort to understand them. They were bad, and that's that.
So "Second-Class Saints" is an uneven work, in my estimation. It is so important to LDS scholarship, and to black Mormons in particular. I'm thrilled Harris spent so much time learning about this ugly chapter of LDS history and cared about his community enough to share it with us. The story of the priesthood ban has needed for a long time to be told. I am simply more of a fan of more balanced treatment of contentious issues. This is not balanced. Others might respond that such an awful thing as the priesthood ban does not warrant balance; there is only one conscionable perspective. I would disagree with such an assessment. There needs to always be room for care, balance, and allowance for other viewpoints.
February 16, 2025
This was a well written piece of non-fiction. Harris proficiently blends a matter-of-fact and straight-to-the-point delivery of facts with plenty of narrative and commentary to stay engaging. This book does an exceptional job of celebrating the victories, small and large, while retaining sobering condemnations of systemic church-wide racism that plagued this American church since its inception.
Although I learned a great deal from reading this book, much of the main points have already been public knowledge for decades. I appreciate that Harris pulls it all together into one cohesive narrative. I believe this lowers the barrier to entry for those who are trying to become more educated on this subject.
I enjoyed how Harris broadened the scope beyond the church. The journey detailed in these pages is not an isolated event, nor is it unique to the LDS church. Rather it is yet another manifestation of the same unfortunate plague that has hobbled our society for millennia.
I hope that I can learn from history and play my part in contributing to a more equitable future. And as for the nearly happy ending, I hope that the LDS church can muster to courage to do the same. Regardless, I applaud the brave men, women, apostles, church members, non-members and activists without whom, this book would have told a very different history.
Although I learned a great deal from reading this book, much of the main points have already been public knowledge for decades. I appreciate that Harris pulls it all together into one cohesive narrative. I believe this lowers the barrier to entry for those who are trying to become more educated on this subject.
I enjoyed how Harris broadened the scope beyond the church. The journey detailed in these pages is not an isolated event, nor is it unique to the LDS church. Rather it is yet another manifestation of the same unfortunate plague that has hobbled our society for millennia.
I hope that I can learn from history and play my part in contributing to a more equitable future. And as for the nearly happy ending, I hope that the LDS church can muster to courage to do the same. Regardless, I applaud the brave men, women, apostles, church members, non-members and activists without whom, this book would have told a very different history.
April 20, 2025
The research done here was impeccable and the amount of material accessed from old apostles and presidents is utterly astounding. One of the most thorough history books on one subject I have read.
There is no denying that the author more than did his homework and remained objective by sticking to the source material and other surrounding source material for contextual understanding.
Also, one may think they’ve got a complete understanding of racial dynamics in the LDS church history and culture, but the research presented in this book demonstrates our understanding has been GREATLY limited on this topic. Excellent, must-read for any and all tied to the LDS church in any way, whether current or former members, or those living among or near LDS culture.
There is no denying that the author more than did his homework and remained objective by sticking to the source material and other surrounding source material for contextual understanding.
Also, one may think they’ve got a complete understanding of racial dynamics in the LDS church history and culture, but the research presented in this book demonstrates our understanding has been GREATLY limited on this topic. Excellent, must-read for any and all tied to the LDS church in any way, whether current or former members, or those living among or near LDS culture.
May 20, 2025
Brilliant book. I think every member should read this book. It is so factual and you can tell how much research he did in order to write this book. BYU needs to use this book to teach about race and the priesthood in all their religion classes (although they will never… which is a HUGGGEEEEEE shame). It is a disservice that they don’t use more books like this in the classroom.
It is also so fascinating that it seems like history is kind of repeating itself 🤔🤔🤔 interesting stuff. I hope we can learn from the past in a more positive and uplifting way!!!!
It is also so fascinating that it seems like history is kind of repeating itself 🤔🤔🤔 interesting stuff. I hope we can learn from the past in a more positive and uplifting way!!!!
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