Item Detail
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30301
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1
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13
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English
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One Devout Mormon Family's Struggle with Racism
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Dialogue : A Journal of Mormon Thought
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Fall 2018
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51
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3
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Farmington, UT
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Dialogue Journal
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155-180
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No other aspect of Latter-day Saint teachings led to more discussion, ridicule, head-shaking, and even outrage in the twentieth century than the Church’s position regarding Black African priesthood denial. While most American mainstream religious denominations were tainted with irrational racist thinking at one time or another, the majority had shed themselves of racist thought by the 1960s, and some of these denominations even placed themselves at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Other alternative Christian movements that arose in a similar fashion to Mormonism—denominations such as the Disciples of Christ (Campbellites), Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and even the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (known now as Community of Christ)—managed to avoid racism as a central teaching altogether. Key Mormon leaders, on the other hand, continued to entertain beliefs in white racial superiority and Black African moral and racial inferiority, which ideas had their origins as a defense of chattel slavery in seventeenth-century America. Numerous books and articles have been written on the topic of LDS Black priesthood denial in all of its various aspects, but this study concentrates on one aspect of the discussion—the so-called “one-drop” rule brought about by the imagined “curse of Cain” and his descendants—and how it adversely affected a single devout Mormon family in rural Utah. Americans in general subscribed to the notion that a single drop of Black African blood was enough to color an entire ocean of whiteness. The idea first developed in the American South, from there spread to the entire United States, has become a codified legal concept, and was accepted by both whites and Blacks alike. Also called the “one black ancestor rule,” the “traceable amount rule,” and by anthropologists the “rule of hypo-descent,” the “one-drop” rule posits that racially mixed persons are assigned the status of the subordinate group, even if they show none of the characteristics of the group to which they are assigned. Thus, to be considered Black in the United States, one only needs to have a known Black African ancestor, no matter how remote. Within the LDS Church, “one drop” of Black African blood denied a Mormon male of all rights to priesthood ordination and his family of access to the most important temple rituals, which are thought to be essential for exaltation in the afterlife. Belief in this doctrine led to a serious amount of grief, frustration, hardship, heartache, and even severe racial identity problems in an otherwise devout Mormon family in the small rural town of Fillmore, Utah.
[from author] -
A History of Millard County
All Abraham's Children : Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage
Church Mourns Passing of Elder Joseph F. Merrill
David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism
Lengthen Your Stride : The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball
Lowell L. Bennion : Teacher, Counselor, Humanitarian
Mormon Doctrine
Mormonism's Negro Doctrine : An Historical Overview
Mormonism's Problematic Racial Past and the Evolution of the Divine-Curse Doctrine
Saints, Slaves, and Blacks : The Changing Place of Black People within Mormonism
Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood
The Mormon Church and Blacks : A Documentary History
The Mormon Menace : Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South