At some point, probably early that winter, he also gave me a copy of the recent (August 26, 1968) letter from Sterling McMurrin to Llewelyn McKay in which McMurrin claimed that McKay told him in 19S4 that the Church had no doctrine "of any kind pertaining to the Negro," —only "a practice, not a doctrine, and the practice will some day be changed." While this remarkable claim was consistent with the views expressed to me by McKay's sons, it didn't strike me as compatible with the overall McKay record.* It did, however, move me to a position of neutrality in my continuing research.

Many years later I learned that, read literally, McMurrin 's claim almost certainly was true--though the implications were not those drawn at the time, i.e., that the policy was subject to simple administrative change. In retrospect the record clearly shows that McKay believed the priesthood restriction was a policy rather than a doctrine--but a policy which could be changed only by revelation. His distinction between policy and doctrine was more subtle than generally was understood at the time. McKay believed modem blacks were indeed literal descendants of those whom the Pearl of Great Price deemed ineligible for the priesthood. What he did not think he knew was why individual blacks were to be denied the priesthood, though he assumed—given that God was no respector of persons—that this must somehow be related to the pre-existence. His statement that there was no "doctrine" on the subject was simply another way of stating that no revelation illuminated the antecedents of the inspired policy. In some regards I analyzed this correctly in my later writings, but I also was appreciably off target. I deduced correctly that McKay believed the practice of priesthood denial to be inspired (i.e., based on revelation), and subject only to revelatory change. I also had an approximate understanding of his distinction between policy and doctrine on this subject. I missed completely the fact that he continued to accept the traditional genealogical relationships. As will be seen, even the parsimonious First Presidency statement of 1969—a major source of my analytical inference–almost surely omitted genealogical references only as a matter of expediency, and not as a reflection of underlying doctrinal change.**

[Footnotes]

* My skepticism was increased by the fact that McMurrin at the time had a certain notoriety for his outspoken criticism of the Church position, most recently just a few weeks prior to this letter in a July speech to the Salt Lake City chapter of the NAACP. McMurrin much later explained, no doubt correctly, that he was emboldened to suggest that the Ch~rch could resolve the priesthood problem if it so chose by his understanding of the early McKay conversation. In retrospect, however, he had missed an important subtlety in McKay's beliefs.

** McKay's initial acceptance of traditional beliefs on priesthood denial was implicit in his being a part of the First Presidency which issued the statement of August 17, 1949, invoking the curse on Cain. Then, in an important 1954 talk in South Africa, discussed below, McKay explicitly characterized African blacks ·as the descendants of the cursed pharaohnic line. He was equally explicit in a 1958 press conference at the opening of the London temple. Throughout this period, and until March 1968, McKay also authorized the use of the 1949 statement in response to private inquiries. As late as September 1969, a First Presidency discussion (quoted later in the text, above) appears to assume McKay's continued belief that blacks were descendants of Cain. In short, at no point can the case be made that he ultimately had discarded the traditional beliefs.