Before moving forward, it’s important to state what this book is and what it isn’t. It isn’t a definitive history of the Mormon priesthood and temple ban. It focuses on international developments within the church insofar as these affected Mormon racial policies and practices, but it doesn’t purport to be a history of the ban in the international church. Nor is it a history of Mormon racism in general or a comprehensive examination of the origins of the ban during the nineteenth century. Indeed, that story has been superbly told by other scholars of Mormonism.18

My focus, rather, is on racism as it affected Black and biracial people in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Readers will see that I include a wide variety of voices and perspectives. Some of these people are well known to Latter-day Saints and to outsiders; others are obscure. They include bishops and stake presidents, newly baptized converts, college professors, LDS religion teachers, disaffected Latter-day Saints, believing Latter-day Saints, politicians and government figures, dark-skinned Africans and light-skinned Brazilians, Motown singers, former Black Panthers, and civil rights organizations like the NAACP. Because the priesthood and temple ban affected Black and biracial Latter-day Saints so profoundly, I have privileged their perspectives as much as the sources would allow.

Readers will also see that I have tried to place Mormon racial teachings in the larger U.S. social, political, and cultural context. Ralph Waldo Emerson perceptively noted that “the ideas of the time are in the air and infect all who breathe it,” and so it is with Latter-day Saints.19 To that end, I juxtapose Mormon teachings with Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical perspectives on segregation, racism, and civil rights and point out where Mormons hold similar views and where they differ. For instance, when religion scholar Anthea Butler wrote that evangelicals “believed African Americans were inferior to whites, supported Jim Crow, and avidly opposed civil rights, busing, and interracial marriage,” she could have been talking about Mormons.20

Some readers might take offense at the book’s unvarnished account of the LDS church’s history with antiblack racism, but in my defense, I believe that readers will appreciate the story more if all the artificial preservatives and sweeteners are left out. Honesty is the only way to heal faith communities from the devastating effects of racism, and if people of goodwill can learn from the Latter-day Saint experience, it might prompt them to excavate their own racial assumptions, wipe them clean of apologetics and rationalizations, and begin anew.