Since Mormonism's foundation, Black people have been members; however, the church placed restrictions on proselytization efforts among Black people. Before 1978, Black membership was small. It has since grown, and in 1997, there were approximately 500,000 Black members of the church (about 5% of the total membership), mostly in Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean. quoting Deseret News 1999-2000 Church Almanac. Deseret News: Salt Lake City, UT (1998); pg. 119. Black membership has continued to grow substantially, especially in West Africa, where two temples have been built.The Church Continues to Grow in Africa By 2018, an estimated 6% of members were Black worldwide. In the United States, approximately 1% of members are Black.
Black Mormons in early Mormonism
The initial mission of the church was to proselytize to everyone, regardless of race or servitude status.D&C When the church moved its headquarters to the slavery-permitting state of Missouri, they began changing its policies. In 1833, the church stopped admitting free people of color into the Church for unknown reasons. In 1835, the official church policy stated that enslaved individuals would not be taught about the church without their enslaver's consent, and the following year was expanded to not preach to enslaved people at all until after their enslavers were baptized into the LDS Church. Some Black people joined the church before the restrictions, such as Joseph T. Ball, Peter Kerr, and Walker Lewis, and others converted with their enslavers, including Elijah Abel and William McCary.
Jane Manning James had been born free and worked as a housekeeper in Joseph Smith's home.Jerel Harris and Brian Passey, The History of Black Pioneers: Slaves, Free Blacks Among the First Utah Settlers When she requested the temple ordinances, John Taylor took her petition to the Quorum of the Twelve, but her request was denied. When Wilford Woodruff became president of the church, he compromised and allowed Manning to be sealed to the family of Smith as a servant. This was unsatisfying to Manning as it did not include the saving ordinance of the endowment, and she repeated her petitions. She died in 1908. Church president Joseph F. Smith honored her by speaking at her funeral. She was posthumously endowed by proxy in 1979.Embry 1994: 40-41.
Other notable early Black LDS Church members included Green Flake (enslaved by John Flake), who was born into bondage on a plantation in Anson County, North Carolina, and a convert to the church and from whom he got his name. He was baptized as a member of the LDS Church at age 16 in the Mississippi River, but continued to be held in slavery. Following the death of John Flake, in 1850 his widow gave Green Flake to the church as tithing. Some members of the Black side of the Flake family say that Brigham Young emancipated their ancestor in 1854; however, at least one descendant states that Green was never freed.
Samuel D. Chambers was another early African American pioneer. He was baptized secretly at the age of thirteen when he was still enslaved in Mississippi. He was unable to join the main body of the church and lost track of them until after the Civil War. He was 38 when he had saved enough money to emigrate to Utah with his wife and son.
Black Mormons in the United States Before 1978, relatively few Black people who joined the church retained active membership. Those who did, often faced discrimination. LDS Church apostle Mark E. Petersen describes a Black family that tried to join the LDS Church: "[some white church members] went to the Branch President, and said that either the [Black] family must leave, or they would all leave. The Branch President ruled that [the Black family] could not come to church meetings."Race Problems;— As They Affect The Church, Convention of Teachers of Religion on the College Level, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, August 27, 1954 Discrimination also stemmed from church leadership. Under Heber J. Grant, the First Presidency sent a letter to stake president Ezra Taft Benson in Washington, D.C., advising that if two Black Mormon women were "discreetly approached" they would be happy sit in the back or side so as not to upset some white women who had complained about sitting near them in Relief Society.
On October 19, 1971, the Genesis Group was established as an auxiliary unit to the church. Its purpose was to serve the needs of Black members, including activating members and welcoming converts. It continues to meet on the first Sunday of each month in Utah. Don Harwell is the current president.Genesis Group When asked about racism in the church, he said "Now, is the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints racist? No, never has been. But some of those people within the church have those tendencies. You have to separate the two."Rosemary Winters, "Black Mormons Struggle for Acceptance in the Church", Salt Lake Tribune, November 4, 2004
From 1985 to 2005, the church was well received among middle-class African-Americans, and African American membership grew from minuscule before 1978 to an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 in 2005. A 2007 study by the Pew Research Center found that 3% of American Mormons were Black. African Americans accounted for 9% of all converts in the United States. A 1998 survey by a Mormon and amateur sociologist, James W. Lucas, found that about 20 percent of Mormons in New York City were Black. Melvyn Hammarberg explained the growth: "There is a kind of changing face of the LDS Church because of its continuing commitment to work in the inner cities." Sociology and Religious Studies Professor Armand Mauss says African Americans are particularly attracted by the focus on promoting healthy families. However, these numbers still only represent a fraction of total church membership in the United States, suggesting that African Americans remain comparatively hesitant to join, partly because of the church's past. Still, Don Harwell, president of the Genesis Group, sees it as a sign that "People are getting past the stereotypes put on the church."
LDS historian Wayne J. Embry interviewed several Black LDS Church members in 1987 and reported that "all of the interviewees reported incidents of aloofness on the part of white members, a reluctance or a refusal to shake hands with them or sit by them, and racist comments made to them." Embry further reported that one Black church member "was amazingly persistent in attending Mormon services for three years when, by her report, no one would speak to her." Embry reports that "she [the same Black church member] had to write directly to the president of the LDS Church to find out how to be baptized" because none of her fellow church members would tell her.
In the United States, researchers Newell G. Bringhurst and Darron T. Smith, in their 2004 book Black and Mormon, wrote that since the 1980s "the number of African American Latter-day Saints does not appear to have grown significantly. Worse still, among those blacks who have joined, the average attrition rate appears to be extremely high." They cite a survey showing that the attrition rate among African American Mormons in two towns is estimated to be between 60 and 90 percent.
In 2007, journalist and church member, Peggy Fletcher Stack, wrote, "Today, many black Mormons report subtle differences in the way they are treated, as if they are not full members but a separate group. A few even have been called 'the n-word' at church and in the hallowed halls of the temple. They look in vain at photos of Mormon general authorities, hoping to see their own faces reflected there."Peggy Fletcher Stack, "New film and revived group help many feel at home in their church", Salt Lake Tribune, July 6, 2007.
In 2015, Joseph W. Sitati a member of The First Quorum of the Seventy, gave a public statement in which he estimated that 15,000 immigrants from various African countries had joined the Church in the United States.article on Sitati's speech
Wynetta Willis Martin In 1970, Wynetta Willis Martin gained the distinction of being the first African-American member of the faculty at Brigham Young University (BYU) and one of the first two Black members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. She accepted it as her personal mission to prove to the world that there were in fact African-American Mormons and that the Mormons were not racist. She toured with the choir for two years before accepting her appointment on the faculty at BYU. She was employed in the training of nurses and tried to help them become more culturally aware.Martin, 1972." About the racial restriction policy, she said:Martin 1972: 56, emphasis her own.These two things: baptism and the Holy Ghost are the only requirements, contrary to popular belief, for entering the Celestial Kingdom and being with God for eternity if one is worthy. Therefore, the Priesthood covenants of the Temple which we are not allowed at this point are not really so crucial as popular belief dictates.
Joseph Freeman Jr. Joseph Freeman, Jr. was the first African American to receive the Melchizedek priesthood after the 1978 revelation.Salt Lake Tribune, 1978-06-24. Freeman was also the first Black member ever to receive church temple ordinances."Mormonism Enters a New Era", Time, 1978-08-07. On June 23, 1978, Freeman was sealed to his wife and five children in the Salt Lake Temple by then-apostle Thomas S. Monson.
Black Mormons in South Africa
The church began proselyting to white English-speaking people in 1853, but very few Black South Africans joined the LDS Church before 1978. Dunn, who was the son of a Scottish father and a Zulu mother, is believed to be the first Black African convert baptized in Africa in 1905, though he did not remain an active member for long. Another early convert of African descent was William Paul Daniels, who joined the LDS Church in 1915 while visiting relatives in Utah. He met on multiple occasions with Joseph F. Smith before returning to South Africa.LDS Church Almanac, 2010 Edition, p. 576
In 1930, the LDS Church established a genealogy program to help male members trace their genealogy to a European country to determine their eligibility for the priesthood, with final approval for receiving the priesthood given by the mission president. Evan P. Wright served as mission president over the South Africa Mission 1948–1953. Wright repeatedly expressed to the First Presidency the difficulty in establishing the church in the region caused by the church-wide ban on ordaining men of Black African descent to the priesthood. This was especially problematic because previous general authorities required even men who appeared white to prove a total lack of Black African ancestry before they could be ordained and records were often unavailable or incomplete. Two missionaries had been given the duty to work on genealogy research for the purposes of establishing which people were eligible for the priesthood. David O. McKay was the first general authority to visit South Africa in 1954,H. Dean Garrett, "South Africa", in Arnold K. Garr, Donald Q. Cannon and Richard O. Cowan, ed., Encyclopedia of Latter Day Saint History, (Salt Lake City:Deseret Book, 2000), p. 1160-1161 and during his visit to the mission, he changed the policy to allow mission presidents to approve men to be ordained without any genealogical research in cases where "there is no evidence of his having Negro blood in his veins."