http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3733
By Peggy Fletcher Stack
The Salt Lake Tribune
The first time she was ever called the most offensive of racial slurs, Tamu Smith was in the Salt Lake LDS temple.
An elderly man spied Smith, a new bride, and asked aloud what a [http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4547 was doing there. Instead of reprimanding him, temple workers defended him, saying he didn’t know better.
Smith didn’t leave the LDS Church over such hurtful language then, and she remains faithful, but frustrated, nearly 15 years later. She will join other http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4814 this week to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the June 8, 1978, revelation that opened the church’s priesthood to “all worthy men,” including those of African descent, and marked a new era for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
President Spencer W. Kimball’s revelation brought a string of firsts for the church: first black missionary; first black bishop; first black couple married in the temple; first black men ordained in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Jamaica, Nigeria; first black general authority. It also brought relief to many white Mormons mortified by charges of racism leveled at them and their church.Notably, it also http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3235 to Mormon missionaries, a great boon to the church. Today, 255,050 Latter-day Saints hail from Nigeria in the west to Kenya and Ethiopia in the east to Zimbabwe and South Africa in the south.
More than 2,000 African men now serve as mission presidents, regional, stake, district and congregational leaders, counselors, as patriarchs and in temple presidencies. In some countries, there are even second-generation African Latter-day Saints.
“I love being part of this church,” says Noelle Nkoy, who lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo for most of her childhood.
For Africans, it’s a new day in the church. Its racist past is not taught and, by those who know, it’s viewed as irrelevant.
African-Americans are joining in record numbers, too, especially in places such as Harlem. But for some, the challenge of being the only black face in the congregation can be disconcerting. They sometimes feel slighted or, worse, patronized by white Mormons. And when they discover the historic mistreatment of LDS blacks, some feel a sense of betrayal and many slip from the fold.
“I don’t mind defending my faith to my black friends and family,” Smith says, “but I do mind having to defend my race to my fellow Mormons.”
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_9497769
From a reader: Ever since the early days of the Prophet Joseph Smith and his claims about the Brass Plates, Mormons have been accused by detractors of being willing to believe tall tales. I suspect that this woman’s story about hearing the “N word” in the sacred temple may be somewhat apocryphal. What may also be aprocryphal is President Kimball’s claim to have received a divine revelation about blacks. If he did, then God sure does move slowly and not very expeditiously: after intense pressure, boycotts, and a hate campaign that even saw a bomb thrown at Mormon college kids, the LDS Church was facing the IRS removal of its tax exempt status over the issue.
Just as with the ban on polygamy, the church hierarchy claimed that God changed His mind, something that Brigham Young, who led the Mormons to Utah, said He would never do on the black question: “the Lord told Cain that he should not receive the blessings of the preisthood nor his seed, until the last of the posterity of Abel had received the priesthood, until the redemption of the earth. If there never was a prophet, or apostle of Jesus Christ spoke it before, I tell you, this people that are commonly called negroes are the children of old Cain. I know they are, I know that they cannot bear rule in the priesthood, for the curse on them was to remain upon them, until the residue of the posterity of Michal and his wife receive the blessings, the seed of Cain would have received had they not been cursed; and hold the keys of the priesthood, until the times of the restitution shall come, and the curse be wiped off from the earth… Then Cain’s seed will be had in rememberance, and the time come when that curse should be wiped off. Now then in the kingdom of God on the earth, a man who has has the African blood in him cannot hold one jot nor tittle of priesthood.” (Speech in Joint Session of the Legislature, 1852.)
“Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.” (Journal of Discourses, Volume 10, page 110.)
Uncomfortably politically incorrect, of course, as are Young’s words about polygamy: “Now if any of you will deny the plurality of wives, and continue to do so, I promise that you will be damned.” (Journal of Discourses, Vol. 3, p. 266).
Many faithful Mormons found themselves to be unable to reject what they considered to be the unchanging laws of God. Mormon “fundamentalists” originally formed in reaction to the change of the polygamy “ordinance,” and received a new influx in reaction to Kimball’s 1978 line change on race. The largest such group is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which was recently raided in Texas by heavily armed police with an armored car and its children seized by the government. Many childen were taken into custody in a bus from a local Baptist church, reflecting the long history of “Christian” persecutions of Mormons. All the children have since been http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4814, with the media referring to the FLDS “Yearning for Zion” ranch as a “compound,” part of the (often unconscious) effort to distinguish The Other and look upon them as different, strange, threatening and thus less than human.
Meanwhile, some black Mormons appear to want to use the Kimball revelation anniversary as a vehicle to advance their own sense of victimhood. In a recent article, blacks at Brigham Young University, which has its own Black Student Union (as usual, no white equivalent), and an aggressive “multicultural student recruitment program” and scholarships for Third World applicants, said that all that’s http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4367; the atmosphere isn’t “welcoming.” Unable to point to any specific discrimination, one BYU junior from Ghana said at a 2008 Black History Month event that he feels that white people in Utah “don’t feel comfortable around him”: he can tell by their body language.