Black Mormons Respond to Brigham Young’s Racism | Ep. 1916

Brigham Young's Racist Legacy: Black Mormon Voices Break the Silence

When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released its official essay on "Race and the Priesthood" in 2013, it represented a watershed moment, an institutional acknowledgment that decades of exclusionary doctrine had been wrong. Yet for Black members and former members of the faith, that admission raised deeper questions: How much did contemporary Mormons actually know about what early church leaders taught? And what does it mean to stay in, or leave, a religious tradition built on such foundations?

A recent Mormon Stories Podcast episode featuring Black Mormon voices responding to historical documentation of Brigham Young's racism demonstrates why these questions remain urgent. The conversation, drawing on research from the book Second Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality, offers a rare public forum where Black Latter-day Saints and ex-members articulate their lived experience against the documented historical record.

The Church's Incomplete Reckoning with Early Leadership

The official narrative taught to most Latter-day Saints positions the 1978 reversal of the priesthood ban as a moment of divine guidance correcting an earlier mistake. What the Mormon Stories panel reveals is that this framing obscures a far more deliberate and doctrinally entrenched system of white supremacy.

Brigham Young, who led the church for over three decades after Joseph Smith's death, did not incidentally exclude Black members from temple ordinances. According to the Mormon Stories panelists, Young explicitly taught that Black people were inherently less valiant in the pre-mortal existence and that interracial marriage was a capital offense deserving of "blood atonement." These were not off-handed remarks, they were foundational theological claims made to legislative bodies and recorded in official church documents.