Mormon Stories #1174: Marlena Smith - Growing Up as a Black Mormon in Utah Pt. 1

What It Cost to Be Black and Mormon in Utah

Growing up Black and Mormon in Utah during the 1980s and 1990s was not simply difficult. It was a specific, documented kind of erasure. In a 2019 episode of the Mormon Stories Podcast, Marlena Smith described what that experience looked like from the inside, and her account raises questions that the institutional church has never fully answered.

Her parents joined the LDS Church after the 1978 revelation lifted the priesthood and temple ban on Black members. They moved to Utah in the early 1980s, settling near Lindon, a small town in Utah County. Marlena grew up as one of the only Black children in her ward, her school, and her neighborhood.

The Historical Record on Race and the LDS Church

The priesthood ban is not contested history. From roughly 1852 until June 1978, Black men were prohibited from holding the priesthood, and Black members of both sexes were barred from temple ordinances, including the sealings that Latter-day Saint theology treats as essential to eternal family bonds.

The church's 2013 Gospel Topics Essay on "Race and the Priesthood" acknowledged that the ban caused "great pain and suffering" and rejected the justifications earlier leaders had offered for it. What the essay does not fully reckon with is the lived texture of what came after 1978, particularly for children raised in predominantly white Utah wards where those old ideas did not simply evaporate on schedule.