As the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) recently concluded its April 2025 General Conference—where President Russell M. Nelson announced 15 new temple locations, bringing his total to 200 new temples announced during his seven-year presidency—we’re exploring a significant chapter in Mormon history. Dr. Matthew L. Harris, history professor at CSU Pueblo, recently published “Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality,” a groundbreaking examination of the LDS Church’s 1978 revelation lifting its ban on Black priesthood. Drawing on previously unseen private papers and extensive archival research, Dr. Harris provides new insights into this pivotal moment in Mormon history. We sat down with him to discuss his research process and findings.
Your book draws on previously unseen private papers of LDS apostles and church presidents. Could you describe the process of gaining access to these archives and how these primary sources changed your understanding of the 1978 revelation?
Dr. Harris: I met with numerous adult children of the apostles and general authorities. Those are the governing people of the church. That’s what they call them, general authorities. And I interviewed with them to get their late father’s private papers, diaries, journals, meeting minutes. That’s one way I got access to this treasure trove of documents.
The other way I got access is I went to the church history library, or the LDS church archives in [Salt Lake] city, and I applied for access. And there was a very generous archivist who gave me a lot of things who is now retired, and his successors probably wouldn’t have been as generous, but he was very generous in giving me access to a lot of different things at the archives at Brighma Young University (BYU).
That’s part of my book because I talk about civil rights, and two of the chapters look at how that the federal government went after BYU for civil rights violations. I went to BYU and I realized that there was a collection from the president of BYU back in the sixties. A guy named Ernest Wilkinson. They are two paper collections. One of them is available to scholars, which I certainly used. It’s called the Earnest Wilkinson Papers. And the other collection is called the Earnest Wilkinson Presidential Papers, and it’s restricted.
I wanted to see the civil rights files in that restricted collection. I asked permission and the archivist said, this is such a sensitive file. We need to get permission from the president of the university at the time. He said, yes, I got into the collection. I realized they had no idea what they gave me access to see, because it was sensitive, confidential stuff… about the details of the federal civil rights investigation into BYU’s practices omitting Black students and faculty.
When I got access to Spencer Kimball’s papers, it changed everything because I wanted to know how the ban affected the church leaders that when they’re visiting predominantly Black areas of the world, like multiracial Brazil or Africa or the Caribbean. In Kimball’s diaries, he would write what he was [experiencing] when visiting, let’s say some Black Brazilians on a church. They would come up to him after the church meeting, saying, “Apostle Kimball, we want to go on a mission for the church. We want to get married in the temple, but we can’t because of the color of our skin.’” He goes home at night to his hotel, and he writes in his diary, “my heart bleeds for these people.”
In other words, he’s saying, I don’t know if this ban’s inspired. I don’t think this is a good thing for the church. Here we have people who want to be full participants, and here we are treating them like second class citizens.”
While researching this book, what findings surprised you the most about the church’s internal deliberations regarding the priesthood ban, and how did these discoveries change or enhance your previous understanding of this period in Mormon history?
Dr. Harris: What I learned, I think the most was that not all of the leaders supported the ban. In fact, Kimball wrote when he was an apostle, this is before he became the church president, he wrote his son and he said the ban may have been “apostle error.” He’s thinking about this long before.
There is another leader I write about extensively in my book. He’s in the governing first presidency, the highest quorum of the church. The first presidency is the highest quorum, and the second quorum would be the quorum of the 12 apostles. His name is Hugh Brown, and Brown was an activist. He hated the ban, and he thought that it was just born out of bigotry. It wasn’t scriptural. It wasn’t something that [God] wanted them to do.
He did the unthinkable. Brown became an activist within the first presidency. That’s just unheard of today. He spoke to the press to put pressure on the church to lift the ban when he couldn’t convince them in private meetings himself. Then he called up Wallace Turner, the New York Times, and he said, “We’ve got this terrible ban in place. We’re thinking about lifting it because we’re trying to move the church into Nigeria.”
Brown knew that wasn’t true. They weren’t thinking about lifting the ban. This is 1962, so this is years before they ultimately did it in 1978. But he’s doing this to put pressure them using the media.
Finally, in 1969, Brown convinced the church president David O. McKay to lift the ban and ordain a Black Latter-day Saint man who worked at the Hotel Utah Church in Salt Lake, named Monroe Fleming. Brown convinced David O. McKay to ordain him to the priesthood in 1969. When the other 12 apostles heard, [they] exploded in anger. Shortly after this the church. McKay died. The new president kicked Brown to the curb and said, “we’re not retaining you in the first presidency. You’re out.”
Critics have noted that the narrative often focuses more on church leadership than on the Black Mormon community itself. What considerations influenced your methodological approach, and what challenges did you face in documenting the experiences of Black Mormons during this period?
Dr. Harris: Obviously a book about Black Mormons needs to have black voices. There’s no question about it. I write in the introduction to my book, I wanted to lift up Black voices as much as I could in terms of what the sources would allow me to do, but even going beyond that, I wanted to include a multitude of voices in my book. How did this ban and being taught that Black people were inferior, how did it affect white people and brown people who were conditioned to see Black people as inferiors?
I wanted to capture many voices. Black people, of course, are the most important, as I note. But I wanted to know how it affected average people. I wanted to look at how it affected the church leaders. Obviously, I got access to their diaries and journals, and I also wanted to look at people outside of the Mormon community, particularly in Utah, particularly the Black community who were not LDS.
I went to the Library of Congress in D.C. to access to the NAACP papers, and they have massive folders on Utah. What they found was, or what they said was to the church leaders, they said stuff like, ‘we don’t care about your racial theology. We don’t care about that. You can, do whatever. If you want to believe in racism, that’s your business. But the racism affects civil rights. In Utah, we’re trying to push for a civil rights bill that will prevent discrimination in housing and in employment. We can’t get that through the Mormon dominated legislature because your church teaches that Black people are derivative of Cain, this biblical counter figure (who is cursed).”
Your book suggests that various external factors—including civil rights pressure and concerns about public perception—influenced the church’s decision to lift the ban. How do you respond to those who might see your work as suggesting that political expediency, rather than divine revelation, was the primary driver of this doctrinal change?
Dr. Harris: ”They’re not mutually exclusive. Kimball, as I argue in my book, wanted to lift the ban once he became the President because of all these experiences in Brazil.
The question is, he became the President in 1973, so why did it take him five years? It wasn’t like God was fickle. It’s because Kimball had to get buy-in from the bigots in the quorum, these deeply prejudicial apostles. There had to be consensus.
Kimball knew that if he just waved his magic wand and said, “Hey, we’re going to lift the ban today’” without buy-in from the apostles, there’d be schismatic movement like there was in 1890 [with polygamy]. That’s the first thing I would say is that the revelation is that process we’ve been talking about.
The second thing I would say is that there’s no way on God’s green earth that the church could have held onto the priesthood ban when there’s been this national movement for racial awakening. I mean, if you want to just be cut to the point, the civil rights movement ended the Mormon priesthood ban, there’s no way they could hold onto this.
I’ll give you one little factoid. Everywhere the Mormon church leaders went in the sixties and seventies, everywhere they went publicly, the first thing that reporters always asked is, “when are you going to lift the ban?” They were sick and tired of hearing that.
I’m thinking of the Washington DC Temple, this beautiful structure the Mormons build in1974. They had an open house dedication for this beautiful temple in 1974, and the church leaders were beside themselves that they thought that the reporters would ask, “tell us about this temple. What kind of theology do you teach in here? What do you do in the temple?” All these things (expected to be) generated by the occasion. Reporters didn’t want to know about any of that. “When are you going to lift the ban?” The leaders were completely flummoxed and angry that those are all the questions they got.
The other thing that I point out in my book a lot too is the federal government was clamping down on universities like BYU and also religious institutions that held discriminatory policies and theologies. And the IRS would’ve come after BYU had they not taken steps to make the university more racially inclusive because the federal government told BYU, if you don’t start recruiting Black faculty and Black students, we’re going to shut you down. We’re going to take away the GI bill that your students can’t use, we’re going to take away research grants from your science faculty.
How has your deep dive into this controversial chapter of Mormon history affected your understanding of revelation and institutional change within the LDS tradition?
Dr. Harris: Some people ask, how has seeing all these papers—the first presidency meeting minutes, the Quorum of the 12 meeting minutes, and their letters and their diaries—affected the way you view them?
The more interesting story for me as a scholar is how people change. How is it that you were born in this incredibly racist culture in Arizona, Utah or Idaho, those three of the big states, and when you start to meet Black Latter-day Saints who tell you their grievances, that they want to be full participating Mormons, yet this anti-Black theology says they can’t, how does that impact people? That’s probably one of the biggest things that came away from my book, is that it does impact them.
They see how this theology harms real people. And I wanted to capture that in my book, and I did. And there are several stories in my book where even some of the most hard-crusted racist apostles start to change their views when they start to come in contact with black and biracial latter-day saints.
There’s also something else driving this, and this is the theology. Mormons are like a lot of Christian groups that they think that they need to bring their gospel to the world. This is what the scriptures teach. The Bible teaches that Jesus in the Bible says that the apostles were to take the gospel to every kindred nation, tongue, and people. Mormons believe this. The problem is how do you take the gospel to every kindred nation, tongue, and people if you can’t go into Sub-Saharan Africa because of this ban? Kimball realizes that theology, the anti-Black theology, collides with Jesus’s instructions to globalize the church. That’s really what’s fueling a lot of this, is that he realizes that if we’re going to spread the gospel to the world, we have to get rid of this ban.”
Dr. Harris teaches classes on civil rights, religion and politics, and American religions at CSU Pueblo, where he incorporates this research into his curriculum. “Second-Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality” is now in its third printing and has sold thousands of copies worldwide since its release in July.
