Jane Manning James: She Walked Across America
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
Jane Manning James was born free in Connecticut in approximately eighteen twenty-two. She was converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by a missionary in eighteen forty-two, and in eighteen forty-three she walked most of the way from Buffalo, New York to Nauvoo, Illinois to join the gathering of the Saints. The journey covered hundreds of miles on foot.
In eighteen forty-seven, she was part of the pioneer company that entered the Salt Lake Valley. She had not been enslaved. She had chosen the church, and she had paid for that choice with her feet. She arrived in the valley as a free Black woman who expected to be part of the community she had crossed a continent to join.
What followed was a decades-long negotiation with LDS leadership over her spiritual standing. The church's policies, which became more explicitly restrictive after eighteen fifty-two under Brigham Young, limited what Black members could receive in terms of temple ordinances and spiritual status. James petitioned multiple church presidents over the course of her life to be sealed to a family in the temple as an adopted child, or to have her own family sealed. She petitioned Joseph F. Smith. She petitioned Wilford Woodruff. She wrote letters. She appeared in person. Her requests were granted in modified and limited forms that fell short of what she asked for.
Jane Manning James died in Salt Lake City in April nineteen oh eight. She had lived in the city for sixty-one years, longer than almost anyone who had made the original crossing. Her obituary in the Deseret News said that few people were as noted for faith and faithfulness as she was, and that she numbered friends and acquaintances by the hundreds. The restrictions she spent a lifetime petitioning against were not formally lifted until seventy years after her death. A monument bearing her name stands at the Salt Lake City Cemetery.
