The Priesthood Ban: From Brigham Young to Spencer Kimball
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
For approximately one hundred twenty-six years, from around eighteen fifty-two until June ninth, nineteen seventy-eight, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints barred Black men from ordination to the priesthood. Black men and women were also excluded from participating in temple endowment and sealing ceremonies, which in LDS theology govern the most significant spiritual and family obligations of church membership. The origin of this policy in the church's own records is ambiguous; a few Black men had been ordained in the church's earliest decades, and the institutional decision to reverse that practice is not clearly documented in a single foundational moment.
In eighteen fifty-two, Brigham Young publicly announced the restriction. The theological justifications offered over the following century and a quarter varied, and some were explicitly racial in language and framing. As the church expanded internationally in the nineteen sixties and seventies, into Brazil and West Africa particularly, the restriction became an increasing source of difficulty. The Brazilian church included large numbers of members of mixed African descent. The growing West African membership had no ordained men and no access to temple ordinances.
On June ninth, nineteen seventy-eight, church president Spencer W. Kimball announced that a revelation had extended the priesthood to all worthy male members regardless of race. The announcement ended the restriction that had stood for more than a century.
In December twenty thirteen, the LDS Church published an essay approved by its First Presidency that addressed the history of the restriction directly. The essay acknowledged that the church disavowed the racial justifications that had been given for the ban over the preceding century, and that those justifications reflected the racism of the period rather than divine doctrine.
The essay is on the church's own website. It is not prominently displayed.
