The Negro Question

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The Seed of Cain. Pre-existence is the source of trouble on the Negro question. According to Mormon belief, only those who led a heroic prelife were eligible to be born into the world as Mormons. Negro souls are not eligible because, as Prophet Smith used to proclaim, they came into the world with the curse of Ham and Cain upon them. Negroes could join the church, and as a consequence of their low status on earth might even earn a higher place among the three levels of Heaven than white men, but it was "revealed" to Brigham Young in 1879 that they could not become Mormon priests. When the rest of mankind has in heaven earned the priesthood, he wrote, "then the curse will be removed from the seed of Cain, and they will possess the priesthood." The decision relegated Negroes to second-class spiritual citizenship until death, depriving them, among other things, of the power to baptize their non-Mormon ancestors into the church.

The doctrine has kept the number of Mormon Negroes to only a few hundred (among 2,000,000), and the church is not seeking any more. Of 12,000 Mormon missionaries abroad, only a handful are in Africa—finding converts among the white residents of South Africa. Only one-tenth of 1% of the population of Utah are Negroes, and it is the only state outside the South without some kind of anti-discrimination law. There are only two Negroes at the church-run Brigham Young University.

Inside Opposition. Will church teaching on the Negro change? "I don't know the answer," says Hugh Brown. "But the channels between heaven and earth are not closed. There will be a solution when the Lord decides the proper time has come." Many Mormons believe that the solution will have to be a new revelation, as when Acting Prophet William Woodruff ordered Mormons to abandon the practice of multiple marriages in 1890—a few months after the Supreme Court had ruled that federal antipolygamy statutes were constitutional.

Revelations are as hard to define as they are to coax up on order. There is not even any accurate count of them, although the church records 133 divinely inspired statements by Joseph Smith. Later Prophets, including his successor Brigham Young, have seldom announced to the public that they have received a message from God, and any new revelation on the priesthood would require a most awkward reinterpretation of Mormon teaching on preexistence. Since he became Prophet in 1951, McKay has never admitted that God spoke to him. Few Mormons have any hope that revelations on the Negro would come to McKay's probable successor, President Joseph L. Smith, 86, a stern, old-fangled moralist (and grandnephew of the Founder) who believes that "darkies are wonderful people."