First Official Church Statement on Mormonism & “the Negro” from the First Presidency, 1949

The First Presidency: George Albert Smith, J. Reuben Clark, & David. O. McKay

In response to the Lowry Letters the First Presidency published this church’s first of two official statements defending this church’s overt anti-Blackness & their practices & doctrines of divine white supremacy & segregation.

This is that first statement.

Today many leaders of this church claim that the anti-Blackness of this church was a folk-belief with mysterious reasons and origins.

But previous leaders were very clear on these beliefs & their doctrinal foundations.

Which to me seems like yet another example of this church’s practice of doublespeak, of having their cake and eating yours too, of being an openly white supremacist organization in practice but preaching Christlike love in rhetoric.

White supremacy doesn’t just fade away. We must put as much effort into disassimilating from it as effort was put into assimilating us all into it.

And in my experience, born just 5 years after the end of the African Salvation Ban, and raised Mormon in Utah’s Dixie, there has been zero efforts to be accountable to and responsible for our culture’s ongoing history of divine white supremacy.

The First Presidency: George Albert Smith, J. Reuben Clark, & David. O. McKay

Official Church Statement on Mormonism & “the Negro”
from the First Presidency, August 17, 1949
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“The attitude of the Church with reference to the Negroes remains as it has always stood. It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the Church from the days of its organization, to the effect that Negroes may become members of the Church but that they are not entitled to the Priesthood at the present time. 

“President Brigham Young said: ‘Why are so many of the inhabitants of the earth cursed with a skin of blackness? It comes in consequence of their fathers rejecting the power of the holy priesthood, and the law of God…’

​"President Wilford Woodruff: ‘The day will come when all that race will be redeemed and possess all the blessings which we now have.’

“The position of the Church regarding the Negro may be understood when another doctrine of the Church is kept in mind, namely, that the conduct of spirits in the premortal existence has some determining effect (the bodies) spirits take on mortality…failure of the right to enjoy in mortality the blessings of the priesthood is a handicap which spirits are willing to assume in order that they might come to earth. 

"Under this principle there is no injustice whatsoever involved in this deprivation as to the holding of the priesthood by the Negroes.

"The First Presidency:
George Albert Smith
J. Reuben Clark
David. O. McKay"