| Black people and the Latter Day Saint movement |
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Black Pete, or Peter Kerr, was an early member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the second black man to be ordained to the priesthood in that faith.
| Black people and the Latter Day Saint movement |
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Black Pete, or Peter Kerr, was an early member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the second black man to be ordained to the priesthood in that faith.
Peter Kerr was born c. 1775, to an enslaved woman named Kino, who was of Mandinka heritage. [1] He and his mother lived in western Pennsylvania, where they were enslaved to a man named John Kerr Jr. Following Kerr's death, Peter was willed to his son, who moved to Ohio, a free state, in 1813. Peter was freed from servitude, and came into contact with a group known as "The Family," which practiced a combination of Christian principles and communism. Many members of that group converted to Mormonism in the early 1830s, including Peter. There is, however, no official record of his baptism, but his membership was recognized by George A. Smith, another member of the church, and in local newspapers. [2] He was notably accustomed to seeing "angels and letters [that] would come down from heaven..." and once jumped off a bridge to catch a letter, which he said was delivered by a black angel. [3] He acted as a Revelator in the community, was ordained to the priesthood, and baptized others into the faith, along with Levi W. Hancock, Edson Fuller, and Herman Bassett. [1] : 64–65 A colleague, Reuben Harmon, mentioned that "White women would chase him about..." [4] [5] and Peter soon entered into a relationship with fourteen-year-old Lovina Williams, of whom he said he had received revelation to marry. [6] Lovina replied that if she received a revelation as well, she would marry him. [6] Peter consulted the prophet Joseph Smith, about whether he should marry Lovina, but Smith said he could not receive personal revelation for him. [4] [1] Peter and Lovina did not marry, and, after 1831, there is no record of him. Some scholars have suggested that he died, being around 60 years old in 1835, [7] when the average lifespan of an African-American man at the time was around forty. [8]
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, informally known as the LDS Church or Mormon Church, is the largest Latter Day Saint denomination. Founded during the Second Great Awakening, the church is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, and has established congregations and built temples worldwide. According to the church, as of 2023, it has over 17.2 million members, of which over 6.8 million live in the U.S. The church also reports over 99,000 volunteer missionaries and 350 temples.
In Mormonism, the Melchizedek priesthood, also referred to as the high priesthood of the holy order of God or the Holy Priesthood, after the Order of the Son of God, is the greater of the two orders of priesthood, the other being the Aaronic priesthood.
Early Mormonism had a range of doctrines related to race with regards to Black people of African descent. References to Black people, their social condition during the 19th and 20th centuries, and their spiritual place in Western Christianity as well as in Mormon scripture were complicated.
Sidney Rigdon was a leader during the early history of the Latter Day Saint movement.
In the Latter Day Saint movement, priesthood is the power and authority of God given to man, including the authority to perform ordinances and to act as a leader in the church. A group of priesthood holders is referred to as a quorum.
The Latter Day Saint movement is the collection of independent church groups that trace their origins to a Christian Restorationist movement founded by Joseph Smith in the late 1820s.
The Church of Christ was the original name of the Latter Day Saint church founded by Joseph Smith. Organized informally in 1829 in upstate New York and then formally on April 6, 1830, it was the first organization to implement the principles found in Smith's newly published Book of Mormon, and thus its establishment represents the formal beginning of the Latter Day Saint movement. Later names for this organization included the Church of the Latter Day Saints, the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church of God, the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Elijah Abel, or Able or Ables was one of the earliest African-American members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and was the church's first African-American elder and Seventy. Abel was predominantly of Scottish and English descent and appears to have been the first, and one of the few, black members in the early history of the church to have received Priesthood ordination, later becoming the faith's first black missionary. Abel did not have his ordination revoked when the LDS Church officially announced its now-obsolete restrictions on Priesthood ordination, but was denied a chance to receive his temple endowment by third church president John Taylor. As a skilled carpenter, Abel often committed his services to the building of LDS temples and chapels. He died in 1884 after serving a mission to Cincinnati, Ohio, his last of three total missions for the church.
During the history of the Latter Day Saint movement, the relationship between Black people and Mormonism has included enslavement, exclusion and inclusion, and official and unofficial discrimination. Black people have been involved with the Latter Day Saint movement since its inception in the 1830s. Their experiences have varied widely, depending on the denomination within Mormonism and the time of their involvement. From the mid-1800s to 1978, Mormonism's largest denomination – the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – barred Black women and men from participating in the ordinances of its temples necessary for the highest level of salvation, and excluded most men of Black African descent from ordination in the church's lay, all-male priesthood. During that time the LDS Church also opposed interracial marriage, supported racial segregation in its communities and church schools, and taught that righteous Black people would be made white after death. The temple and priesthood racial restrictions were lifted by church leaders in 1978. In 2013, the LDS Church disavowed its previous teachings on race for the first time.
Hiram Page was an early member of the Latter Day Saint movement and one of the Eight Witnesses to the Book of Mormon's golden plates.
Jesse Gause was an early leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and served in the First Presidency as a counselor to church founder Joseph Smith. For decades Gause was generally unknown to Latter Day Saint historians. It was only in the 1970s and 80s that research identified his rightful place among early church leaders.
Kwaku Walker Lewis, was an early African-American abolitionist, Freemason, and Mormon elder from Massachusetts. He was an active member of the Underground Railroad and the anti-slavery movement.
In the theology of the Latter Day Saint movement, an endowment refers to a gift of "power from on high", typically associated with the ordinances performed in Latter Day Saint temples. The purpose and meaning of the endowment varied during the life of movement founder Joseph Smith. The term has referred to many such gifts of heavenly power, including the confirmation ritual, the institution of the High Priesthood in 1831, events and rituals occurring in the Kirtland Temple in the mid-1830s, and an elaborate ritual performed in the Nauvoo Temple in the 1840s.
This is a chronology of Mormonism. In the late 1820s, Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, announced that an angel had given him a set of golden plates engraved with a chronicle of ancient American peoples, which he had a unique gift to translate. In 1830, he published the resulting narratives as the Book of Mormon and founded the Church of Christ in western New York, claiming it to be a restoration of early Christianity.
From 1852 to 1978, temple and priesthood policies in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prohibited both Black women and men from temple ordinances and ordination in the all-male priesthood. In 1978, the church's highest governing body, the First Presidency, declared in the "Official Declaration 2" statement, that the restriction had been lifted. Between 1830 and 1852, a few Black men had been ordained to the Mormon priesthood in the Latter Day Saint movement, under Joseph Smith.
Since Mormonism's foundation, Black people have been members; however, the church placed restrictions on proselytization efforts among Black people. Before 1978, Black membership was small. It has since grown, and in 1997, there were approximately 500,000 Black members of the church, mostly in Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean. Black membership has continued to grow substantially, especially in West Africa, where two temples have been built. By 2018, an estimated 6% of members were Black worldwide. In the United States, approximately 1% of members are Black.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In the past, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints including Brigham Young have consistently opposed marriages between members of different ethnicities, though interracial marriage is no longer considered a sin. In 1977, apostle Boyd K. Packer publicly stated that "[w]e've always counseled in the Church for our Mexican members to marry Mexicans, our Japanese members to marry Japanese, our Caucasians to marry Caucasians, our Polynesian members to marry Polynesians. ... The counsel has been wise." Nearly every decade for over a century—beginning with the church's formation in the 1830s until the 1970s—has seen some denunciations of interracial marriages (miscegenation), with most statements focusing on Black–White marriages. Church president Brigham Young taught on multiple occasions that Black–White marriage merited death for the couple and their children.
Joseph Smith's views on Black people varied during his lifetime. As founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, he included Black people in many ordinances and priesthood ordinations, but held multi-faceted views on racial segregation, the curses of Cain and Ham, and shifted his views on slavery several times, eventually coming to take an anti-slavery stance later in his life.
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