I have a weirdly vivid memory of the early 1990s moment when I first learned that some people frown on interracial marriages. I was approximately five years old and living in Florida. While playing one afternoon, I stumbled upon a wedding invitation for a mixed-race couple in my ward. The invitation included an engagement photo, and said the wedding would be held in a few weeks at the chapel.
I stared, captivated, at the photo for a long time – mostly admiring how beautiful and happy the couple looked — I think they were wearing bright yellow while standing in front of a palm tree. But I was a little confused by the invitation. Mormon weddings could be held in normal chapels? Mormons were supposed to get married in temples. Even if the closest temple was 12 hours away in Atlanta. Earlier that summer I had flown to Utah and had waited outside and gotten a vanilla ice cream cone with my grandparents (on my dad’s side) during an Aunt’s (on my mom’s side) temple wedding. That’s the way Mormon weddings worked.
As I was still staring at the photograph invitation, someone came up behind me and made an offhand comment. I don’t remember the exact words, but I remember the gist. The person remarked, in a tone of disapproval, that they didn’t think the couple should be getting married. They said they expected the couple would have a difficult marriage because one was a convert, and even worse, they were different races.
That comment didn’t make any sense. All I saw was a happy, beautiful, in love, couple. But the person who said it was an adult, and adults knew more than me. So the message I took away was that this couple weren’t good Mormons, and weren’t allowed to get married in a Temple, because one of them was black.
Maybe a month or so later, I saw the recently-married couple from the photograph at church. I said something to my mother about how I was very sad they weren’t temple worthy because one of them was black. My mother quickly corrected me, explaining that the real reason they weren’t getting married in the Temple was because one of them had recently been baptized and they had to wait a year to be sealed. That answer also didn’t make sense to me as a five-year-old, but at least the race-based part had been corrected.
Any lingering confusion was further corrected the next year, when my first grade teacher did a Black History Month unit and we read children’s books about Martin Luther King, Jr. That’s when I learned that America, and the State of Florida, had a long history of whites enslaving black people and treating them terribly. This was very sad and had hurt lots of nice people and had caused lots of fights. But now we knew that was stupid. Now everyone knew everyone was equal, and everyone should be nice to everyone else, and silly things like skin colors shouldn’t matter. Some people might still think that black people should be treated differently from white people, but that was very bad. It was (first grade word of the day) “racist.”
I did the math in my head and connected the dots. The Civil Rights Movement was still recent history! It wasn’t old history like George Washington; my parents and my teacher had already been grown-ups! Maybe the older person at church who had said the mean thing about the interracial couple still thought blacks and whites should be separated? Sometimes adults were wrong. This must have been an example.
Seven or eight years later, as an adolescent, I started reading copious amounts of Civil Rights Era books. I learned about Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court decision striking down bans on interracial marriage as unconstitutional. Around the same time, I learned about the Mormon Church’s own tragic history of banning blacks from receiving the Priesthood or attending the Temple until 1978. I learned that even following the June 1978 Official Proclamation, although the “ban” on interracial marriage had been lifted, its discouragement continued.
By the time I was 18 or 19 I had added “interracial marriage” to my “benchmark of reliability” checklist. If a Mormon-related book implied in any way that interracial marriage was inappropriate, no part of the book was worth reading. I remember on one occasion, in response to a gospel question I had, an Institute Director referred me to an old book in the library. So I flipped to the index, flipped to the chapter on interracial marriage, found a horrific quote, closed the book, and went back to him to explain why I would not be reading it, and how I thought all such false doctrine should be purged from church libraries. Instead of agreeing, he looked mildly shocked. “But that’s still the counsel. It’s just reality born from the brethren’s wisdom and experience. The church still discourages interracial marriages, because they are known to be exceptionally difficult…”
As documented by Matthew Harris and Newell Bringhurst in their 2015 book The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History: “The church’s position on miscegenation became somewhat fuzzy after the civil rights era ended in the early 1970s. Even today, the church’s position remains ambiguous. On the one hand, general authorities claims they do not oppose interracial marriages; on the other hand, they still reprint old talks in their current manuals discouraging the practice.”
This ambiguity should not exist. So let’s be clear: such teachings, whether implicit or explicit, are not of God. To the extent anyone still harbors any semblance of a belief that interracial marriage is disapproved or disfavored, the Church’s statement yesterday should put that belief to rest.
Out of curiosity, this afternoon I went and searched “interracial” and “miscegenation” on LDS.org. There were only 7 hits, and upon closer examination only 4 of them deal with the topic directly. [1] Although still far from perfect, today it appears that the Church’s content acknowledges both that the Church previously disapproved of interracial marriages, and makes clear that such views are unacceptable.
[1] For the curious, here are the results:
(a) The 2014 Race & the Priesthood gospel topics page and essay, which acknowledges (in a footnote) that Utah outlawed interracial marriage for the better part of a century. See Patrick Mason, “The Prohibition of Interracial Marriage in Utah, 1888–1963,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 108–131.
(b) A 2016 article which relates the story of Joseph Freeman and Toe Leituala Freeman, an interracial couple who originally broke up in the 1970s because Toe refused to be with Joseph on the grounds that he could not hold the Priesthood or get married in the Temple. However, after much prayer and spiritual promptings, they chose to ignore the counsel of their bishop and criticism from within the church, and were civilly married in 1974.
(c) A 1992 article which tells the story of Robert Stenson, who converted in 1972 because of his overall testimony of the gospel, despite being furious that the LDS Church still engaged in racial separatism. In April 1978 he married his wife “after receiving counsel about the challenges of interracial marriage.” Just two months later the Priesthood and Temple ban for black members was lifted, and his family was sealed the next year.
(d) A 1990 Ensign article by Myrna Braman, where she describes an adventure around 1980 when her interracial family had decided to hike up to the Oakland Temple grounds out of curiosity, despite believing that Mormons hated blacks and would reject their interracial family. They were warmly welcomed instead, and the family eventually converted.