On Dec. 25, 1964, as Mitt Romney enjoyed his last Christmas break as a high school student in Michigan, two Mormon missionaries visited Darius Gray in Colorado Springs and asked him whether he had any last questions before joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
He had one. A proud African American, Gray expressed wariness over a description in the Book of Mormon of a dark-skinned tribe being out of favor with God and asked, "How, in any way, does that relate to me?" The younger of the two missionaries stood off to the side as his senior companion explained, "Well, Brother Gray, the primary implication is that you won’t be able to hold the priesthood."
 |
Join the Discussion |
 |
Post a Comment |
After a tumultuous night of prayer, Gray still felt a call to join the faith and went on to help found the Genesis Group, an official church support group for African American Mormons, which he believes paved the way for the 1978 lifting of the ban on blacks in the priesthood. It was an anguishing period that coincided with Romney’s full embrace of his faith and his rise within it.
The mere mention of Romney and the church’s ban on blacks is fraught. If he gets the nomination, the nation’s first Mormon presidential nominee will challenge the first black president. Romney, the son of former Michigan governor George Romney, who had a strong record of civil rights activism, bears no responsibility for the doctrines of his church. But in the prolonged Mormon debate over whether the ban resulted from divine doctrine or inherited historical racism, Romney appears to have embraced the prevailing view: The ban was the word of God and thus unalterable without divine intervention.
Gray, who still chokes up discussing the day the church lifted the ban, wants to know more about Romney’s perspective on the ban and how he struggled with it.
"It’s a marvelous question," said Gray. "But there is only one person who can answer it."
The Romney campaign declined to expound upon the candidate’s thinking at the time.
As the son of George Romney, the Michigan governor and a leading voice for civil rights within the Republican Party, Mitt was well regarded by the few black students at the prestigious Cranbrook School outside Detroit.
"I was the only African American in my class," said Sidney Barthwell Jr., a Romney classmate and later a classmate of Barack Obama at Harvard Law School. "I knew about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and that they didn’t allow blacks to ascend to the priesthood. I knew that then. But George Romney was a tremendous social liberal and a tremendous supporter of the social rights movement."
Barthwell, now a magistrate in Michigan, said he never got any sense that Mitt Romney saw African Americans as anything but equals and that the Mormon church’s ban never arose as an issue at school. But the subject became unavoidable as Romney returned from his mission in France and enrolled at Brigham Young University in 1969. The priesthood ban contributed to unprecedented volatility on campus.
-
4A baseball: Slam lifts Salem Hills into title game
Published May 23, 2013 10:30:21PM -
Tavaci rezoning application filed with Salt Lake County
Published May 23, 2013 10:22:49PM -
At quiet Salt Lake shareholder meeting, Goldman works on its image
Published May 23, 2013 10:22:49PM -
First peregrine falcon hatches in downtown Salt Lake City
Published May 23, 2013 09:54:55PM
In October of that year, 14 black players lost their places on the University of Wyoming’s powerhouse football team for planning to wear black armbands in protest of the ban during their game against BYU. Stanford University, which Romney had previously attended, took the opposite stance, announcing at the end of 1969 that it would boycott athletic competitions with the church-owned university.
"I do remember Mitt being really angry with Stanford," said Kim Cameron, a friend at the time. "He felt like it was, A, naive, and, B, sort of a bigoted, narrow-minded perspective."
In the early ‘70s, when Romney served as a leader of BYU’s sports booster organization, called the Cougar Club, opposing teams would throw tomatoes and worse at BYU players and their fans. According to Dane McBride, a member of the club and one of Romney’s closest friends, there was a pervasive sense in the club that BYU was "under siege" from the protests. Their retaliation, he said, was to "raise more money for the school."
Furthermore, said McBride, the very notion of questioning the doctrinal ban was considered "unseemly as well as useless."
But that was not a uniform view.
Gray, the black Mormon pioneer, saw the ban as more a product "of the racial attitudes of this nation." While he understood that only a revelation from the top of the church could end the oppression, "We could advocate for it, lobby."
Mormon boys join the priesthood at age 12, a sacred rite that Mormons believe was restored to them by John the Baptist through Joseph Smith in 1829 after millennia of apostasy. At age 18, Mormon men enter a higher-level priesthood that allows them to serve as missionaries, hold positions of church authority and bestow the priesthood on others.
At church functions, Gray said, he and other black Mormons suffered the assurances of their white brethren that "you will have the priesthood in the world to come," or encouragements that if they lived worthy lives, "you will find your skin will become lighter and lighter."
As Romney bristled against the protests in Provo, Gray and two other black Mormons in Salt Lake expressed their frustrations to the church hierarchy. The church president at the time, the conservative Joseph Fielding Smith, responded by assigning three junior apostles — Gordon B. Hinckley, who would become president of the church; Thomas S. Monson, the current president; and Boyd K. Packer, who is next in line to be president — to meet with the three men. In an acknowledgment of their travails, the church established the Genesis Group in October 1971, although they reiterated, according to Gray, that the doctrine was a "policy of God" and that it would "take a revelation to change it."
Next Page >Copyright 2013 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
