New research discovers the first known Latter-day Saint polygamist with Black ancestry

While researching a book on her family tree, Latter-day Saint historian Jenny Hale Pulsipher discovered that one of her most prominent pioneer ancestors, who first settled Ogden and had long identified as white, had Black grandparents.

Many modern Americans are finding mixed races among their progenitors, but it can be especially complicated in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which, for 126 years, had a policy — now discarded — of racial discrimination against Black members.

From 1852 until 1978, the church barred Latter-day Saint men with African blood from entering the all-male priesthood and Black women and men from participating in temple rites.

Pulsipher’s relative, Capt. James Brown, was “an ardent convert” who joined the church in Illinois in 1839, served several missions for his newfound faith, and, the historian wrote in a new “Century of Black Mormons” profile, “most famously” captained a company of the Mormon Battalion that arrived in the Salt Lake Valley five days after Brigham Young’s vanguard company.

James Jr. (as she calls him to distinguish from other Brown family members) later became “the founder of Ogden, Utah (initially called Brownsville), where he and his family settled,” added Pulsipher, a history professor at church-owned Brigham Young University. “A polygamist, James Jr. had 13 wives and 28 children, and his descendants today number in the thousands.”

Yet James Jr. enjoyed priesthood positions — he was ordained a high priest in Nauvoo, Illinois; set apart as bishop in a nearby county; and received his temple ordinances on Dec. 22, 1845, before the Latter-day Saint exodus to the West.

All his marriages were “sealed” in a Latter-day Saint temple. About the same time, other Black members — including Jane Manning James, a lifelong devotee who pushed top church leaders to receive her own temple rites — were barred from participation.

So what does Pulsipher’s discovery mean?

It “illustrates the inconsistent application of Latter-day Saint racial policies over time,” said W. Paul Reeve, a University of Utah historian and author of “Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness.” “Her biography of James Brown Jr. reveals the impossibility of policing racial boundaries.”

Pulsipher combined DNA detective work with 19th-century court documents to reveal Brown to be “the first known person of Black African ancestry to practice polygamy as a Latter-day Saint,” Reeve said. “He is one of 11 men of Black African ancestry thus far to receive the Latter-day Saint lay priesthood before the lifting of the faith’s racial restrictions and one of 14 men and women to receive temple rituals despite the faith’s evolving racial policies.”

The messiness of race

Through the generations, it had long been rumored that Pulsipher’s progenitor, James Brown Jr., had what family members called “Negro blood,” she said in an interview, but she was skeptical.

After all, his son James Morehead Brown was married to a Shoshone woman, so the historian thought some of the whisperings might have been based on “the dark skin” of that mixed-race marriage.

When Pulsipher interviewed Brown descendants, they said they thought the chatter was based on that Native American connection.

James Morehead Brown and Adelaide, his Shoshone wife, were “sealed” in the Endowment House (a precursor to the Salt Lake Temple) in 1857.

Out of nowhere, though, that ordinance was later canceled.

“Because there was no suggestion of misconduct, it is possible that Latter-day Saint leaders may have suspected some Black ancestry,” she said. “We presumed they sought to have the sealing and other ordinances reinstated and, in 1865, they were. No explanation was offered.”

The couple remained faithful to the church, she said, for the rest of their lives.

Modern geneticists, though, were able to find “African ethnic markers” among descendants of James Jr., she wrote, who determined that James Jr. was “approximately one-eighth Black. … Contemporary records suggest that both his grandfather William Brown and his grandmother Margaret Brown had Black ancestry.”

The original rumors were likely based on an 1821 court case in North Carolina, where records described William Brown and “the wife” as “colored people,” Pulsipher wrote. James Brown Sr. and his son were actively involved in the case.

That means James Jr., the historian explained,“knew that his neighbors considered his family to be ‘colored’ or ‘mixed race.’”

By the time they all reached Illinois and joined the church, however, he and his family were treated as white.

“By leaving North Carolina to begin anew in the West,” Pulsipher wrote, “the Browns could leave their racial identity — and the increasing prejudices and restrictions associated with it — behind them.”

None of their children “probably had any idea,” she said, “of the family’s mixed-race status.”

‘One-drop rule’

Before the 20th century, the “one drop rule” — one drop of African blood made a person “Black” — did not exist in many states.

Thomas Jefferson, who fathered six children with his slave Sally Hemings, wrote in a letter that those with less than one-eighth Black ancestry could be considered having “clear[ed] the issue of the Negro blood.”

In short, their descendants could be seen as white.

Brigham Young, who initiated the Black priesthood/temple ban, did not teach or implement the “one drop rule,” Reeve said, but church leaders did grapple with the issue on a case-by-case basis among those with mixed-race ancestry. They didn’t implement a one-drop policy until 1907.

“Mixed-race people accounted for the vast majority of the free Black population in North Carolina,” Pulsipher wrote, by one estimate — “at least 70%.”

Descriptions of James Brown Sr. handed down through the Brown family noted his “dark complexion,” she reported. “While ‘complexion’ had multiple meanings in the 18th century, by the early 19th century it had come to be primarily associated with skin color.”

Today, thousands of James Jr.’s descendants are “practicing Latter-day Saints,” wrote Pulsipher, “a resounding demonstration that people with African ancestry have always fully participated in the ordinances and offices of the church.”

Though only a tiny fraction of that blood runs through her, she is one of them.

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