For many early Utah pioneers, James Brown Jr. was a hero of sorts. He led a Mormon Battalion company into the Salt Lake Valley just days after Brigham Young. He and his family settled Ogden, which became known for a time as Brownsville, and he served as a Latter-day Saint bishop.
As a prominent leader, he married 13 women — all sealed to him in temple rites — and fathered 28 children.
What most church members didn’t know was that James Jr. had Black grandparents — and that carries significance, given that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had a policy barring Black members from holding the priesthood or entering temples from 1852 to 1978.
On this week’s show, Brigham Young University history professor Jenny Hale Pulsipher, a descendant of Brown, discovered his racial ancestry, and W. Paul Reeve, who is head of Mormon studies at the University of Utah and has done the most scholarly research on African Americans in the church, discuss this finding and how it helps modern believers understand the messiness of the past and the “impossibility of policing racial boundaries” through profiling.
Listen to the podcast: