‘We were bamboozled’ — students at Black college question why it honored LDS founder Joseph Smith

When a portrait of Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s 19th-century founder, was added to a gallery of leaders and activists assembled on the campus of a historic Black college in Atlanta, many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints cheered at what they saw as a symbol of bridge building.

The charismatic Latter-day Saint leader “was Lincoln before Lincoln,” the Rev. Dr. Lawrence Edward Carter Sr., dean of Morehouse College’s Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel, said during a Feb. 1 induction ceremony. “... His opposition to slavery was rooted not merely in humanitarian sentiment but in a theological certainty: the equality of human souls before God.”

Not everyone, though, was pleased with the honor accorded a religious leader who had made racist remarks and whose church barred Black members from participating in its temple rituals and priesthood for more than a century.

“Our beloved institution was founded in the aftermath of slavery to educate, uplift, and affirm the dignity of Black men. … Therefore, those honored within our walls should reflect that legacy,” Morehouse juniors Alonzo Brinson and Damarion King posted on social media. “Honoring a figure associated with a religious tradition whose early history includes racially exclusionary teachings and practices does not align with Morehouse’s mission or heritage.”

They asked that Carter take down Smith’s portrait from ​​the chapel’s International Hall of Honor and revoke his “induction” into the hallowed space.

Their protest was not aimed at church members, Brinson and King told The Salt Lake Tribune, but at the elevation of Smith as a role model.

“I am not saying that we don’t want to have a connection with the Latter-day Saints or for us to collaborate on different events or partnerships,” said Brinson, president of the chapel assistants program. “But to induct [Smith] right now just wasn’t a good taste. It wasn’t a good perception.”

This move was strictly the dean’s vision of the faith founder, Brinson said. “We were bamboozled.”

The two protesters told Morehouse’s student paper that administration officials demanded that they delete the post, and that if they refused, they could face punitive actions.

The school, though, denies any threats, according to the paper, and Carter said he welcomes open debate.

Morehouse is “a liberal arts college,” the longtime dean of the chapel told The Tribune. “We want our students to be safe to hear and discuss any idea, no matter how controversial, [including] the students who have protested about the Joseph Smith portrait. Nobody who works for Morehouse — professors or deans or directors or chairs of academic departments — nobody is condemning those students for expressing their views or discouraging them from speaking up. Freedom of press, freedom of speech is encouraged. All of our students understand that where Blacks or minorities are not free, we’re all born to rebel.”

Still, Carter believes that those students have not studied Mormonism as much as he has. Indeed, the Black administrator has spent a fair amount of time talking with Latter-day Saint historians and now sees the faith — and, he said, all faiths — through a lens of forgiveness and redemption.

Differing views of history

It is true that Smith evolved in his approach to Black people and slavery from the church’s beginning in 1830 to his long-shot campaign for U.S. president in the months before his slaying in 1844, said W. Paul Reeve, chair of Mormon studies at the University of Utah and author of “Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness.”

For most of his life, the Mormon prophet shared the belief of most Christians of his era about Black people having “the curse of Ham,” a biblical view the Utah-based faith eventually disavowed. He also condemned interracial marriage, or, as many put it, “race mixing.”

Smith made a statement in 1836 that “reified the status quo,” Reeve noted, and publicly opposed abolition.

At that time, Smith argued in a church publication that the course of abolitionism was “calculated to … set loose, upon the world a community of people who might peradventure, overrun our country and violate the most sacred principles of human society, chastity and virtue.”

By the time he ran for president, however, Smith’s platform called for ending slavery by selling public lands to compensate slaveholders.

After his death, his immediate successor, Brigham Young, led Mormon pioneers across the country to what they hoped would be a haven from persecution.

It was there that Young instituted the church’s racist ban, blocking Black men from joining the all-male priesthood and Black women and men from participating in temple rituals. That prohibition lasted until 1978.

Reeve was pleased to see recognition that Smith arrived at an antislavery position, he said, “but there is no need to make it sound more influential than it was.”

Putting up the Latter-day Saint leader’s portrait without any acknowledgment “that the church got race wrong for nearly 130 years,” the historian said, “or of the considerable harm that resulted leaves people feeling like there is an effort to avoid hard history.”

It is “perfectly OK to celebrate the good things,” he said, “but to do so while ignoring the bad things leads to the kind of response we have witnessed from students at Morehouse.”

Though Zandra Vranes has been a lifelong Latter-day Saint, she said, “Had I, a Black Mormon woman, been able to vote in 1844, my vote would have gone to James G. Birney.”

Birney called for “the immediate abolition of slavery, for the Constitution to be interpreted as an antislavery document,” she said, “and for freed Black Americans to be recognized as citizens with natural rights.”

Vranes acknowledged that “while Joseph Smith was a kind friend and leader to many Black pioneers in the faith, his campaign did not condemn slavery, and he allowed enslavers into membership and leadership in the church.”

She understands why Morehouse students are questioning his inclusion in the cherished chapel.

A longtime relationship

Carter, who is retiring this summer from the chapel he has overseen for nearly five decades, has been involved with Latter-day Saint leaders for some time.

A choir exchange, in which choirs from Morehouse and Spelman colleges sang with The Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square in 2023 and 2024, he said, was his idea.

His school has not received any money directly from the church, Carter said, and he hasn’t asked for any.

It was conversations with Latter-day Saint historians that opened his eyes to Smith’s presidential aspirations, Carter said in an interview. He was amazed to learn about his antislavery platform, which came decades before the Civil War.

What about those racist views he had before 1844?

Lincoln had them, too, Carter noted. And the Morehouse leader knows all about Thomas Jefferson’s illicit relationship with Sally Hemings (“As a slave,” he said, “she couldn’t give consent so he raped her”) and about Young and the faith’s racial exclusions.

But all these figures should be remembered for the good that they did, “not the mistakes they made,” he said. “Everybody’s humanity should be respected. That’s the spiritual point of view.”

Christians are called to “build community, to have a ministry of reconciliation,” Carter said, and “not be fixated on the rearview mirror, to live in what we pray for and dream of.”

Noting the Book of Mormon teaching that God invites “all to come unto him — Black and white, bond and free,” he said, “Smith’s revelations affirmed a gospel preached without racial distinction.”

Carter defended the decision to honor Smith “as a reflection, a mirror of Martin Luther King’s world and his dream of people being judged by their character and not by the color of their skin.”

The nearly retired dean plans, he said, to continue his association with Latter-day Saints.

He said he has chosen the final speaker for his lecture series: Brigham Young University President Shane Reese.

And he hopes in the future to add QR codes to every portrait in the chapel’s International Hall of Honor so visitors can read on their phones the complicated reality behind every face.

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