Civil rights advocate Jeanetta Williams was delighted to see a formal alliance emerge in 2018 between the NAACP and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as both institutions pledged to work for greater racial harmony.

But that historic 2018 presidential summit between the NAACP’s Derrick Johnson and the church’s Russell M. Nelson was not the beginning of cooperation between the nation’s oldest civil rights organization and the Utah-based global faith, Williams said in an interview. Nor was Nelson the first Latter-day Saint president to reach out to the NAACP.

[Read more about the current NAACP national president’s views on his alliance with Latter-day Saints.]

Williams, who has led NAACP’s Salt Lake Branch for more than 30 years, tracks the partnership between the two groups to 1998, when she invited then-church President Gordon B. Hinckley to be the keynote speaker at the organization’s regional meeting — encompassing Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, California, Hawaii and Arizona.

It was the first time a Latter-day Saint president had addressed an NAACP gathering, Williams told the church-owned Deseret News. (Nelson addressed the NAACP’s national convention in Detroit in 2019.)

(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Russell M. Nelson speaks to a national NAACP convention in Detroit in 2019.

Williams said the Salt Lake Branch had long enjoyed a friendly relationship with the affable Hinckley.

“We were one of the first groups,” Williams said, “to sit down with President Hinckley after he became president of the church.”

Securing Hinckley’s participation at the NAACP regional conference “was a major coup for Williams and an astonishing about-face for the LDS Church and the NAACP,” historian Matthew Harris and daughter Madison Harris co-wrote in a Utah Historical Quarterly essay.

Williams hoped the occasion would prompt further willingness for the two groups to work together — and it did.

Fifteen years before Hinckley’s landmark speech to the Black organization, Congress had created a federal holiday named in honor of Martin Luther King. By 1999, according to the quarterly article, all states had recognized the King holiday — except Utah.

The Beehive State was not the last to embrace the day but had refused to use King’s name, instead calling it “Human Rights Day.”

A year after Hinckley’s speech, Williams “hand-delivered a letter to his office,” the Harrises’ article reported, “asking him to support the Martin Luther King holiday.”

The church president declined to do so publicly, the researchers said, but worked behind the scenes to make it happen.

By 2000, the Utah Legislature finally recognized the King holiday in the name of the civil rights legend, due largely to “the persistent efforts of NAACP President Jeanetta Williams, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley…and others,” the Harrises wrote. “They convinced lawmakers to honor King, which marked the end of a long and tumultuous debate in Utah over his life and legacy.”

Since then, Williams has been a respected guest at the church’s semiannual General Conferences and at its annual Christmas concerts. She also attended the funerals of church Presidents Hinckley, Nelson and Thomas S. Monson.

The energetic NAACP leader continues to host two annual luncheons to honor first responders and other “helpers,” she said, and the church regularly buys at least one table for these events.

Unlike the church’s backing of the NAACP’s scholarship program for historic Black colleges, it has never given significant money specifically to underwrite the Salt Lake Branch’s own scholarships, said Williams, adding “maybe it’s time I ask.”