It's been nearly thirty years since the LDS church changed its policy regarding the ordaining of African American males (or, better put, males of black African descent) to the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods. My kids have all grown up not knowing what it was like for that sort of discrimination to exist in the church, but I remember feeling quite self-conscious about it when I was a teenager. In what I still regard as the granddaddy of all non sequiturs, at the end of my senior year of high school in 1977, I wrote in the yearbook of a classmate, an African American girl, some silly message about how I was certain that all the blessings of the priesthood would come to black people someday -- when she probably didn't even know I was Mormon or what I was talking about. Based on what certain church leaders had said (case in point: Bruce R. McConkie, Mr. Mormon Doctrine himself, who at one time wrote and preached that African Americans would never enjoy priesthood and temple blessings in this life), the color bar looked like iron-clad church doctrine. However, oddly enough, it was only about a year after I made that wishful "prediction" in my classmate's yearbook that President Spencer Kimball received the revelation driving the policy change.I clearly remember the moment when I found out about the policy change; it was the summer after the end of my freshman year at BYU, when I was trying to find motivation to serve a church mission. I was home that day and was fixing myself something to eat while watching "The Price Is Right" or something on TV. The network news broke in with a bulletin saying the Mormon church had announced that from that time forth, the priesthood would be extended to all worthy male members regardless of race. I fairly buzzed with excitement and immediately called my mother at work to tell her; we agreed that it was a great day and a great thing. Some people still can't forgive the church for ever having barred blacks from the priesthood and temple ordinances, but there's no denying that 1978 marked the church's emergence into the civil-rights age.
Looking back, it's difficult to identify any rationale for the original policy that doesn't entail racism of some sort -- especially given the expansive definition that the "R" word has acquired over the years -- which is presumably why the church tries not to talk too much about it these days. I regard it now as a historical oddity that, gratefully, has gone away.
The effect of the change over time was never made more dramatically clear to me than during the 2000 presidential election campaign, when George W. Bush caused a stir in the press by appearing at Bob Jones University, which at the time had a ban on inter-racial dating. I could -- and can now -- only imagine what would have happened to the Mormon church in the interim, public relations-wise, if it still denied the priesthood to African American males.
Unfortunately, if Mitt Romney wins the Republican presidential nomination this year, it will probably be the race angle from which the mainstream media attack him most for his Mormonism. I don't know how excited I am about Romney's running for president (although he's far and away the best administrator in the race, 'Pub or Dem), but, regardless, it's difficult to imagine that the Dems and their allies in the media won't raise the specter of Mormon racism 24/7 if he's up against Hillary Clinton and/or Barack Obama.
(By the way, on the topic of electing the first woman, the first African American, or the first Mormon president, a friend of mine observed that we should simply elect Gladys Knight president and take care of all three at once. Brilliant!)
