To live comfortably within one's own skin, looking every day into the mirror and feeling fully included in one's chosen community of faith. That is Darius Gray's hope for every Latter-day Saint.
Darius Gray and Marie Taylor discuss Freedman's Bank database released earlier this year.
Jason Olson, Deseret News
It gets him up each morning, sits down to breakfast with him, pushes him out the door when weariness would keep him at home. It inspires his writing, undergirds his leadership, informs his speaking assignments. And occasionally, it discourages him.
As the president of Genesis, a group of black Latter-day Saints, he has the literal blessing of top church leadership in having been "set apart" by apostles to preside over a group that is unique in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Designed to help blacks feel included within LDS culture while taking pride in their own ethnic background, the group meets monthly on a Sunday evening for fellowship, music and sharing their feelings about God.
Looking back on the 30 years since Genesis was formed on Oct. 19, 1971, Gray and other blacks say they're standing in the "middle of the road."
"We've come a long way since 1978," says Gray, remembering the exultation that came in June of that year, when then-church President Spencer W. Kimball announced that a revelation from God directed that the faith's priesthood should thenceforth be available to all worthy males. Previously, black men could not hold the priesthood. "The revelation," as it has since been called, did more than open the way for blacks to serve in church leadership positions. It effectively opened the doors of the faith's temples to them, allowing participation in sacred ordinances that Latter-day Saints believe binds them together as families in the afterlife.
Twenty-three years later, one LDS temple is operating in South Africa, and others are planned for Nigeria and Ghana. The numbers of African Latter-day Saints there are exploding, and white missionaries are regularly paired with black missionaries to spread the gospel in select African nations.
While Gray has rejoiced at such progress, he emphasizes the vast difference between Africans living together in their own culture while accepting the gospel, and African-Americans, whose long quest for civil rights amid a white majority still informs the striving they feel for full acceptance in LDS culture, particularly in Utah.
While their spiritual privileges are now on par with all church members, a sense of distinct "otherness" remains, he said.
"June of 1978 changed so many things and left unchanged too many things. We are far more tolerant of African-Americans in our presence, and while we are, the lack of comfort with ethnic and racial diversity affects the reception that blacks receive. While we've progressed greatly, we have yet a long way to go."
The road ahead is blocked in some measure with outdated notions among a majority of non-LDS blacks that the church has "negative attitudes toward blacks," Gray said. "I still encounter that everywhere I go, though I find the attitudes can be moderated and even modified" with explanation. Though some have heard of a policy change in years past, the attitudes remain in part, he believes, because there has not been enough "candid discussion about our past, our present and where we're headed for the future."
Margaret Young, who is working with Gray to finish their second co-authored fictionalized book on early black Latter-day Saints, also sees the lack of real dialogue about blacks within the church. Having researched black LDS history in depth, she's troubled by the stagnancy of discussion surrounding modern blacks within the church and how the past affects their present reality.
She noted that the church's new Web site - www.mormon.org - was designed specifically to answer questions that those not familiar with church doctrine have. While it addresses sensitive subjects like polygamy, women and the priesthood, and homosexuality, "it has nothing about race. There seems to be something about it that is so scary. Whether it's that we haven't dealt with it because we're afraid it will become fodder for anti-Mormonism, I don't know."
As an instructor at Brigham Young University, Young, who is white, said she often encounters students who have been taught wrong concepts about race or who are troubled deeply by the lack of discussion about how race is viewed from a doctrinal standpoint. In fact, a quest for understanding in that realm is present among Latter-day Saints of all colors, Gray believes. Scriptural references to skin color, particularly in the Book of Mormon, are often interpreted in ways that view those whose skin is not white as "less than."
During a recent presentation she did for a women's group, Young said one woman of color in the audience talked of how "she just kept getting whiter and whiter" over time. "That whole concept that whiteness equals righteousness is just inculcated into the church."
Gray said he witnessed that discomfort within the past month as he attended an LDS sacrament meeting in Chicago while there to address the African American Genealogical and Historical Society about the church's recent release of the Freedman Bank records, composed mostly of black slave information from the Civil War era.
During the church service, a new bishopric was sustained by the congregation. One of the new counselors, a Hispanic man, was called on to speak and began his address expressing gratitude for God's confidence in him "despite this skin of mine."
Gray is concerned about "the folklore and misinformation (about race) that has existed for 160 years." And, he says, a few statements made by early church leaders dealing with race - statements never codified as LDS doctrine - have yet to be openly discussed, leaving many black members with lingering questions.
The resulting lack of closure on the issue continues to provide obstacles for people who find truth in a faith they want to embrace but wonder whether they can retain personal identity by doing so, he said.
Rainey Boateng, a 20-year-old student at the University of Utah, is now experiencing what it means to become a black Latter-day Saint. Formerly a Southern Baptist, she wasn't looking for a new faith when she visited Temple Square several months ago. But what she saw and heard there has changed her life dramatically.
As an employee of the National Conference for Community and Justice, she has a broad basis of understanding about how various faiths relate to - and separate themselves from - each other. But she admits she wasn't totally prepared for how her religious conversion has affected everything from relationships with family and friends to suddenly feeling that she is, in many ways, alone. She attends Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake periodically to "sing the hymns and feel a part of my culture."
A native of Idaho, she lost every black friend she had when she joined the church, she said. They accused her of "selling out." While she has white friends in Utah that are supportive, she has no blacks her own age to share feelings and frustrations with. Genesis has been her lifeline, she said.
"I really feel like a pioneer," particularly as she has visited LDS historic sites throughout the Salt Lake area. "I'm looking at all these artifacts left by pioneers, and the biggest thing that separated me and them was the glass between us and the time they lived. I feel I really am pioneering new ground."
Gray said he and the leadership of Genesis will continue to support church doctrine and leadership in their activities as they have always done, along with continuing their outreach efforts. Genesis group members often present firesides for church groups, sharing their faith and answering questions. They always emphasize the brotherhood and sisterhood of all people.
Their message has always been well-accepted, Gray said, and is now being more widely sought out as many white Latter-day Saints adopt black babies and seek ways to help them feel accepted as they grow up.
"We are not a punch-and-cookies organization. We're very different from anything else in the church, and at times we're viewed with uncertainty because of that. I also think we're one of the best-kept secrets in the church. We have a separate culture here as blacks in the U.S. Those needs need to be addressed and supported, as are the needs of others of God's children."
And while he often hears talk of "assimilation," Gray said his goal doesn't involve becoming something he is not.
"There is no way I'm ever going to look Nordic," he smiles. "It just ain't going to happen. I'm proud of my race, proud of my culture, and I don't wish to assimilate. I'm an African-American Latter-day Saint, and I'm proud of each of the groups represented in that title."