From The Atlantic Monthly, 8/13/2012


" As Romney gained steam in 1967, Martin Luther King received a letter from Mrs. Edris Head of Wilkinson, Massachusetts. The letter began assertively: "I am writing to you because I think it is imperative that the Negro community understand what a line of bull the hierarchy of the Mormon Church is trying to feed the public in its effort to make Romney an attractive presidential candidate."

Head then went ahead to detail the wrongs of Mormonism. Blacks could not be priests. When one judge and bishop found "Negro" ancestry in his genealogy, he was demoted and forced to sit in the back of the church. Even those he had baptized had to be re-baptized. The LDS church "changes slowly," she concluded, and she could not imagine "any Negro voting for a loyal son of such a church." Head ended by calling King "the greatest living American" and "a true disciple of Gandhi and Jesus."

Is any of what this Mrs. Head wrote to MLK, true?

Does anyone know of this judge and bishop being demoted and having to sit at the back of the church and his baptisms having to be redone, when they discovered he had mixed ancestry/black blood in his family line?

Hi,

I only just found out about this letter, but Edris Head passed away last week at 78 years, she was my mom. I know my Mom was sincere in writing that letter and she was raised a Mormon, her grandparents were converted in Denmark by missionaries and they went to Utah to become devout Mormons and raise 7 children there.
I'm sure what she says about the judge is in fact what she was told and it was believed by her and many others to be true.

Wow. Thanks.

This obituary was at legacy.com and mentions an Episcopal church service. Was this your mom, Kampeh?:

http://m.legacy.com/obituaries/dailypress/obituary.aspx?n=Edris-Head&pid=173257707&referrer=0&preview=True

Condolences on your mother's passing, to you and your family.

Thank you.

Most of us would have to look at this in the frame of reference from back in the day. I was raised on this racist bullshit where we learned that "one drop of Negro blood" would pollute an entire line. People not only believed this, but many a sincere person actually believed this. So I don't think that it is outside of the realm of reality that--back in this day--some church member might have owned up to having "Negro" blood. And I don't think it is without the realm of reality that authorities might have believed they had to hunt down and nullify the baptisms of those people baptised by such a member. It was stupid stuff to begin with, and could only be followed up by even stupider stuff. I shouldn't expect any church leaders, local or not, to suddenly somehow use any kind of common sense when it came to backing up hard, fast, eternal, and everlasting LDS doctrine. (Unless you're going to change it, of course, which they could never do. *winks*)

Having said all that, it was George Romney back in that day who was widely loved and who marched on behalf of civil rights in the United States. A wonderful a man he was, he made a terrible mistake--shoving a silver spoon down the throat of his son Willard, sending him to the finest private schools and raising him in the lap of luxury.

Son Willard did not turn out like his exemplary father, George.
Remember that it was George who earned the letter of censure from Delbert Stapely for supporting the "Negro" cause. I think it can be found here (I can't open a PDF just this moment, so I'm not sure).


http://mormonmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/delbert_stapley.pdf

edited to correct mistake. Stupid Stapely. Stupid Flanders.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/25/2014 11:23AM by cludgie.

Indeed. One small correction though...The letter you are referring to come from Delbert Stapley.

Ah. Right. I knew there was something wrong and having a prefixed S seemed out of place. On the other hand, one is so much like the other.

Thanks for the replies and condolences for my Mom.

I can't verify that specific instance, but a similar thing occurred in my own ward in California.
I've related this story before here...the short version:
A man in our ward of Polynesian ancestry, an Elder and temple-married husband and father, found a black ancestor is his background, some 200+ years back. Upon "reporting" this find, he was stripped of his priesthood, his temple marriage was declared null and void, anyone he had baptized or ordained, (which included his two kids) had to be re-baptized, his son was also stripped of his Aaronic priesthood deacon office, and he was removed from all callings (while his wife wasn't). This was in late 1977, not long before the church changed its mind on blacks. He and his family were humiliated, but bore it with dignity and continued to attend church.
A short time later, when the "revelation" came out, the bishop gleefully called him in, and told him that NOW he could start all over again, be re-ordained, eventually repeat his temple sealing, and everything would be just like it was before!
The bishop thought this was wonderful.
The man and his family couldn't see why a few months was the difference between them being full, faithful, priesthood-holding members and being outcasts. So they left the church.

Such things did indeed happen. I witnessed one.

You can find my Mom's letter here in the MLK archives:

http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/letter-edris-head-mlk-about-mormans-and-presidential-election#

I add my condolences on the loss of your mother, along with my thanks for sharing her letter with us.

I have to wonder if this kind of thing was another reason for such an emphasis on genaology.

First it was a hook to keep people in the cult by offering "salvation" to their dead relatives and then later on in Utah it was a way to screen people. You could always be accused if you didn't have proof. It wasn't always 100% exclusion though:

http://www.connellodonovan.com/black_white_marriage.html


Ironically, the Nazis did the same sort of thing. You had to have proof of "Aryan" ancestry going back at least two hundred years and rumours were often started to discredit people.

Bio on Reinhard Heydrich, the "penultimate" Nazi:
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/heydrich.html



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/23/2015 01:39PM by anybody.

On Kauai, there was a Fijian man in our ward. He had the priesthood. But racist local Asians and Hawaiians and haoles in the ward decided he had "negro" blood in his line somewhere, even tho they had no genealogical evidence of it, and he was stripped of his priesthood. He went inactive. He wanted to come back, but he wanted the ward to admit that he was not a "negro", and the ward was not willing to do this.

The ward leaders would get extremely hostile if I ever mentioned doing any sort of ministry to this man. They really didn't want him back.

I only found my Mom's letter when I was checking details for her obituary. I regret I never got to show it to her and talk to her about it, She never mentioned it, she wrote it when I was 4 years old, and I don't suppose she heard anything about it after she put it in the mail. My sister and I did some research into Nephi Bates and we found out a lot, which you can find too if you spend some time with Google, (unless any of it was removed recently).

Nephi's parents were married in New Orleans, they were not Mormon, and he was their only child, his father left to work on the River to make money so he could move his family west, but he either died on the Mississippi, or he abandoned the infant Nephi and his Mom (and older sibling from mother's previous marriage). His mom married a third man and moved to Utah and they became successful mormons and had more children.
Everything we could find seemed to us to corroborate the details in my Mom's letter. We did not find anything that indicated any untruth to us about the story in her letter. But we did not find anything that we thought proved it to be true.
My Grandmother, who told the story to my mom, she would not have made it up. She was a lesbian, but she knew she could not "come out" in her lifetime. Of course if Nephi's father could have "passed" for not-negro, he would have, just like my grandmother was openly straight and had to deny herself publicly.

Thanks for the information. I have read of other cases of nineteenth century Mormons with black ancestry ( http://www.connellodonovan.com/black_white_marriage.html ) but I'd not heard of Nephi Bates or any one ever "outing" themselves in such matter. Considering a person to be black if they have any African ancestry no matter their apperance seems to be unique to America (Puskin, Russia's greatest poet, isn't). I know it originated in the seventeenth century when white masters wanted to legally ensure their offspring with black slave women would be also be slaves and thereby increase their stock but why this would still be a social convention in the twenty-first century makes no sense.

It had not yet been genetically established in 1967 that all humans are descended from Africa.

Everyone on the planet has one drop.

The church's malleable doctrine is like all other religions' doctrines - survival of the fittest. Religions are even more Darwinian than governments in the skills of survival.