Paul Reeve

After Ellen Susannah Hathaway, a white Latter-day Saint, fled her plural marriage to a much older man, she married Thomas F. Tanner, a Black migrant from Missouri who was not a Latter-day Saint.

In 1899, the notable Black journalist Julius F. Taylor interviewed an elderly Black couple in the small Utah County community of Spanish Fork for his newspaper, the Broad Ax.

And if 21st century Latter-day Saints think that their brand of Christianity has climbed the ladder and is safe from the lion king, it might be useful to remember the time in 1856 when we were denigrated as "a congregation of apes with tails."

Defining superiority and inferiority is the point. In Donald Trump's version of white Christian nationalism, he is the lion, the king of the jungle. The Obamas, in contrast, are at the bottom of the hierarchy.

The reporter went on to predict that “if Salt Lake City is wholly peopled by individuals of the average of intellect possessed by the newly-arrived emigrants, we should, following the law of depreciation, expect that in a century it would be merely a congregation of apes with tails.”

The Times declared that “among the whole four hundred and fifty, there was scarcely one face that showed that is possessor was greatly elevated above the animal.”

The English and Scottish Mormons were no different. "Their countenances were imbruted with ignorance and dirt--not the material dirt of a sea voyage, but the moral dirt of a life of imbecility and indolence. The Apostles of Joe Smith and Brigham Young found them an easy prey."

The Times reporter told readers that typical Welsh girls were distinguished by their "very ruddy" complexions, "very wholesome" appearance, and "very staid and chaste . . . manners," but the Welsh Mormons "were neither ruddy, wholesome nor staid."

That year, a reporter from the Times announced that a Latter-day Saint immigrant ship with migrants from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Denmark had landed in New York. Even though these immigrants were white and European, they were nonetheless deemed undesirable because they were Mormon.

An 1856 New York Times report regarding a Latter-day Saint immigrant ship is a perfect illustration of how this racial hierarchy functioned in the 19th century.

Donald Trump is the king of the jungle in the video, at the top of the racial hierarchy. Everyone else falls a variety of rungs lower. At the bottom rung of evolutionary descent are the apes with tails.

Remember that time in 1856 when Latter-day Saint immigrants were denigrated as a "congregation of apes with tails"?

Even though the video that President Donald Trump posted of the Obamas included other people also depicted as animals, superiority and inferiority are the point.

When Mormons say to comply with ICE incursions, we're forgetting our own history (RNS) — In 1857, when Latter-day Saints deemed actions emanating from Washington, DC, to be significant breaches of constitutional norms, they didn’t comply, they resisted.

My thanks to Jana Riess and Religion News Service for publishing my opinion piece on the ICE incursions into Minnesota as an eerie echo from the past--the federal incursion into Utah Territory in 1857-58 known as the Utah War.

religionnews.com/2026/02/02/w...

Annie May Ritchie died young, at age 25, just over a year after her marriage. She was the daughter of a formerly enslaved father and a white mother. Her parents were denied temple admission in 1909 because the family’s bishop

Ida Belle Leggroan Dixon's mother and father migrated to Utah from Mississippi in 1870 after being emancipated at the end of the Civil War.

Thomas Coleman’s life was marked by tragedy. He arrived in Salt Lake City in 1848, enslaved to John and Nancy Crosby Bankhead, converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from Mississippi.

Henry Geboyle Church was around seven years old when he and his family crossed the United States from Tennessee to Utah Territory to join with other Latter-day Saints in their Rocky Mountain home.

In 1896, a Black man identified only as "Mr. Knox" was described as a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who lived in Utah in his later years. That year, he attended a festival in Utah that celebrated its citizens who were over seventy years of age.

Alberta Mae Roberts is a third-generation member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her grandparents, Ned and Susan Leggroan, were formerly enslaved in the South and moved west after the Civil War in search of a new life and better opportunities.

Sarah Jett was an early Black Saint baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Kentucky. Sarah’s father, George Jett, converted first in 1898, & then Sarah & her sister Katie received baptism eleven years later, on the same day as their stepmother, Alwilda.

Nina Viola Stevenson Howell was the first wife of one of the better-known Black Mormons of the twentieth century, Abner Leonard Howell. She was born and raised in Michigan and met Abner during the time he studied law and played football at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Martha Ann Leggroan Roberts Stevens's parents, Ned and Susan Leggroan, were both born into slavery and both previously married. Martha was their first child together. Susan gave birth to Martha in Utah Territory on 5 December 1870, after migrating from Mississippi that spring.

Today we remember Mary Willson even though we know very little about her. The only surviving source to name her and describe her as a “colored woman” is a list of rebaptisms performed in Nashville, Lee County, Iowa. 1/7

Even though Mary Bowdidge Berry Smith was a white woman, she nonetheless ran afoul of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ racial policies. LDS leaders barred Mary from receiving the crowning rituals of her faith because she had married a Black man & had children with him.

Ethel Irene Wells Burdette and her husband William were two of three Black converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, baptized on the same day in 1914 in Chester County, Pennsylvania where William worked in the coal mines. 1/5

Alex James Brooks grew to adulthood in southwestern Georgia during federal Reconstruction when southern Black people enjoyed some of the rights promised in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, including citizenship and Black male voting rights. 1/4

Major Dorimus Church's mother was formerly enslaved to his father. Born in Tennessee in 1869, in the aftermath of the Civil War, he and his mother and his siblings were listed in the 1870 census as Black. 1/6

John & Laura Thorpe Fuller were both likely born into slavery in Granville County, North Carolina, before the Civil War began. After slavery was abolished, John worked on his father's farm from a young age & continued to do so well into adulthood, likely cultivating tobacco. 1/7

Lorah Jane Bowdidge Berry Barton’s life history illustrates the ramifications of the one-drop racial temple & priesthood ban that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints enforced on members who appeared to be white, but who actually had limited Black African ancestry. 1/5

Sylvester James, along with his mother Jane Manning James, his half-brother Silas, and step father Isaac James, was an 1847 pioneer into the Salt Lake Valley. He labored to establish a new settlement in the valley and with his family worked in Brigham Young's household. 1/6