Once people come to terms with the uncomfortable idea that Brigham Young committed an error in endorsing a priesthood ban on church members with black African ancestry, a puzzling question naturally follows.

If the ban was an error, then why didn't it get corrected earlier than 1978?

There were nine church presidents between Brigham Young and Spencer W Kimball

and 101 years between President Young's death in 1877 and President Kimball's

revelation in 1978. So why did it take so long to correct this mistake and again

offer full privileges to black Africans in the church

as they had enjoyed in Joseph Smith's day.

In today's episode of Church History Matters,

we attempt to offer at least the beginning of an answer to this question

by tracing the key moments and

decisions in the leadership councils of the church when instead of correcting this

error they came to conclusions that led to an unfortunate hardening in place of the priesthood ban.

In this episode, the years 1879,

1904, 1907, and 1908 will sadly be added alongside the year 1852

as we piece together both the timeline and the reasoning behind this band.

I'm Scott Woodward and my co-host is Casey Griffiths,

and today we dive into our fourth

episode in this series dealing with race and priesthood now let's get into it.

Hi Casey. Hi how are you Scott? It's so good excited to chat with you more today. Yeah. We got a lot of things to talk about don't we we? Yeah, a lot to talk about and so let's dive right in and get right to it. Yes.

And so today we're going to continue our series dedicated to exploring the important church history topic of

black Africans in their participation in priesthood and temple privileges in the

church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Yeah. Casey, why are we talking about this difficult issue again?

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