022: Black and Mormon -- The Darron Smith Story Pt. 1

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 5.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2007

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In part 1 of a 3 part series, we interview Darron Smith--a black man who joined the LDS church as a teenager in Tennessee. After serving a mission for the LDS Church and graduating from the University of Utah, Darron began a 10 year teaching career at church-owned Brigham Young University. After 10 years of teaching at BYU, Darron's employment was terminated in response to (according to Darron) his public writings and speaking--wherein Darron openly called for the LDS Church to apologize for, and renounce the racists statements of past Church leaders. In this series, Darron discusses his upbringing in the Church, provides a brief history of Blacks within the Church, discusses his termination from BYU, and his hopes for the LDS Church in the future with regard to these issues.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm very excited to have you with us today.
0:16.0	I'd like to thank all of you who were able to listen to the Buckley-Jepson interview.
0:21.0	We've received a lot of very positive and negative feedback around that episode.
0:28.0	I'm just grateful the people were able to hear Buckley's story.
0:31.0	And I hope you guys enjoyed it.
0:34.0	As always, we encourage you to please send your comments either to Mormon Stories at gmail.com
0:42.0	or even better. Please feel free to join us up on our blog at www.mormonstories.org.
0:50.0	Today we have a very special guest with us. His name is Darren Smith.
0:55.0	Darren, welcome and thank you for joining us on Mormon Stories.
1:04.0	Are you there, Darren?
1:07.0	Darren, thank you for coming on Mormon Stories.
1:10.0	Oh, you're welcome. Thank you. There's a little bit of a gap in here. I couldn't hear you.
1:15.0	Yeah, thank you. Thanks for inviting me and glad to be here.
1:19.0	And for those of you who don't know, Darren Smith, well, there's a lot to say about Darren.
1:27.0	I mean, if I went through his resume, there's a lot of cool things you'd see.
1:31.0	Darren has been a teacher at BYU at UVSC University of Utah.
1:37.0	He has a master's degree and he's working on his PhD in education.
1:42.0	Great guy and probably most notable if you've been following the press at all.
1:49.0	And I'll just go ahead and read from an article in the Salt Lake Tribune,
1:54.0	which basically says that Smith worked until recently as an adjunct professor
1:59.0	at LDS church owned at Brigham Young University and as a diversity counselor.
2:03.0	Last month, his contract was not renewed, he says.
	...

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