Hello and welcome to Mormon Stories Podcast. My name is John Delin. As always, it's

a indeed a pleasure to have you with us. We very much appreciate all of your emails

and your posts to the Mormon Stories blog. We appreciate the community and the support

and it seems like we're getting up to a thousand listeners per episode now. So it's very

exciting to know that some of the stuff that we're doing is having an impact with many

of you. We hope that some of you were able to tune in and listen to the podcast with

Darren Smith. For those of you who were able to listen, Darren talked to us quite a bit

about his experience growing up in the church as a black man and in his time working at

Brigham Young University. During that podcast, I promised you all that we would do a deep

dive on the issue of Blacks, the LDS church, and the priesthood. The two guests, if I could

sort of cherry pick two guests that I could have to speak on this issue, I think that the

two guests that we have on today would be the two that I'd pick, with maybe Armond Moss

to do some commentary afterwards. And I've already got Brother Moss's consent to do that

if it ends up being necessary. But without any further ado, I'd like to introduce my

two guests, the first being Darius Gray. Darius, welcome.

Thank you, John. And the second being Margaret Young. Margaret, thanks for coming on.

Glad to do it. For those of you who don't know, around 1971, we're going to get into

this. President Joseph Fielding Smith of the Mormon Church created an organization called

the Genesis Group. And the Genesis Group was an organization founded to do outreach and

to be a fellowship in community for Black members of the Mormon Church. And Darius Gray

was actually called as the first counselor of that group back in 1971. Prior to that,

he had worked as a reporter for KSL News. He's also been involved in many important initiatives,

...