Spencer W. Kimball, his counselors, and their fellow apostles prayed about the revelation

that Latter-day Saints have canonized as official Declaration 2 in June 1978. They immediately

let it be known, that the Lord had told them that all worthy people of any race, color,

freed, or nationality would be eligible for temple blessings, and that men could be ordained.

This lifted a racial restriction that had lasted for more than a century that denied ordination

to men of black African descent and the endowment and sealing ordinances to men, women,

and children of black African descent. Importantly, President Kimball's journey to receiving the

revelation began decades earlier.

Even as a boy, he recognized how his neighbors treated Native Americans with distrust and disdain.

He saw inequity and wanted to correct it.

Although he did not know as a lad that he would receive a revelation with global consequences,

it's remarkable to me that something President Kimball notices a child would

change the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' global trajectory. My name is Joseph

Stewart. I'm the Public Communication Specialist at the Neely Maxwell Institute for Religious

Scholarship at Brigham Young University. Janice Johnson, a Willis and a research associate

at the Institute, and I will be discussing each week's block of reading from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,

Come Follow Me curriculum. We aren't here to present a lesson, but rather to hit on a few key themes from the scripture block that we believe will help fulfill the Maxwell Institute's mission to inspire and fortify Latter-day Saints and their testimonies of their restored gospel of Jesus Christ and engage the world of religious ideas.

Good morning. How are you, Janice? Oh, I'm just living the dream. It's a pleasure to be able to talk about

Latter-day Saint history and to talk about a revelation that means so much to me and to the awards and stakes that I participated in.

I'm glad that we get this official declaration number two gets its own episode,

because I think that this is important.

I feel like that Come Follow Me curriculum,

...