The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, or Mormon) has long been chastised for how it treats its black members. For more than a century, men of African heritage were barred from holding the LDS priesthood, despite the fact that the office was conferred on nearly all other male members of the church. As a result, black men and women were not permitted to participate in temple ceremonies that Latter-day Saints regarded essential for attaining the highest level of exaltation in the afterlife. In June 1978, officials of the LDS Church announced a revelation that eliminated these racial limitations.
Understandably, much of the discussion concerning race in the LDS Church revolves around the church’s history of exclusion and the eventual reversal of its discriminatory policies. Nonetheless, African Americans have been members of the LDS Church from its inception, despite its history of racial persecution. It is significantly less common to explore how these Mormons negotiated life in the church prior to the 1978 revelation. Jane Elizabeth Manning James, a free black woman who came to Mormonism in the early 1840s, gives a little-known vantage point from which to present a Mormonism story that considers the church’s racial history.
During James’ lifetime, a limited number of African Americans joined the Latter-day Saints, and even fewer traveled to Nauvoo, Illinois, and Utah’s Salt Lake Valley. Tracing Jane James’s biography exposes some of the less-traveled avenues open to nineteenth-century African American women and men, as well as how African American Mormons built rich, fulfilling religious lives despite the LDS Church’s discriminatory rules.
Jane Elizabeth Manning was born in the early 1820s in Wilton, Connecticut. Her mother was born into slavery but was freed before Jane was born. When Manning was a young girl, her father died, and she went to work for a wealthy, elderly white couple in New Canaan, Connecticut, some six miles from her family’s home. She joined the New Canaan Congregational Church in 1841, but converted to Mormonism after hearing an LDS missionary preach, and she appears to have brought the rest of her family with her.
In 1843, the Mannings joined an interracial group of converts from southwest Connecticut and traveled to Nauvoo, Illinois, where the church was centered at the time. When they arrived in Buffalo, New York, the black members of the group were refused entrance on the ferry that would transport them to Cleveland, according to Jane James.
They chose to travel the 728 miles to Nauvoo instead. When they arrived, Jane Manning worked as a servant in the home of the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith; when he was assassinated in 1844, she went to work for Brigham Young, Smith’s successor. She married Isaac James, another black convert, and they followed the church to Utah. They were among the first to arrive in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.
Jane James spent the rest of her life in Salt Lake City. She was involved in the LDS church and expended a lot of work obtaining permission to do the temple rites she believed were necessary for her salvation and the salvation of her family, but her temple access was limited because she was black. She could be baptized for deceased family members, which is one of the three basic ceremonies done in temples. However, she was not permitted to obtain her endowment—the LDS jargon for engaging in the initiation rite that all Latter-day Saints are required to perform—and she was not permitted to execute sealing rituals.
Temple sealings—marriages and adoptions—create familial bonds that last forever, according to Latter-day Saints. Without these ceremonies, James’s links to her family members were severed when she died in 1908, and she was unable to achieve the highest degree of glory in the hereafter, according to LDS theology.
Because the temple was generally inaccessible to her and her family, James built her religious identity, at least in part, around direct encounters with the holy and the sense that God was on her side that resulted from these encounters. James experienced similar experiences throughout her life. Jane communicated with the divine in a variety of ways, including supernatural healings. In 1896, for example, James spoke to a group of LDS women about healing herself.
The secretary who reported on the meeting put it this way: “Sister Jane James bore a faithful testimony and said she had been terribly afflicted in her head, and she took her consecrated oil and anointed herself and she was healed. Felt that that was faith, and praised the Lord for her blessings.”
The Holy Spirit also gave James visions. Her experience doing the Smith family’s laundry shortly after being hired as a domestic servant in Nauvoo was the most dramatic. “Among the clothing I discovered brother Joseph’s robes,” James said in her autobiography. “I looked at them and wondered; I had never seen any before, and I pondered over them and thought about them so intensely that the spirit revealed to me that they related to the new name given to the saints that the world is unaware of.” I have no idea when I washed them or when I hung them to dry.”
The “new name” that James mentioned was a reference to the temple endowment ritual, suggesting that although temple ceremonies were supposed to be secret, she received information about them directly from God.
Speaking in tongues, a technique typical to early Mormons, was perhaps the most frequent charismatic experience in James’ life. The first known case of James speaking in tongues occurred immediately after her conversion. “About three weeks after [baptism], while kneeling at prayer, the Gift of Tongues came upon me, and startled the entire family who were in the adjacent room,” James wrote in her autobiography. This encounter, according to James, reaffirmed her choice to join the LDS Church. Aside from this first instance, James’ recorded experiences with speaking in tongues happened in social situations when their significance in encouraging and soothing the Saints was obvious.
James, like many members of the LDS Church she joined in the 1840s, sought and valued charismatic encounters like these. James’ interactions with the supernatural enabled her to identify with other early Mormons and to build a religious identity that validated the concept that God interacted actively with humans in ways that mirrored Joseph Smith’s personal experiences.
However, even though she found validity for her religious experiences in the LDS Church, racism continued to limit James’ religious life: what blackness meant theologically, socially, and politically was a changing target during James’ lifetime. Attending to Jane James’ religious experience in the LDS Church allows us to observe how race issues plagued the institution and its members throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.