Review
Title: My Lord, He Calls Me: Stories of Faith by Black American Latter-day Saints
Editor: Alice Faulkner Burch
Publisher: Deseret Book
Genre: Religious Non-fiction
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 225
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 9781639930296
Price: $23.99
What does it mean to be a Black member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? From 1852 to 1978, Black male members were banned from holding the priesthood, and both males and females were denied the ordinances of the temple. Lingering folklore and clumsy explanations for the ban have persisted beyond the ban’s end by revelation in 1978. Rules on grooming for temple workers have on occasion been interpreted to keep some Black members with certain hairstyles from serving as temple workers. All this despite the clear scriptural statement of 2 Nephi 26:33 that “….he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female…all are alike unto God.”
The experiences of Black LDS members are individual and not universal. All church members should recognize that anyone’s path to the gospel is unique. For Black members, the added weight of being Black in a predominately white church, at least in the United States, is an extra burden. In the stories shared in My Lord, He Calls Me, edited by Alice Faulkner Burch, we see both heartache and hope in the lives of Black saints from the early days of the Restoration up through current times. To this reviewer, many of the saints in these stories have benefited from gifts of grace and personal revelation that have enabled them to persist in a church that was not always welcoming.
Burch relies on her subjects’ own words to tell their stories in this collection. Many of their stories are raw confessions of the pain and discrimination suffered at the hands of fellow church members, sometimes overt and sometimes out of ignorance. Marie Graves, a Black woman who was active in her Oakland, California ward until her death in 1930, wrote of a visit with friends to Atlanta and attending an LDS branch there. As she writes, “I found the right church, but the wrong people.” She and her friends cautiously sat in the back of the all-white congregation. At length, the conference president asked to speak with her and her friends, explaining that they were making the other members there uncomfortable and finally asking them to leave. She writes, “Had I known we would have been treated like that; I never would have tried to have gone to church there. I felt so much worse by my friends being with me and seeing how mean they acted” [p150].
An anonymous writer shares the story of how her parents hid from her the fact that she had a different father than her siblings, a Black man. This duplicity continued well after the 1978 revelation reversing the temple/priesthood ban. As a result, she grew up through adolescence and young adult years confused at the reaction of schoolmates and friends who questioned her racial identity. Her stake president, also her family’s physician, tested her for sickle-cell anemia, common among Black Americans while withholding the truth about her biracial identity. When her stake was encouraged to donate DNA samples for a BYU research project, her mother contacted the study’s leader and asked him to withhold her daughter’s results. When she finally learned the truth of her heritage at age 43, she explains how she reacted:
After being hurt through exclusion from ordinances and collusion to maintain lies, why do I continue to be a part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Because I follow the Christ, not man. Because I desire the blessings promised by Jesus. I seek truth confirmed by the Spirit. I knock to obtain testimony strengthened through Christ’s tender mercies…the Lord still reaches out to me to pull me up. [p134]
One of the most enjoyable chapters for this reviewer described the experience of two adopted Black teens in a white family in a predominantly white community in Utah. Their adoptive mother, feeling she lacked some of the context she needed to meet the needs of these two girls, took them on a five thousand mile road trip, with visits to the girls’ Black grandmother, the home of Medgar Evers, and Ruby Bridges school in Louisiana. They talked about Emmett Till while crossing Mississippi and read the New Testament to learn more about Christ and his mission. As the girls recall, it was their “find-our-roots-and-Jesus road trip.” Like other stories in this collection, their story explains how despite challenges, they have found sufficient faith and strength to remain in a church that sometimes does not feel welcoming.
One author writes about the problems with the lack of diversity among church leadership, saying, “It is important that I, my children, and my grandchildren see people like us in those leading the church” [p41]. Another writes about people who have said to her, “I don’t see color.” As she relates it, this attempt to be colorblind about her racial background ignores the totality of her experience as a person who has always been defined first as Black.
Jane Manning James’s story tells of converting to the church, walking from New York to Nauvoo in the winter, and finally finding shelter and a sense of belonging in the home of Joseph Smith, traveling West to Utah, and staying in the church despite never being able to fully enjoy the blessings of saving temple ordinances.
My Lord, He Calls Me has something for all church members. The challenge for us as members in the Lord’s church is to recognize both the unity and cohesion of being fellow saints in the Kingdom, while also respecting and recognizing the individuality and eternal nature of others and their unique life experiences. We have come a long way towards truly seeing all our brothers and sisters the same way that our Father in Heaven sees us. Burch’s book may be about our Black brothers and sisters heeding the call of the Lord, but it’s also a call to the rest of us to hear and listen to what our Black brothers and sisters are telling us about their experiences.