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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Today Century of Black Mormons remembers Mary Susan Leggroan Tanner. Mary Susan was the tenth child born to her formerly enslaved parents, Ned and Susan Leggroan.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Today Century of Black Mormons remembers Archie Roberts as a third generation Black Latter-day Saint who was baptized in Idaho Falls in 1901 at age eleven.

Archie's Latter-day Saint membership record.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Margaret Elizabeth Jones Beckley was one of a small number of people whose Black African heritage was known to Latter-day Saint leaders and yet she still received her temple endowment . . .

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

This week the Springville Museum of Art picked up this portrait of Isaac Lewis Manning by Marlena Wilding, from the Mormon Studies Initiative at the University of Utah. It will be on loan to the Springville Museum of Art for an upcoming exhibit.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Harriet (Hattie) Gertrude Church was born in 1881, in Deseret, Millard County, Utah, after her parents migrated from Tennessee and left their former involvement with slavery behind.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

Mary Jane McElroy was over one hundred years old when she died. She had lived through slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Native American colonization, the Jim Crow South, and both world wars by the time she passed away in 1948.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

What does Juneteenth have to do with Utah history? Utah remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War so we might think that Juneteenth does not involve Utah but we'd be wrong.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Frank Perkins' maternal great-grandparents were Green & Martha Ann Morris Flake, both of whom were enslaved Latter-day Saints when they arrived in Utah Territory. In fact, Frank's great-grandfather, Green Flake, arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on July 22, 1847, two days ahead of Brigham Young.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Forty-eight years ago today the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reintegrated its priesthood & temples & restored the Church to its universal roots. Today we remember some of those who slipped past the walls of exclusion to receive priesthood ordination or temple rituals before June 1978.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

May 20, 2026, marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Enoch Lovejoy Lewis. Century of Black Mormons commemorates his birth and remembers him on its 200th anniversary.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Today we remember David Samuel Sampson. In 1908, just five years after the CofJCofLDS again opened an evangelizing mission in South Africa, a newly married 36-year-old blacksmith named David Sampson had a chance encounter with one of the faith’s missionaries in Cape Town.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Today we remember Wesley Taylor who was described as a faithful African American member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who lived in Utah towards the end of his life.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Today we remember Philida "Phyllis" Jacoba Elizabeth February Daniels Sampson who was baptized a Latter-day Saint in South Africa in 1909. Phyllis and her family were of mixed racial ancestry, or “coloured” in South African terminology.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Today we remember Mary Elizabeth "Polly" Bowdidge Berry Crowton. Polly's mother was a white convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the Isle of Guernsey in the Channel Islands.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

Today we remember Grace Samantha Ritchie Gerhardt Searle Mann Ashton, the first documented woman born to a formerly enslaved parent to serve as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

Huron Perkins, born on Christmas Day in 1908, descended from Black Mormon pioneers on both sides of his family tree. His paternal grandparents (Frank and Esther Perkins) and maternal great-grandparents (Green and Martha Flake) had each traveled to the Great Basin enslaved.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

After Ellen Susannah Hathaway, a white Latter-day Saint, fled her plural marriage to a much older man, she married Thomas F. Tanner, a Black migrant from Missouri who was not a Latter-day Saint.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

In 1899, the notable Black journalist Julius F. Taylor interviewed an elderly Black couple in the small Utah County community of Spanish Fork for his newspaper, the Broad Ax.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

Annie May Ritchie died young, at age 25, just over a year after her marriage. She was the daughter of a formerly enslaved father and a white mother. Her parents were denied temple admission in 1909 because the family’s bishop

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

Ida Belle Leggroan Dixon's mother and father migrated to Utah from Mississippi in 1870 after being emancipated at the end of the Civil War.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Thomas Coleman’s life was marked by tragedy. He arrived in Salt Lake City in 1848, enslaved to John and Nancy Crosby Bankhead, converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from Mississippi.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

Henry Geboyle Church was around seven years old when he and his family crossed the United States from Tennessee to Utah Territory to join with other Latter-day Saints in their Rocky Mountain home.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 04/01/2026

In 1896, a Black man identified only as "Mr. Knox" was described as a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who lived in Utah in his later years. That year, he attended a festival in Utah that celebrated its citizens who were over seventy years of age.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

Alberta Mae Roberts is a third-generation member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her grandparents, Ned and Susan Leggroan, were formerly enslaved in the South and moved west after the Civil War in search of a new life and better opportunities.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

Sarah Jett was an early Black Saint baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Kentucky. Sarah’s father, George Jett, converted first in 1898, & then Sarah & her sister Katie received baptism eleven years later, on the same day as their stepmother, Alwilda.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

Nina Viola Stevenson Howell was the first wife of one of the better-known Black Mormons of the twentieth century, Abner Leonard Howell. She was born and raised in Michigan and met Abner during the time he studied law and played football at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

Martha Ann Leggroan Roberts Stevens's parents, Ned and Susan Leggroan, were both born into slavery and both previously married. Martha was their first child together. Susan gave birth to Martha in Utah Territory on 5 December 1870, after migrating from Mississippi that spring.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

Today we remember Mary Willson even though we know very little about her. The only surviving source to name her and describe her as a “colored woman” is a list of rebaptisms performed in Nashville, Lee County, Iowa. 1/7

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

Even though Mary Bowdidge Berry Smith was a white woman, she nonetheless ran afoul of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ racial policies. LDS leaders barred Mary from receiving the crowning rituals of her faith because she had married a Black man & had children with him.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Ethel Irene Wells Burdette and her husband William were two of three Black converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, baptized on the same day in 1914 in Chester County, Pennsylvania where William worked in the coal mines. 1/5

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Alex James Brooks grew to adulthood in southwestern Georgia during federal Reconstruction when southern Black people enjoyed some of the rights promised in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, including citizenship and Black male voting rights. 1/4

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

Major Dorimus Church's mother was formerly enslaved to his father. Born in Tennessee in 1869, in the aftermath of the Civil War, he and his mother and his siblings were listed in the 1870 census as Black. 1/6

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

John & Laura Thorpe Fuller were both likely born into slavery in Granville County, North Carolina, before the Civil War began. After slavery was abolished, John worked on his father's farm from a young age & continued to do so well into adulthood, likely cultivating tobacco. 1/7

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

Lorah Jane Bowdidge Berry Barton’s life history illustrates the ramifications of the one-drop racial temple & priesthood ban that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints enforced on members who appeared to be white, but who actually had limited Black African ancestry. 1/5

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

Sylvester James, along with his mother Jane Manning James, his half-brother Silas, and step father Isaac James, was an 1847 pioneer into the Salt Lake Valley. He labored to establish a new settlement in the valley and with his family worked in Brigham Young's household. 1/6

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

A new painting at LDS Church History Library by Casey Lynn Childs depicts a singular day in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On September 3, 1875, 8 African American Latter-day Saints attended the Endowment House to perform proxy baptisms for deceased friends & family.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

Albert Webb had a short-lived membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Only a couple of weeks after his baptism in 1872 in Tennessee, he returned to his previous religion, the Disciples of Christ. 1/4

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

The Salt Lake Tribune Mormon Land podcast interviewed Professors Jenny Pulsipher and Paul Reeve about the new Century of Black Mormons bio of James Brown Jr., a captain in the Mormon Battalion and founder of Ogden, Utah. A link to the Mormon Land interview follows.

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

One public historian who wrote about Susannah Lucretia Tanner Christensen Stevens for a Las Vegas history project suggested that her long life embodied “much of western history.” 1/4

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

John Stewart Knight was beset by opposition for most of his life. As a mixed-race man & suspected homosexual, he faced considerable challenges. 1/3

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

Without an 1853 journal entry from Texas and an 1857 entry in Latter-day Saint records in Utah, an enslaved woman named Louisa may have been lost to history. These two sources offer an intriguing glimpse into her life and her epic westward journey. 1/2

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

47 years ago today the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reintegrated its priesthood and temples and restored the Church to its universal roots. Today we remember some of those who slipped past the walls of exclusion to receive priesthood ordination or temple rituals before June 1978. 1/12

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

William Franklin Church was the first son born to his formerly enslaved mother following her emancipation at the end of the Civil War. Census records identified him as Black in Tennessee and white in Utah. 1/4

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

When Mary Church was born in 1863 in TN, her father was her enslaver. At age 16, she received LDS temple rituals & served as proxy when her father was vicariously sealed to his deceased first wife. Meet Mary here & learn the rest of her remarkable story: exhibits.lib.utah.edu/s/century-of...

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

When Alwilda Jackson married George Jett she was 19 & George was 35. It was a 2nd marriage for both but one that lasted. Jett was a pioneering Black Latter-day Saint in KY & he must have shared his faith with Alwilda who also joined. Meet Alwilda here: exhibits.lib.utah.edu/s/century-of...

George Jett and Alwilda Jackson Marriage Certificate, 1905

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Century of Black Mormons @centblckmormons.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

John Taylor Church’s mother was formerly enslaved to his father before the family moved to Utah Territory in 1878. Early in life John was promised priesthood ordination in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but was subsequently denied over questions about his racial ancestry.

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