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

Mary Susan worked as a seamstress for the Works Project Administration during the Great Depression and later as a maid. As an adult, she no longer affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and did not raise her own children in the faith.

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

Mary Susan was baptized in 1900, at age nine, in Milo, Idaho, in Bonneville County, where the family had moved to farm. Mary Susan married Thomas George Tanner, a widower and fellow Black Latter-day Saint in 1909. She was eighteen and he was thirty. They later divorced.

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

Her parents converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1873, after migrating to Utah from Mississippi following the Civil War. They raised their large family, including Mary Susan, in the faith.

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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

His mother and siblings would eventually convert to the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Idaho, but Archie died tragically young, before his family made that faith transition.

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

After arriving in Utah, they joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and raised their family in the faith. Archie thus represents the third generation of the Leggroan family baptized into the faith.

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

The oldest of five siblings, William Archibald (known as “Archie”) was the son of Martha Ann Leggroan Roberts Stevens and William Roberts. Both of Archie’s grandparents, Ned and Susan Leggroan, were formerly enslaved in the US South and migrated to the West following the Civil War.

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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

Even so, she met with difficulty in her later years as she suffered from mental illness and died under tragic circumstances. Today Century of Black Mormons remembers Margaret, her four baptisms, and her temple rituals, as evidence of her devotion.

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

Her life began under what must have been difficult circumstances as a biracial child living in the South during the era of slavery. After she married, her husband amassed a sizable fortune and Margaret must have enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle with domestic servants to help run her household.

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

Margaret was an early convert to the Church and remained committed to it throughout her life (something she signaled with four baptisms as a Latter-day Saint).

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

. . . during the years that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prohibited priesthood ordination and access to full temple rituals to members of her race.

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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

Wilding's portrait thus features Isaac holding a shovel in one hand and the 1903 affidavit in the other. It will be on display at the Springville Museum of Art from August 27, 2026 to July 22, 2027. Be sure to check it out.

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

In 1903, in Salt Lake City, Isaac swore out an affidavit to the fact that he "dug the graves." For the rest of his life Isaac cherished the service he performed for the slain bodies of the person he claimed as a prophet and his brother the patriarch.

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

Manning’s deepest connection to Joseph and Hyrum Smith, however, came in the service he provided in the wake of their murders. He eventually dug four graves for their bodies, an act of kindness which became a lifelong witness of his faith.

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

That personal connection to the Smith family earned him esteem among his fellow Latter-day Saints for the rest of his life. He also served as drummer in the Nauvoo Legion and quarried stone for the Nauvoo Temple.

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

Late in life, in fact, Isaac recalled, “I was a cook in the prophet’s kitchen at Nauvoo, and he used to say I was a mighty good cook too. I cooked the prophet’s meals . . . when I was servant in the family.”

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

Isaac was the older brother of the better known Jane Manning James and a Latter-day Saint convert himself. He worked in the Nauvoo Mansion House as a cook for Joseph Smith and his wife Emma Hale Smith, the founding couple of his new faith.

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

It is the second time that Wilding's portrait has been on loan. The first time was in 2025 when Isaac was a part of an exhibit at the Church History Museum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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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

In the case of the Church family, local leaders in Oasis and Deseret seemed willing to allow them temple admission “provided the white blood predominates,” even though leaders in Salt Lake City had insisted otherwise in 1900 in the case of Hattie’s brother John.

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

Even though local and central leaders grappled with questions about those of mixed racial ancestry in the nineteenth century, they were inconsistent in the application of racial restrictions in some cases and may not have been aware of some people’s ancestry in other cases.

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

Yes a formerly enslaved woman was sealed to her former enslaver and Hattie and Hyde would receive the same rituals in 1904.

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

In 1900, leaders in Salt Lake City had prevented Hattie’s older brother, John Taylor Church, from priesthood ordination because of his racial ancestry but Hattie’s parents were sealed together in the Salt Lake Temple in 1903.

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

After growing up in rural Utah, Hattie married a local boy, Hyde Cahoon, lived her entire life in Millard County on a farm, survived into her eighties, & encountered no impediments to full participation in the CofJCofLDS despite having Black African ancestry.

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

Hattie’s mother Harriet Elnora had been born into slavery in Tennessee and was formerly enslaved to Hattie’s father, Thomas Church.

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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

Her story thus weaves slavery, Reconstruction, Indian Removal, the Jim Crow South, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints together into an unexpected tapestry all its own.

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

The missionaries who created her membership record identified her father as “Indian” on that record & her mother as “African” & simultaneously labeled Mary Jane as “colored,” an indication of the racial ideas that existed in her new faith regarding both strands of her ancestry.

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

Remarkably, at age fifty-two, she accepted baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the only person in her family to join this American born faith.

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

She encountered racism and the reverberations of slavery but also the sting of rejection when the Mississippi Choctaw refused her application into membership in 1902.

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

Mary Jane believed her father to be a full-blooded Choctaw, while her mother was Black and enslaved. Mary Jane was thus born into slavery. She would have to wait until Union troops arrived in Texas after the Civil War to experience her own Juneteenth.

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

She experienced all of this from the vantage point of just two neighboring counties in east-central Texas, Limestone and Freestone counties, both of which were dominated by rural agriculture grounded in slavery before the Civil War.

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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

Bankhead’s remembrance however fails to indicate when he learned of the news or how he found out that he was free. Lincoln thus freed Utah's enslaved on June 20, 1862, but how and when news of freedom reached Utah's enslaved people remains obscure.

A picture of the book cover for This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah, by W. Paul Reeve, Christopher B. Rich Jr., and LaJean Purcell Carruth

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

Alex remembered the “joyful expressions which were upon the faces of all the slaves when they ascertained that they had acquired their freedom through the fortunes of war.”

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

In 1899, Julius Taylor, the editor of the Broad Ax, a Black owned newspaper in Utah, interviewed two formerly enslaved people, Marinda Redd and her husband Alex Bankhead.

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

There is no surviving evidence to indicate how or when news of the law’s passage might have made it into the hands of the territory’s enslavers, let alone into the hands of those whom they enslaved.

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

In fact, the announcement in the DN would have been easy to miss. It was printed on page 4, in the middle of a column titled “From Washington." The paper simply informed its readers that the “President approved the bill prohibiting slavery in the Territories.” That was it.

A picture of the Deseret News Column titled "From Washington."

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

There was no banner headline or extensive story about what the law’s passage meant to Utah’s enslavers or to those who they enslaved. There was no sense of relief or feelings of joy expressed over the legal end of slavery in the territory.

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

But when did Utah's enslaved learn of their freedom? That is a question more difficult to answer: On July 2, 1862, the Deseret News, a newspaper owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reported passage of the new law.

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

To be clear, the law that Lincoln signed was not the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment. This was a law that freed slaves in all U.S. Territories, including Utah. It passed in 1862, making Utah's Juneteenth three years ahead of that of the nation.

A picture of the Act to secure freedom to all persons within the Territories of the United States

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

On June 20, 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed into law “An Act to secure freedom to all persons within the Territories of the United States,” and in doing so he freed Utah’s roughly 35 enslaved people. June 20 is thus the anniversary of Utah's legal Juneteenth.

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