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Title
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Passing
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Description
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Racial passing refers to people who may have concealed a socially applied racial identity or ethnicity in order to be perceived as another race or ethnicity. It most frequently refers to someone of mixed racial ancestry who assimilates into the white majority in order to escape discrimination. For Century of Black Mormons, this item set tracks Latter-day Saints of mixed race (typically people of white and Black-African ancestry) who eventually passed as white. Many of those in this item set received the lay priesthood and/or temple rituals in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is unlikely that those who performed the priesthood ordinations or temple rituals were aware of a given individual's racial ancestry although in some circumstances local leaders and/or central leaders were aware. After 1896, when the United States Supreme Court put its stamp of approval on racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, some states adopted "one drop" laws that allowed them to segregate any person of African ancestry, even if that person had only "one drop" of Black blood, to use the language of the time. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints followed suit. In 1900, George Q. Cannon, a member of the faith’s First Presidency, the highest governing quorum in the Church, expressed his belief that “however white a man may be and though every trace of negro blood be lost in his appearance, still if he were a descendant of that race in any degree, he could not legally hold the priesthood.” It was not until 1907 that the First Presidency adopted this view as official policy. That year the First Presidency decided that “no one known to have in his veins negro blood, (it matters not how remote a degree) can either have the Priesthood in any degree or the blessings of the Temple of God.” Despite such a declaration, the men and women in this item set, both before and after 1907, illustrate the challenges of policing racial boundaries and the impossibilities of ferreting out "one drop" of anyone's ancestry.
