Graves, Marie Benjamin
Biography
Marie Benjamin Graves and her husband William Graves, were pioneering Black Latter-day Saints in Oakland, California. Marie accepted baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1911, at age 33, and remained committed to her new faith for the rest of her life. William and Marie were racial minorities in a predominately white church and the only Black people in their Oakland congregation, but Marie’s story is remarkable beyond that. In 1920, after experiencing racism at the hands of fellow Latter-day Saints while visiting Atlanta, Georgia, Marie wrote a letter to the leader of her faith, Heber J. Grant, detailing her experience and making a case for the universal message of the gospel that she so thoroughly embraced.[1]
Marie Benjamin was born in 1878 in Hamburg, Alabama, an unincorporated community in Perry County, an agricultural region previously dominated by slavery. Marie listed her father as Gabriel Benjamin and her mother as Hattie Krenshaw on her baptismal record.[2] Both were likely formerly enslaved.[3] Little is known about her childhood and adolescence other than the timing of her birth meant that she grew up as federal Reconstruction ended and segregation began. She must have lived with the ramifications of what that meant for Black people in the South. The year before Marie’s birth the federal government withdrew the last of its troop’s from the region and influential southern white people began to reassert white supremacy through Jim Crow laws, segregation, voter suppression, and Ku Klux Klan orchestrated racial terror, including rape and murder. Marie likely became a part of what historians refer to as the Great Migration of Black people out of the South to find new opportunities in the industrial centers of the North and West.[4]
There is no indication when Marie arrived in California or the route she took to get there. Her motivation for migrating to the West is also not clear other than the presumed economic opportunities that the bustling port city of Oakland offered in comparison to the difficulties of agricultural labor in Perry County, Alabama. The first public document to indicate Marie’s residence in Oakland is her 1909 marriage certificate to William. By that point both William and Marie had previously been married and were either widowed or divorced. At the time of her marriage to William, Marie listed her last name as Shropshire and on a subsequent census record she indicated that her marriage to William was her second. In fact, when she was nineteen years old she had married a John W. Shropshire back in Alabama.[5] For his part, William had a daughter named Nettie from his previous marriage.[6]
Whatever the circumstances of Marie meeting and marrying William, missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were involved. In fact, an Elder Leroy M. Morris, from Salt Lake City, Utah, performed the wedding. Another missionary, Alvin Keddington, also from Salt Lake City, served as a witness to the event. It is a clear indication that Marie and William had a longstanding and trusting relationship with Latter-day Saint missionaries by the time they decided to be baptized over two years later.[7]
Surviving sources do not indicate how William and Marie first met the missionaries or what attracted the couple to their message. Latter-day Saint scholar Armand Mauss moved to the Oakland congregation as a young boy and much later recalled hearing William stand at the pulpit on occasion to bear his testimony. Although Mauss was only twelve when William died, he nonetheless recalled one testimony in which William shared “an account of his conversion.” If Mauss’s memory is accurate, William’s encounter “began with a street meeting in Oakland at which he [William] happened to drop by while LDS missionaries were preaching.”[8]
It is not clear if Marie was with William when he first heard the missionaries preach or if he later included her in his ongoing association with them. In either case, the couple eventually decided to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On November 21, 1911, they demonstrated their commitment through baptism. Ray Peter Lund, a young missionary from Manti, Utah, baptized Marie that day and a Joseph Brigham John Hawkley, likely from Box Elder County, Utah, confirmed her in front of the Oakland congregation the following Sunday.[9]
If surviving Oakland Branch records are any indication, Marie was a dedicated member of her new faith and certainly added strength to the small congregation. Marie became a devoted member of the branch Relief Society, the Church’s women’s organization. She found fellowship there and a sense of purpose. On November 7, 1912, almost the first anniversary of her baptism, she spoke to the Relief Society “of the goodness of the Lord and [the] blessings bestowed upon her.” The following month she again mentioned “the Lord’s goodness to her” and added that she “enjoys the gospel more and more each day.” She added her witness to those of her fellow Relief Society sisters on a regular basis after that. On one occasion, she bore her testimony “to the truthfulness of the Gospel and the many blessings” she had received and another time she acknowledged “the goodness of God” in her life and “the blessings which await the faithful.”[10]
Marie did not reserve her expressions of faith for only the Relief Society. She regularly bore witness before the entire congregation too. The first Sunday of each month in the Latter-day Saint tradition is colloquially referred to as “fast Sunday.” On that day congregants fast from two meals and donate the money that they might have otherwise spent on food for the relief of the poor in their community. There are no prepared sermons on “fast Sunday,” but the time is reserved for the sharing of expressions of faith, called “testimonies.” Anyone from a given congregation is welcome to stand and share their feelings of devotion—an opportunity that Marie and William regularly utilized. Sometimes one or the other stood before the congregation on a given fast Sunday but many times both William and Marie did. It was customary for members of the Oakland branch to select a particular song to sing in the middle of testimony bearing, as a musical expression of their faith. Marie participated in this tradition on several occasions. On September 7, 1913, for example she “suggested ‘G[u]ide us O thou Great Jehovah” as an expression of her faith. In response, the congregation joined her in singing, “Guide us, O Thou great Jehovah, Saints unto the promised land! We are weak, but Thou art able, Hold us with thy pow’r-ful hand. Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit, Feed us till the Savior Comes.”[11]
Marie, in particular, enjoyed the songs of her new faith and owned her own 1915 edition of the Latter-day Saints Psalmody. She carefully wrote her name, “Mrs. Marie Graves,” and address, “1040 28th St.” inside the front cover. Her particular hymnbook remained in the possession of the Oakland congregation following her death and passed into the meetinghouse library. Steve Wallace, choir director in the Oakland First Ward, happened to preserve Marie’s hymnal when the members of the First Ward sorted through old materials in the meetinghouse library in the twenty-first century. At the time Wallace did not know who Marie Graves was; once her story came to light following the dedication of a monument to William and Marie at the Evergreen Cemetery in 2019, Wallace pulled out the old hymnal and understood its significance. He then passed on the prized hymnal to the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City for preservation. It serves as a physical reminder of Marie’s connection to her faith through song and marks her place in Latter-day Saint history as a racial pioneer.
By all indications Marie and William were welcomed members of their Oakland congregation and they enjoyed their first decade as Latter-day Saints. They found a sense of community in an integrated congregation and must have felt like they belonged. When the couple traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1920, for vacation, however, they encountered something quite different and it shocked them. They had friends in Atlanta and Marie was intent on introducing those friends to the gospel. She located the Atlanta chapel and invited her girlfriends to Sunday services with her. What happened after they arrived, however, so disturbed Marie that she penned a letter to Heber J. Grant, the leader of her faith, and in it she detailed the event.[12]
Marie addressed her letter to “President Heber J. Grant, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” She knew to whom she wrote and intended her message to reach the highest office in the Church. “Dear Brother,” she began, “I feal that it is right for me to let you know how I was treated when I visited this branch of the church in Atlanta, Ga. I had some fri[e]nds I wanted to take to church,” she explained, “becaus[e] I did not not know when I would have that opportu[n]ity again so I ask[ed] two fri[e]nds to go with me to church. We found the right church all right but found the wronge people.” It was a fitting summary of the experience that followed and it encapsulated the way that Marie came to make sense of it. “It seams like I had gone into a den of evil spirits so bad was the fealings against us because we was Colerd,” she wrote.[13]
Marie explained to her fellow Latter-day Saints in Atlanta that she “was a member in Oakland.” In response, Marie noted that “two or three tried to make us welcome.” Nonetheless, someone in the Atlanta congregation informed her that the conference president would come and talk to her. A man whom she presumed to be the conference president then invited Marie and her friends to speak with him outside the building. “So we went out,” Marie wrote, and “he told us of the line being [drawn] betwe[e]n the Colerd and the white people and antagonistic fealing amonge them.” He explained that the church was “dedicated by the white people of the south” and “when he finish[ed] we said good by an[d] left,” Marie recalled. “We knew that me[a]nt for us to stay out of there. We knew the line was drawn in the south.” Marie indicated that she and her friends had no intention of violating racial protocol in the South simply by attending church. They “did not go up in the front,” she clarified, but rather they sat “in the back.” Even still they were “asked out of the church.”[14]
The experience devastated Marie. Her feelings were only made worse by the fact that she had invited her friends to join her. “I never had nothing to hurt me like that in all of my life,” she told President Grant. “My fri[e]nds said, ‘now you belonge to that church and cannot go to it here?’ Had I knowen we would have been treated like that I never would have tried to have gone to church there,” she explained, still stinging from the humiliation she bore. “I fealt so much worse by my fri[e]nds being with me,” especially because her friends witnessed firsthand “how mean” her fellow Latter-day Saints had been.[15]
Marie’s only relief came in the fact that William and the husbands of her friends had not yet joined them by the time they were dismissed from the building. “We deci[d]ed not to tell our husbands,” Marie recounted. “We did not need any more compa[n]y fealing bad with us,” she wrote. “After I was treated like this I could not leave the south fast anought,” Marie concluded. “I thought the Gospel was free for any one that wanted to hear it; I did not know that it was like that down there,” she ruminated. “I have a a testimo[n]y of the gospel just the same,” she declared. “The Lord has bless[ed] me wonderful[l]y and I thank him for it.”[16]
By the time that she wrote her letter to Heber J. Grant, it seems that Marie had already concluded that she was not going to let the racism of the members in Atlanta deter her from maintaining her own connection to God. Even still, she was unwilling to ignore the racism nor pretend that it did not exist. In Marie’s mind it was something that needed to be acknowledged and rectified and for that she took her plea to the top. She signed her letter, “Your Sister in the gospel, Marie Graves.”[17]
Marie’s letter is significant on several counts: It was addressed to the leader of her faith, the president of her church and a man whom Latter-day Saints consider to be a prophet of God. As such it represents the import she ascribed to the incident and a sense of her own dignity as a daughter of God in reaching to the top of the Latter-day Saint hierarchy for redress. Her letter also represents an expression of Marie’s faith in her own words, a rarity among Black Latter-day Saints; it demonstrates an inner commitment to matters of equality and racial justice; it is an honest assessment of the racism she endured and a simultaneous expression of her ongoing devotion to the Latter-day Saint gospel despite that racism. In short, it is a singular document in Latter-day Saint history.[18]
Heber J. Grant read Marie’s letter but did not respond directly to Marie. Instead, over the signature of the entire First Presidency (Heber J. Grant, Anthon H. Lund, and Charles W. Penrose), he forwarded her letter to Joseph W. McMurrin, the president of the California mission, then headquartered in Los Angeles. His secretary, George F. Gibbs, meanwhile sent a short note to Marie telling her that McMurrin would visit her “in regard to the subject matter of your letter” the next time McMurrin traveled to Oakland. Whether or not McMurrin followed through on the proposed visit is not known; if he did so, no record survives to indicate what message he conveyed. If McMurrin did meet with Marie and adhered to the First Presidency’s suggested communication, it must have been a disappointment.[19]
The First Presidency asked McMurrin to visit Marie “with a view to making explanations and comforting her,” yet the message they suggested was not one of comfort. The three leaders briefly recounted for McMurrin Marie’s experience in Atlanta but rather than condemning the treatment Marie and her friends received, they reminded McMurrin that “in the south we must bear in mind the color line is drawn between the white and colored races.” The First Presidency even suggested that segregation might also prevail in Oakland if the Black population there increased. “Should Oakland suddenly become populated thickly by negroes,” the three men surmised, “evidently the same color line would have to be drawn there as now exists in the Southern States, including Atlanta Georgia. We should bear in mind,” they concluded, “that our mission is not directly to the negro race.”[20]
Remarkably, William and Marie returned to Oakland and picked up where they left off, bearing testimony on fast Sunday and otherwise contributing to their Oakland branch. When the Oakland Branch held its annual conference in 1921 or 1922 Marie and William were there, in the center of the crowd, as evidenced in the photograph taken that day. The same is true when the Oakland chapel was dedicated in 1923. They were present at the gathering surrounded by fellow Saints.[21]
Marie’s attachment to the Relief Society also continued unabated. In 1921 she paid twenty-five cents to the Relief Society as annual dues. On January 5 of that year she and a sister Nancy Holbrook gave a Relief Society lesson on the subject of “Health and Revelation.” In June and September, Marie offered the closing prayer. In October she bore testimony to her fellow Relief Society sisters. In 1922, the same pattern ensued, with Marie regularly attending Relief Society meetings and engaging in service work. She helped make paper cups for sacrament service and sewed quilt blocks. Marie was a seamstress or dressmaker by trade and must have been particularly skilled at the sewing projects.[22] She also regularly contributed cash to the Relief Society’s charity causes. In January 1922 she offered .15 cents for charity and .50 cents for membership dues. In February she paid .15 cents for charity, another .10 cents each in March and April, .15 cents in July, and .10 cents each in August, September, and October. In small but meaningful ways, Marie left a trail of crumbs behind to indicate her ongoing devotion despite the racism she endured in Atlanta.[23]
Marie passed away on September 6, 1930, at age 52. She was laid to rest in the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California where William ensured that she had a proper headstone to mark her grave. William survived ten years longer on his own. The couple did not have any children together and William’s daughter from his first marriage had moved to Chicago by then.[24] When William passed away in 1940, he was buried next to Marie but no headstone marked his grave.[25]
That may have been the end of the story for William and Marie had not Marie's letter to Heber J. Grant been preserved in the files of the Latter-day Saint Church History Library. Its discovery led to further research to flesh it out.[26] When Latter-day Saints in the Oakland, California Stake learned of the previously unknown pioneer couple, they sprang into action. They embraced William and Marie and did their part to ensure that their memory lived on among present-day Latter-day Saints. When Oakland Saints learned that William’s grave remained unmarked, Bishop Greg Call of the Oakland First Ward and Dean and Nancy Criddle crowdsourced the funds to install a proper monument designed to honor both William and Marie.[27]
On May 25, 2019, President Bill Davis, the Oakland Genesis leader (a Church sanctioned group for African American Latter-day Saints) offered the opening prayer and Genesis member Barbara Whitfield sang. Bishop Michael King of the Oakland Ninth Ward dedicated the newly placed monument. The crowd that gathered that day sang, “Guide us O Thou Great Jehovah” in memory of Marie’s request that her beloved Oakland congregation join her in singing that hymn in 1913 as an expression of her faith. The 2019 crowd thus sang one of Marie’s favorite hymns at Evergreen Cemetery in her honor; they did so with a hope in their hearts that their unified voices might reach Marie’s ears somewhere in the eternities and that the Great Jehovah might indeed hold her in his powerful hand.[28]
By Ardis E. Parshall and W. Paul Reeve
[1] Marie Graves, Oakland, California, to Heber J. Grant, Salt Lake City, Utah, 10 November 1920, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah. For the story of finding William and Marie and uncovering their histories see Ardis E. Parshall, “William and Marie Graves: ‘We Found the Right Church, All Right . . .’” Keepapitchinin, 30 September 2015; Ardis E. Parshall, “Marie and William Graves: The Part I Withheld,” Keepapitchinin, 14 September 2018; Ardis E. Parshall, “A Host of Contributions: Remembering William and Marie Graves,” Keepapitchinin, 2 October 2018; Ardis E. Parshall, “Save the Date: Dedication of Monument to William and Marie Graves, May 25 at 11 am,” Keepapitchinin, 17 April 2019.
[2] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, Oakland Branch, CR 375 8, box 959, folder 1, images 154 and 279; box 4855, folder 1, image 401, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
[3] A John W. Crenshaw held 93 slaves in Perry County, Alabama, in 1860, and a S. W. Crenshaw held 16. While there are no known enslavers from Perry County with a last name of Benjamin, it is possible that Marie’s father adopted “Benjamin” as his last name following the Civil War rather than use the last name of his former enslaver. See J. Hugh LeBaron, 1860 United States Slave Census, Perry County, Alabama. See also, Tom Blake, “Perry County, Alabama, Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Mathes for African Americans on 1870 Census." Marie’s parents were married on 5 November 1877, nine months before Marie’s birth. See Alabama, Perry County, Marriage License, Gabriel Benjamin to Katy Crenshaw, 5 November 1877. We express gratitude to Vicki Standing of Lehi, Utah, a professional genealogist with experience in tracing Black lives, for assistance in finding traces of William and Marie’s pre-Latter-day Saint lives, and for locating their home lot in Oakland.
[4] On the Great Migration see Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).
[5] Alabama, Calhoun County, Marriage License, John W. Shropshire to Mary A. Benjamin, 21 July 1898, Microfilm 1,035,496, book E, page 297, Family History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah; California, Vital Records, Certificate of Marriage, Marie Shropshire to William Graves, 5 August 1909, Office of Clerk-Recorder, County of Alameda, Oakland, California; United States, 1910 Census, California, Alameda County, Oakland. We express gratitude to Vicki Standing of Lehi, Utah, a professional genealogist with experience in tracing Black lives, for assistance in finding traces of William and Marie’s pre-Latter-day Saint lives, and for locating their home lot in Oakland.
[6] “Graves,” Oakland Tribune, 8 September 1930, 31.
[7] California, Vital Records, Certificate of Marriage, Marie Shropshire to William Graves, 5 August 1909, Office of Clerk-Recorder, County of Alameda, Oakland, California.
[8] Armand Mauss, email to Ardis E. Parshall, 9 April 2014, in possession of Parshall.
[9] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, Oakland Branch, CR 375 8, box 959, folder 1, images 154 and 279; box 4855, folder 1, image 401, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
[10] Oakland Branch, California Mission, Relief Society minutes and records, LR 6358 14, folder 1, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.
[11] Oakland Branch, California Mission, General Minutes, LR 6358 11, folder 5, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah. The words here are taken from Marie’s 1915 edition of the Latter-day Saints Psalmody.
[12] Marie Graves, Oakland, California, to Heber J. Grant, Salt Lake City, Utah, 10 November 1920, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.
[13] Graves to Grant, 10 November 1920.
[14] Graves to Grant, 10 November 1920.
[15] Graves to Grant, 10 November 1920.
[16] Graves to Grant, 10 November 1920.
[17] Graves to Grant, 10 November 1920.
[18] Graves to Grant, 10 November 1920.
[19] George F. Gibbs, Salt Lake City, Utah, to Marie Graves, Oakland, California, 23 November 1920, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.
[20] First Presidency, Salt Lake City, Utah, to Joseph W. McMurrin, Los Angeles, California, 23 November 1920, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.
[21] Oakland LDS Branch Conference, 1921 or 1922, courtesy Craig E. Stewart; Oakland LDS Branch in front of Oakland Chapel, dedicated in 1923, courtesy Craig E. Stewart.
[22] United States, 1910 and 1920 Censuses, California, Alameda County, Oakland.
[23] Oakland Branch, California Mission, Relief Society minutes and records, 1921-22, LR 6358 14, folder 1, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.
[24] California, Department of Public Health, Vital Statistics, Certificate of Death, Local Registered No. 2252, Marie Graves, Office of Clerk-Recorder, County of Alameda, Oakland, California; “Graves,” Oakland Tribune, 8 September 1930, 31.
[25] County of Alameda, Superior Court of California, Probate Court, Estate of William Graves (1940: No. 75031), courtesy of Paris Fox.
[26] For the story of finding William and Marie and uncovering their histories see Ardis E. Parshall, “William and Marie Graves: ‘We Found the Right Church, All Right . . .’” Keepapitchinin, 30 September 2015; Ardis E. Parshall, “Marie and William Graves: The Part I Withheld,” Keepapitchinin, 14 September 2018; Ardis E. Parshall, “A Host of Contributions: Remembering William and Marie Graves,” Keepapitchinin, 2 October 2018; Ardis E. Parshall, “Save the Date: Dedication of Monument to William and Marie Graves, May 25 at 11 am,” Keepapitchinin, 17 April 2019.
[27] William and Marie Graves, Monument Dedication, 25 May 2019, Evergreen Cemetery, Oakland, California.
[28] William and Marie Graves, Monument Dedication, 25 May 2019, Evergreen Cemetery, Oakland, California.
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