Biography

Huron Perkins, born on Christmas Day in 1908, descended from Black Mormon pioneers on both sides of his family tree.[1] His paternal grandparents (Frank and Esther Perkins) and maternal great-grandparents (Green and Martha Flake) had each traveled to the Great Basin enslaved and chose to be baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and practice the faith with their families. His mother, a devout Latter-day Saint, attended Church and socials with her ward. His father, though never baptized, supported the family in their church activity. This foundation of faith stayed with Huron as he married and then led his own family in a life dedicated to the Latter-day Saint gospel.

Huron grew up in Wilford, a farming community on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. He was the third of four children born to Martha Stevens and Sylvester Perkins.[2] The Perkinses had their own farm and through hard work it produced well and provided a living for the family. While they raised peaches and grain, their main livelihood was the acres of black currant bushes Huron and his siblings harvested each summer. They woke early and attended to some of the chores of the day, such as milking the cow. After breakfast, they spent all day in the currant bushes where they picked and gathered the little berries Huron’s sister described as “devilish.” After picking some currants, they would rub a tiny handful in between their palms to break up the bits of stems and leaves. Once separated from debris, they put the berries in a jar. The children did this all day long. Their mother brought lunch to them in the currant orchard so that they could work until dusk. Although the children found the labor tedious, it produced fruitful results. The currants sold well in the area and occasionally shipped out of state.[3]

In the autumn, Huron and his siblings would begin their school year. The pressures of school would replace any relief they may have felt to be out of the currant bushes. They attended the Wilford one-room schoolhouse where they experienced the challenges of youth. As Black children, they also sometimes encountered the added pressure to prove themselves in comparison to their white counterparts. Huron completed eight years of schooling before he decided to focus on earning a living.[4]

Winters in the Salt Lake Valley were cold and snowy, and the Perkinses lived close to Big Cottonwood Canyon and experienced heavy snowstorms. Lucille, Huron’s sister, recalled that her father often brought the shovel into the house in the evenings so that he would be able to clear a path through the fallen snow in the mornings.[5]

The Perkins family maintained strong friendships with other families in the Wilford community. They attended socials, picnics up the canyon, ward activities, and dances in the church house. Lucille remembered when the adults were dancing, the children, who had made beds on the floor and were supposed to be asleep, would crack the door to watch the adults. “It was great fun to see them make fools of themselves with their dancing.”[6]

The LDS faith was prominent in the Perkins home. Huron’s mother, a descendant of Green Flake, one of the first Black pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley, chose to be baptized a year before the birth of her first child.[7] Once baptized, Martha ensured that her children learned the gospel as taught in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sylvester and Martha oversaw the children’s growth in the faith. The children were blessed as infants, a practice the Church instituted in its early years and continues to the present. It was an opportunity to present a newborn infant to the congregation, bless them, and enter their names and birthdates into the records of the Church. Beginning in the 1850s, the Church prohibited men of African descent from being ordained to its lay priesthood. This meant that white male priesthood holders would have performed the blessings and the baptismal rituals for the Huran children. The elders blessed Huron on March 7, 1909, in the Wilford Ward in Salt Lake City.[8]

As Huron and each of his siblings reached the age of eight, Martha made sure that they were baptized and confirmed members of the Church. Huron received baptism on April 28, 1917, also in the Wilford Ward.[9] Martha wanted her children to experience the blessings that came with membership. She made sure they were included in church records and that they never missed Sunday School.[10]

Maintaining family connections was also important to Martha. She took her children to Idaho whenever she was able, where their grandparents spoiled them.[11] This desire for connection passed to Huron. He lived in the Salt Lake area his entire life and, even after getting married, chose to remain near his family.

Huron married young. When Sammie D. Haynes moved from Mississippi to Salt Lake City with her family in 1927, Huron took an interest in her rather quickly. The Haynes family moved into the tight-knit Black community, which included the Perkinses.[12] Sammie’s father started working on a farm, and her mother became a domestic worker while Sammie and Huron starting spending time together. The young couple married on March 19, 1928, when Huron was eighteen years old and Sammie was nineteen.[13]

Huron placed a degree of significance on his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Even though Sammie was not a member, an elder of the Church officiated at their wedding, and the event was then recorded in the Church’s membership records.[14]

The couple began their married life in Salt Lake City and eventually built their own home on Evergreen Avenue in Mill Creek, a town east of Salt Lake City.[15] Huron found work wherever he could. He took on odd jobs sometimes but also found employment as a construction worker and as an employee at an autobody shop.[16] Around 1955, he obtained a steady job with the Union Pacific Railroad and maintained his position there until his retirement.[17]

Huron remained an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and tried to lead his family in the faith. He is listed with his wife and children in Church census records continuously throughout the years that the Church conducted those censuses.[18] In 1949, his eldest daughter had her own child, and the two lived with Sammie and Huron. The entire family, Huron, Sammie, his children, and his grandchild, are listed in the 1950 Church census.[19] In 1971, when Sammie was 59 years old, she accepted baptism and joined Huron as a member of of the Church, no doubt a joyful day for Huron.[20] Yet, there is no evidence that any of his children were baptized.

Black Latter-day Saints faced challenges in their own faith community and in broader American society during the height of segregation in the United States. African Americans were barred from entering certain “white only” establishments, and these restrictions sometimes bled into Latter-day Saint congregations as well. Huron’s sister Lucille recalled that she had felt welcome at Church in her own community in Wilford, but when she tried to attend an LDS ward in downtown Salt Lake, the congregation barred her from entering.[21] Black members who lived in segregated cities sometimes stopped attending because of the prejudices they encountered.[22] Huron, in contrast, lived in a rural area in an inclusive congregation that supported and cared for one another. He would not, however, have escaped the racial tensions that were typical of this time period. His decision to continue to practice his faith despite the social pressures he would have faced, demonstrates the devotion he had to the Latter-day Saint gospel. It is easy to imagine that had Huron lived to see the racial restrictions on priesthood ordinations lifted, he would have been overjoyed.

He missed the removal of those restrictions by only two years. Utahns commemorate their pioneer heritage each year on July 24th, the day in 1847 that Brigham Young arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. Huron passed away on this celebratory day in 1976, a fitting convergence of events that harkened back to his great-grandfather, Green Flake, who was an enslaved pioneer in 1847, and a devout Latter-day Saint. At the time of Huron’s passing, he had thirteen grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. His obituary includes a picture of Huron smiling widely, and he is described as a “Member, LDS Church.”[23]

By Shannon Miller

[1] Utah, State Board of Health, Certificate of Birth, File No. 2567B, Huron Perkins, 25 December 1908, series 81443, reel 52, box 17, folder 27, Utah State Division of Archives and Records Services, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[2] United States, 1920 Census, Utah, Salt Lake County, Precinct 3.

[3] Lucille Bankhead, Interviews with Black People in Utah, 1982-1988, Interview 1 by Leslie Kelen, 4, MS 0453, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[4] Lucille Bankhead, Interview 1 by Leslie Kelen, 4-7; United States, 1940 Census, Utah, Salt Lake County, Precinct 3.

[5] Lucille Bankhead, Interview 1 by Leslie Kelen, 7.

[6] Lucille Bankhead, Interview 1 by Leslie Kelen, 8.

[7] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, Wilford Ward, microfilm 889,386, Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[8] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, Wilford Ward, microfilm 26,673, Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[9] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, Wilford Ward, microfilm 26,673, Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[10] Lucille Bankhead, Interview 1 by Leslie Kelen, 10; “Perkins, Huron,” Presiding Bishopric stake and mission census, 1914 and 1920, Family History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[11] Lucille Bankhead, Interview by Leslie Kelen, 13.

[12] United States, City Directories, 1822-1995, (Salt Lake City, Utah, 1928), 574.

[13] Utah, Salt Lake County, Marriages, 1887-1965, Huron Perkins and Sammie Haynes, 19 March 1928, Utah Division of Archives and Records Services, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[14] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection, Wilford Ward, Form E, 1928, microfilm 26,674, Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[15] “Sammie D. Perkins,” Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah), 24 November 1998, 38.

[16] United States, 1930 Census, Utah, Salt Lake County, Precinct 3; United States, 1940 Census, Utah, Salt Lake County, Precinct 3; United States, City Directories, 1822-1995 (Salt Lake City, Utah, 1953), 707.

[17] United States, City Directories, 1822-1995 (Salt Lake City, Utah, 1956), 850; “Huron Perkins,” Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah), 26 July 1976, 19.

[18] “Perkins, Huron,” Presiding Bishopric stake and mission census, 1914, 1920, 1925, 1930, 1935, 1950, 1955, and 1960 censuses, Family History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[19] “Perkins, Huuron,” Presiding Bishopric stake and mission census, 1950 census, Family History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[20] Sammie Davidson Haynes (KWZD-WR2) Familysearch.org.

[21] Lucille Bankhead, Interview 1 by Leslie Kelen, 10.

[22] See for example, Ardis E. Parshall and W. Paul Reeve, “Marie Benjamin Graves,” Century of Black Mormons; Joseph R. Stuart, “Len Hope,” Century of Black Mormons; and Joseph R. Stuart, “Mary Lee Pugh Hope,” Century of Black Mormons. 

[23] “Huron Perkins,” Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah), 26 July 1976, 19.

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