When the church banned Black kids from Boy Scouts leadership
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Ogden Standard-Examiner, July 24, 1974. Image via Utah Digital Newspaper Archive, the University of Utah
Fifty years ago this week, the NAACP sued the Boy Scouts of America over a Mormon ban on Black scouts in troop leadership.
- This is Old News, where we scout the annals of Utah's past to clarify the present.
Catch up quick: Until 1978, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints banned Black members from entering the faith's temples or holding the "priesthood" — a status available to most other male members starting at age 11.
- That affected who could serve as senior patrol leaders in church-affiliated Boy Scout troops, which automatically gave the normally elected position to the sponsoring congregation's "deacon's quorum" president.
- That's a role that requires the priesthood.
What drove the news: The policy barred two 12-year-old Black scouts from becoming leaders in church troops in 1974, prompting the NAACP to join them in a racial discrimination lawsuit on July 23.
The outcome: The local United Way chapter threatened to withdraw funding to the Boy Scouts of America's Great Salt Lake Council if it didn't institute a non-discrimination policy.
- The church then changed its policy to stop conflating priesthood roles with Scouting roles but still required a Black child to be "better qualified" than a white priesthood-holding boy to become a senior patrol leader.
- The BSA settled the case with the NAACP months later, after then-church president Spencer W. Kimball was subpoenaed.
The big picture: Latter-day Saint troops accounted for 16% of all Boy Scouts at the time.
- The church was the BSA's largest single sponsor for decades, automatically enrolling boys as scouts when they turned eight, until the church withdrew from Scouting in 2019 to start its youth program.
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What they said: "While we very reluctantly acknowledge the LDS Church's legal right to maintain its doctrine excluding [Black people] from the priesthood, we are outraged when that doctrine finds expression in the church's secular activities," the NAACP wrote in a news statement quoted in the Logan Herald Journal.
Context: The church has not apologized for the priesthood ban, instead claiming its removal was contemporaneous with a revelation from God to then-leaders of the faith.
- That has left church members to proffer possible doctrinal justifications for it, some at odds with the church's present positions.
Case in point: A prominent religion professor at BYU told the Washington Post in 2012 that the ban was equivalent to a parent refusing to give a young child the keys to the family car, implying that Black members weren't yet ready for the priesthood.
- Other members have argued the ban was divinely inspired because it allowed the church to recruit white members who wouldn't have embraced racial equality at the time.
Reality check: Explanations claiming that Black members were, in fact, spiritually inferior until 1978 — or that white members were rightly God's priority — are still definitively racist.
The bottom line: The priesthood ban's extension to secular endeavors like Scouting weighs against claims that the motive was purely religious.