Mindful of history, Mormon Church reaches out to minorities

By Hamil R. Harris

It was Sunday morning, and the church was filled with more than 200 men, women and children, praying, singing and testifying.

“I have been searching for a faith all of my life,” Melvin Davis, 60, of Southeast declared from the pulpit. The grocery clerk’s story, genial and direct, bared a quest for a spiritual home that long had come up short.

Davis, who is African American, finally found what he was looking for in the Mormon Church, whose history includes a period of more than 120 years during which black men were essentially barred from the priesthood and few Americans of color were active in the faith.

But since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began ordaining African American men into the priesthood in 1978, after the church’s then-president said he had a revelation from God, Mormons have reached out to minorities and worked to address the religion’s racially fraught history. A new documentary, “Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons,” is shedding further light on the issue.
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