Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 88, Number 1, 2020 by Utah Historical Society

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The Last State to Honor MLK: Utah and the Quest for Racial Justice

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contents By Matthew L. Harris and Madison S. Harris

Race, Latter-day Saint Doctrine, and Athletics at Utah State University, 1960–1961

By Jessica Marie Nelson

Utah in the Green Book : Segregation and the Hospitality Industry in the Beehive State By Christine Cooper-Rompato

Private Visions: Outsider Art on Utah’s Cultural Landscape By Roger Roper

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In This Issue Public History: UQHS Reviews 2019 Award Winners Contributors In Memoriam: Floyd A. O’Neil Utah In Focus

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REVIEWS 79

The Civilian Conservation Corps in Utah: Remembering Nine Years of Achievement, 1933–1942 By Kenneth W. Baldridge Reviewed by Michael R. Polk

The Mormon Handcart Migration: “Tounge nor pen can never tell the sorrow”

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notices

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By Candy Moulton Reviewed by Gene A. Sessions

My Life in Carbon County in the 1950s By Ronald G. Watt

Westward with Fremont: The Story of Solomon Carvalho By Sophie Greenspan

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In our first article, Matthew Harris and Madison Harris ask why Utah took so long to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. by naming a holiday for him. Ronald Reagan first created the federal King holiday in 1983, and, by 1999, every state but Utah had followed suit. The Harrises argue that the notion that King was a communist—which was promulgated by such national figures as J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Welch and repeated by Ezra Taft Bensen and Cleon Skousen, prominent Latter-day Saints—created an atmosphere in which many state legislators were loath to acknowledge the civil rights leader by name. After years of debate, much unfavorable attention, and the efforts of Jeanetta Williams, Gordon B. Hinckley, Robert Sykes, and others, the state finally designated a King holiday in 2000. Jessica Nelson, in our second article, analyzes a particularly turbulent time at Utah State University, the 1960–1961 school year. In January 1961, university president Daryl Chase called the school’s few black athletes together to caution them against interracial romances. Around the same time, professor John J. Stewart

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Finally, Christine Cooper-Rompato examines race relations by looking to the Green Book, a state-by-state directory of businesses that opened their doors to African Americans. Her study of Utah’s hospitality industry finds that from at least 1939 until the mid-1960s, very few restaurants and hotels would do so. The handful of welcoming businesses were almost entirely owned and managed by African Americans, many of them women. That could lead to some financial success, and it could also invite racially motivated violence. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Green Book eventually ceased publication, but that did not spell the end of difficulties for black travelers.

published his Mormonism and the Negro, an apologia for the policies that restricted the full participation of blacks in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The meeting and the book touched off an intense and wide-ranging conversation at USU, especially within the pages of the campus newspaper, much of it focused on “local issues in which Mormonism was the fulcrum.”

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Joyful young faces appear on the cover of this Utah Historical Quarterly, portraits of African Americans attending World War II–era dances in Salt Lake City. They are glimpses of a state on the threshold of change. As with the rest of the United States, Utah has grappled with race relations since its founding in the nineteenth century; well into the twentieth century, both custom and law made the state a difficult environment for African Americans and other people of color. The social and structural shifts set in motion by the war, the civil rights movement, and the upheavals of the 1960s and beyond, however, opened the door for some improvement. This issue of UHQ explores race and agency in interracial relationships, public life, and athletics during those tumultuous years.

In This Issue

Altogether, these three articles deepen our understanding of subject that hasn’t seen enough published work: the black experience in twentieth-century Utah, which included cold shoulders, uneven justice, and limited public acceptance. LDS policies, as well as Utah’s relatively insular setting, surely played a role in this environment. At the same time, as these articles show, personal agency and striving made a positive difference in the state, as did influxes of soldiers, students, defense workers, railroad employees, and others. And as the range of years covered in this issue—from roughly 1939 to 2000—demonstrates, overcoming racial prejudice and creating the beloved community, as Dr. King put it, is not a subject buried in the past.

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Rosa Parks speaking at a commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr. five years after his death. After her role in the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Parks continued the struggle for civil rights, receiving national and international recognition for her work and service. Library of Congress, LOT 15045, no. 612.

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The Last State to Honor MLK: Utah and the Quest for Racial Justice

November 2, 1983, was a historic day at the White House. There President Ronald Reagan signed a bill to create a federal holiday on the third Monday in January named in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King. Dozens of states quickly followed suit. Within three years of the bill’s passage, seventeen states had recognized Martin Luther King Day. By 1999, all states had recognized the King holiday except Utah.1 In Utah, as in other states, the federal holiday set off a fierce debate about how to honor the late civil rights leader. In 1986, the Utah legislature chose to honor the King federal holiday by calling it Human Rights Day, prompting significant pushback from state’s small but noteworthy African American population. The refusal to honor King also placed a glaring spotlight on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose past teachings about blacks made the Mormon-dominated Utah legislature a target of ridicule and scorn in the national news media. In 2000, after intense pressure from critics both within and outside of the state, Utah Governor Michael Leavitt signed a bill renaming Human Rights Day Martin Luther King Day. “With this signing,” the NAACP cheerfully noted, “Utah became the last state to recognize the King holiday by name.”2

Why did it take nearly fifteen years for Utah to honor the King holiday? We argue that a number of Utah lawmakers were influenced by the authoritative teachings of LDS apostle Ezra Taft Benson and his close ally, Cleon Skousen, both of whom branded King a communist. Their writings, circulated widely within the LDS church, provide an important cultural context for how some state lawmakers viewed King and, more importantly, why they refused to recognize the holiday that bore his name. Even so, the Utah legislature eventually recognized the King holiday because of the persistent efforts of NAACP president Jeanetta Williams, LDS church president Gordon B. Hinckley, Utah congressman

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Robert Sykes, and others. They convinced lawmakers to honor King, which marked the end of a long and tumultuous debate in Utah over his life and legacy.

Ezra Taft Benson served as a member of the LDS church’s elite Quorum of the Twelve Apostles from 1943 to 1985 and was church president from 1985 to his death in 1994. From 1953 to 1961 he served as the Secretary of Agriculture in the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, taking a leave of absence from his ecclesiastical responsibilities in the Quorum of the Twelve.

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Like most of his fellow apostles, Benson believed that black people were descendants of Cain, reflecting his deep-rooted support of LDS racial teachings.3 From 1852–1978 persons of African ancestry were barred from sacred priesthood and temple rituals because of their “cursed” status.4 Church president Spencer W. Kimball lifted the priesthood and temple ban in 1978 through divine revelation in the Salt Lake temple certifying that all men and women, regardless of race, could now enjoy the full privileges of Mormon liturgical rites. Kimball’s revelation came at a critical time. The NAACP had recently sued the Boy Scouts of America, alleging that LDS racial policies prevented an African American boy from advancing in scout leadership in a Salt Lake City troop sponsored by the church.5 Moreover, the NAACP had pressured the church to lift the priesthood and temple ban, proclaiming that Mormon racial doctrine was a barrier to getting civil rights legislation passed in Utah.6 The NAACP had good reason to pressure the LDS church. The Utah legislature, composed predominantly of Mormons, had opposed civil rights bills in Utah in the 1940s and 1950s and the LDS church also rejected civil rights bills or at least preferred to remain silent when lawmakers discussed them.7 Neither church leaders nor lawmakers believed that bills preventing discrimination in jobs and housing were moral issues and therefore they refused to act. They also feared that civil rights legislation would erode racial barriers and lead to interracial marriage, which violated both church teachings and state law prohibiting miscegenation.8

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Frustrated with the state’s inaction on civil rights, NAACP leaders threatened to protest at the 1963 LDS general conference. After meeting with Hugh B. Brown and N. Eldon Tanner of the First Presidency, the highest governing body in the LDS church, both sides reached a compromise. Brown would read a statement in general conference professing church support for civil rights and the NAACP would not march at the conference. It was a tepid statement, offering neither support for specific civil rights bills at the federal level nor at the local level. Not surprisingly, the NAACP did not accept the church’s lukewarm endorsement. Some two years after meeting with Brown and Tanner, NAACP leaders protested at Temple Square, prompting the church hierarchy to reassess its strategy remaining silent on civil rights bills.9 In 1965, with LDS church support, the Utah state legislature passed an “Anti-Discrimination Act,” prohibiting discrimination in public housing and jobs.10 The bill was a long time in coming. Nevertheless, Ezra Taft Benson, then an apostle and wellknown government official, was not among its supporters. In fact, he opposed any civil rights legislation, placing him at odds with the First Presidency, as well as moderate-to-liberal Mormons like Michigan governor George Romney, who championed racial equality. Benson asserted that the civil rights movement was a communist plot secretly masterminded by the Kremlin. He also claimed that Martin Luther King was a communist agent.11 Benson’s conspiracy views permeated most of his public discourses in the 1960s, not least his views on Dr. King. His worldview, informed by his eight years in the Eisenhower administration when many Americans feared the spread of communism around the world, derived from two fringe figures whose works he read and admired. The first was J. Edgar Hoover, the longstanding director of the FBI and the second was Robert Welch, the controversial founder of the John Birch Society, the most extreme anticommunist organization in the United States.12 In his sermons, Benson frequently quoted from Hoover’s book Masters of Deceit and became alarmed by the director’s bold assertion that subversives lurked within the United States. This included, in Hoover’s words,

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Hugh B. Brown at the October 1963 LDS general conference. Brown was part of the LDS First Presidency, which issued a statement in favor of civil rights at the conference. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints © By Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

“high-ranking statesmen, public officials, educators, ministers of the Gospel, professional men” and others who “have been duped into helping Communism.”13 Just as troubling, Hoover claimed that King was among the subversives because he maintained close ties with communists and agitated for racial and economic equality.14

the Communist takeover of America.” He also excoriated the NAACP, informing his fellow apostles that the civil rights organization was “made up of men who are affiliated with one to a dozen communist-front organizations.”16

Welch was no less influential on Benson. He alleged that the civil rights movement was a communist plot and that President Eisenhower and members of his cabinet were also communists. It was a remarkable claim given the president’s longstanding service fighting communism and socialism, both as Supreme Allied Commander in World War II and as Commander in Chief during the Korean War. Nonetheless, Welch made these fantastical claims within the pages of The Politician, a book that Benson found both riveting and alarming.15 Hoover and Welch’s writings motivated the brash apostle to denounce the civil rights movement before countless civic groups in the United States. In 1963 Benson delivered a number of stinging addresses to Latter-day Saints in which he vilified civil rights legislation, then pending in Congress, as part of a “pattern for

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Ezra Taft Benson speaking at the October 1967 LDS general conference. Benson sermonized often to the LDS faithful about the evils of communism, of which he considered Martin Luther King, Jr. to be a part. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints © By Intellectual Reserve, Inc.

Benson’s outspoken assertions and his eagerness to state them publicly compelled the First Presidency to reprimand him, after which Idaho congressman Ralph Harding, a practicing Latter-day Saint, complained about the apostle’s extremist views. On the floor of the US Congress, Harding condemned Benson for “utilizing his high church office to promote an extremist ideology which cast aspersions on our elected officials and other fellow citizens.”17 Harding’s strong denunciation of Benson garnered unfavorable publicity in the national news media, prompting the First Presidency to dispatch Benson to Frankfurt, Germany, where he presided over the European states mission from 1964–1965.18 Though church leaders hoped that Benson’s new church assignment would “purge” him of his far-right political leanings, Benson returned to the United States in 1965 as determined as ever to expose the civil rights movement as a communist front.19 Not long after his return

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he informed his fellow apostles that the civil rights movement “is being directed and supported and prompted by agents of the communist party.” Earlier that year in the general conference of the LDS church he asked Latter-day Saints what they were doing to fight the civil rights movement. “Before I left for Europe I warned how the communists were using the Civil Rights movement to promote revolution and eventual take-over of this country,” he declared. “When are we going to wake up?”20

In 1966, as dozens of urban revolts erupted across the United States and as scores of disillusioned African Americans began chanting “Black Power,” Benson intensified his efforts to denounce the civil rights movement as a communist plot. In a devotional assembly at Brigham Young University, he excoriated Martin Luther King for lecturing “at a communist training school,” soliciting “funds through communist sources,” and hiring “a communist as a top-level aide” and he condemned him as someone “who unquestionably parallels the communist line.”21 The apostle continued his assault on the civil rights movement the following year in his church’s general conference. In a defiant 1967 address, Benson declared that black Marxists were poised to foment a revolution. His address was prompted when riots erupted in south central Los Angeles between police and blacks, leaving scores of people dead and millions of dollars in property damage.22 Benson also besmirched King after he was assassinated in 1968 by circulating a private memo to all general authorities urging them not to celebrate King’s life. The apostle alleged that King “had been affiliated” with dozens of “officially recognized Communist fronts,” including persons who served as “top level” aids to the Communist Party.23 Benson’s most strident anti-King sermon appeared in the Improvement Era, the official church magazine and was republished by the LDS-owned Deseret Book and again in a book entitled An Enemy Hath Done This. His writings were sold in countless bookstores across the United States and reprinted in LDS church manuals for youth and adult Sunday school.24 Even the New Yorker magazine commented on the ubiquity of Benson’s work, marveling that BYU sold his pamphlet titled “Civil

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Rights—Tool of Communist Deception.”25 It is not a stretch to say that Latter-day Saints were inundated with Benson’s anti-King views, forged over a ten-year period during the midst of the turbulent civil rights years. Benson’s sermonizing against King ended abruptly in 1969 after he assailed critics in the LDS general conference for attacking “the church for not being in the forefront of the socalled civil rights movement.”26 The timing was not coincidental. Senior apostles reined him in during the midst of an embarrassing public relations debacle when dozens of universities refused to compete against BYU athletic teams in protest of Mormon racial teachings.27 The university’s refusal to recruit black students, moreover, gave negative publicity to the LDS church.28 Church leaders discouraged blacks from attending BYU, fearing that their presence on campus would lead to interracial dating. In 1968, the year the protests began, only three black students attended BYU, which gave the perception to outsiders that black people were persona non grata at the church institution.29 If Benson’s general conference sermon in 1969 marked the last time he expressed his anti-civil rights views in public, they did not go away. His writings still circulated in LDS bookstores; more importantly, surrogates promoted his views, contributing to anti-King sentiment. Cleon Skousen, his close friend and ally, echoed the apostle in “The Communist Attack on the Mormons,” in which he drew heavily from Benson’s 1967 general conference address claiming that communists had organized the athletic protests. Skousen asserted that “communist-oriented revolutionary groups have been spearheading the wave of protests and violence directed toward Brigham Young University and the Mormon Church. With Marxism and Maoism as their ideological base and terror tactics as their methods,” he boldly declared, “they have inflamed some and forced others to join in their revolutionary violent movement.”30 While Benson stopped speaking publicly against the civil rights movement in 1969, his writings about King had unintended consequences. After President Reagan signed the bill to honor King—a result of intense lobbying

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In Utah, the opposition was particularly intense, thanks in part to Benson and Skousen, whose criticisms of King in the Freemen’s Digest had an undeniable impact on Utahns predisposed to conspiracy theories. The Freemen’s Digest was the official magazine of the Freemen Institute, the ultraconservative organization that Skousen started in 1971. Skousen was a beloved figure in Utah and had an immense following nationally. Among the forty-six books he authored a number were national bestsellers, including The Naked Communist, which joined J. Edgar Hoover’s the Masters of Deceit as the most prominent anticommunist book published in the 1950s. Skousen had also been on the Birch Society national speakers’ circuit in the 1960s, joining Fred Schwarz, Billy Hargis and other prominent anticommunist speakers.35 Latter-day Saints in the Intermountain West attended his “Freemen seminars”

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Indeed, by the early 1980s, many Utah lawmakers were steeped in Skousen’s ideas and thoroughly immersed in his writings. The church-owned Deseret News commented that the “Freemen Institute [was] a burgeoning political force” in state politics. The Ogden-Standard Examiner marveled that Utah senator Orrin Hatch, Utah congressman Dan Marriott, Idaho congressman George Hansen, Arizona congressman Eldon Rudd, and Ezra Taft Benson, then president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, were all counted as staunch Freemen supporters. The Ogden-Standard Examiner went on to explain that “several elected officials [in Utah]—among them Democrats and Republicans, liberal and conservatives—said the Freemen Institute has emerged in recent years as a strong force at all levels of government.”37

Nevertheless, despite LDS church support for civil rights, the federal bill to recognize the King holiday prompted a backlash not only in Utah, but across the nation, especially from Birchers, who lambasted it for celebrating the life of a communist.33 Some critics cited monetary concerns, claiming the holiday would cost taxpayers millions of dollars with a paid day off for federal employees. Others questioned why King would be one of the select few to get a holiday in their name. For still others, the federal holiday would keep his vision of racial and economic equality alive, which they rejected.34

and quoted from his writings in church Sunday School and sacrament meetings. A number of Utah lawmakers also attended the seminars and some even proposed legislation that reflected their training at these seminars. “The Freemen Institute is a good influence in the [Republican] party,” quipped one lawmaker, “and I hope it will have more influence.”36

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by the NAACP and other liberal groups—Benson’s anti-King sermons became a flash point as Mormons in Utah and Arizona debated the King holiday. The federal holiday forced some Mormons to evaluate their biases toward King, which were confused by the mixed messages the top LDS leadership sent about the civil rights movement. While Benson adamantly opposed civil rights, the First Presidency had endorsed it in general conference in 1963, citing that that there was “no doctrine, belief or practice” in the church “that is intended to deny the enjoyment of full civil rights by any person regardless of race, color, or creed.”31 Likewise, the Deseret News, the church-owned newspaper, supported civil rights in an editorial piece in 1965 as did a First Presidency statement in 1969.32

In fact, so great and so pervasive was the Freemen Institute’s influence on Utah lawmakers that Jim Considine, a Democratic congressman from Salt Lake City, dourly noted that “We have identified twenty-three to twenty-five graduates of the Freemen Institute in the House and another ten to fifteen Republicans who are sympathetic.”38 When Skousen died in 2006, Orrin Hatch touted his influence, affirming that “Cleon played a significant role in the political and governmental arena throughout Utah, our Nation, and even the world.” Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck similarly touted Skousen’s influence.39 It comes as no surprise, then, given his ultraconservative views and previous denunciations of King, that Skousen strongly opposed the King holiday. In the January 1984 issue of the Freemen’s Digest, devoted to the civil rights leader, Skousen excoriated King in an attempt to influence Mormons to oppose the holiday. “[King] surrounded himself with many long-time members of the Communist party machinery,”

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Cleon Skousen holding a copy of The Naked Communist, March 15, 1958. A prolific author, Skousen was a prominent anti-communist crusader who staunchly opposed a holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., whom he believed was a communist. Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake Tribune Negative Collection, no. 46521.

10 Skousen scoffed, offering no evidence.40 A close ally of Skousen’s, Willard Woods, claimed within the same pages that King “had close associations over many years with quite a number of communists” further alleging that there was “an enormous amount of F.B.I. material on King [that] is being kept secret for 50 years at the National Archives” that would reveal his communist affiliations. Furthermore, Woods asserted that King was not a role model for Americans nor worthy of having a national holiday named after him like George Washington. Why would Americans, he asked, want to celebrate the life of man “who courted violence . . . broke the law . . . and whose personal life was so revolting that it cannot be discussed”?41 Nor is it a surprise that Benson supported the Freemen Institute, given his close friendship with Skousen and their mutual interest in conspiracy theories. Benson, in fact, spoke at many Freemen Institute functions and attended many of their events, despite the First Presidency cracking down on Skousen for using LDS meetinghouses to promote the Freemen Institute’s extreme right-wing agenda.42 In addition,

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Benson recommended Skousen’s books in general conference and touted his work in private communications with Latter-day Saints. Both men believed that King was “a top Kremlin agent.”43 In 1985, Benson’s strong convictions about King became a matter of controversy following his ordination as the LDS church president. The federal holiday honoring King’s life brought Benson’s anti-black views firmly into the open, even if he remained silent about King during his church presidency years. Members of the church’s small, but outspoken black population found his views about King particularly harmful. In 1985, just months before Benson became the church president, Chester Lee Hawkins, a black Latter-day Saint, blamed Benson for conveying the impression to church members that the civil rights movement “was rotten.” “Ezra Taft Benson kind of messed up the whole ball game,” Hawkins sighed. “The black people knew him, about him, and the John Birch Society. They thought they had enough of that bunch. I am not going to blame the Church for the John Birch Society because of one man.

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Williams pressed his fellow state senators to explain why they opposed the King holiday. “They came up with every possible argument . . . to defeat the bill instead of speaking their true inner feelings,” he frankly noted. “They were bigoted. Some of them were out and out racists.” They did not believe that what King “did in the civil rights movement did anything for Utah.” On the Senate floor, he probed further. “We need to recognize whether we have bigotries inside of ourselves or not.” He asked them to evaluate their “unspoken prejudices.” Williams recalled that his colleagues “were just squirming in their seats” when he addressed them, because they did not have the courage to speak “their true feelings.” They “refused to take the microphone to speak these things and yet they couldn’t bear to hear me speak them.”48 Publicly, Williams’s colleagues claimed to oppose the holiday on financial grounds, yet Williams knew why they opposed it: they believed that King was a communist. The outspoken

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Frustrated but not discouraged, Williams invited Coretta Scott King, the widow of Dr. King, to speak to the legislature. King implored the Senate to honor her late husband. “It is important that we teach our young people, because they are the ones that are going to be hopefully picking up the torch and carrying it forward in the future,” she calmly noted.51 Her message met resistance in some quarters of the House and Senate. One lawmaker “refused to greet [her].” Others muttered in private that King’s husband “was an infidel” who “associated with the communist party” and “preached treason.”52 Yet her visit to the state capitol energized Williams and redoubled his efforts to get the bill through the Senate. Like King, Williams appealed to many of his colleagues’ desires to uphold the reputation of the LDS church. According to Williams, who was not a Latter-day Saint, critics would shun Mormon missionaries when they proselytized: “Oh, yeah, you’re from that state that didn’t pass the Martin Luther King holiday, aren’t you?”53

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The following year Williams resubmitted the bill after forty states had already voted in favor of the King holiday. His second attempt was no less controversial.46 In a speech on the Senate floor, Williams starkly noted that “this is the kind of bill that brings out the best in us and also the worst in us. And that challenged people. Because when I said the best, they would smile and when I said the worst, they would frown because they had to look inside of themselves to understand why they individually were not supportive of the bill and that was something that we dragged them kicking and screaming to do.”47

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Benson’s strong opinions about King further emerged after Utah lawmakers began debating the King holiday. When in 1985 Terry Lee Williams, the first African American to serve in the Utah State Senate, introduced a bill to recognize the civil rights leader his colleagues refused to even allow a vote on the bill. “It never saw the light of day,” Williams complained. “I mean it didn’t even get out of committee to be discussed.” It was “just totally nonexistent.”45

senator postulated that his colleagues lacked the courage to express their convictions on the record because they did not want to disparage King after a majority of states had voted to honor him. Off the record, though, they spoke unrestrained, speculating that King had “secret records with the CIA [and] FBI,” which revealed his communist affiliations, although a recently released book drew on King’s FBI files to counter the claim.49 Recognizing that Benson, Skousen, and the Birchers, not coincidentally, had made the same claim against King over the years, Williams averred that some of his colleagues were “bigoted” and racist in their views.50

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That wouldn’t be right [but] I have to be frank and honest that so many people got the impression that the John Birch Society was running the Church.”44

Williams’s colleagues vigorously resisted the bill, deploring his tactics and methods. The King holiday bill was “dead in the water,” he lamented, and posed little chance of getting passed during the 1986 legislative session. Senators tabled the bill, which essentially killed it.54 Dejected, Williams left the state Senate later that year after having lost in the Democratic primaries in a bid for the U.S. Senate. The bill experienced a different fate in the House. After Williams proposed the bill in the Senate, he sought a sponsor in the House. “We looked for sponsors in the House and got beat

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up pretty badly,” recalled Reverend France Davis, chairman of the “Committee for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday in Utah” and one of the most respected African American leaders in the Beehive state. Fierce opposition in the House prompted Davis to challenge Salt Lake City congressman Robert Sykes to a debate on “Take Two,” a prominent news program in Utah. Sykes initially opposed the King holiday, but by “the end of the debate,” Davis remembered, Sykes was “convinced by my argument” and agreed to sponsor the bill. After intense debate in the House, the bill passed 48–20, thanks in part to the indefatigable lobbying efforts of Sykes.55

The King holiday bill was now at a standstill. It passed in the House but failed in the Senate. Recognizing the impasse, Representative James R. Moss from Orem proposed a bill to honor “Utah Peoples’ Day” in place of the Martin Luther King Holiday. His bill called on Utahns “to remember and reflect upon their ethnic and cultural heritage” and “to participate with the rest of the nation in celebrating the lessons of tolerance, respect, equality, and opportunity taught so eloquently by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.” However, much to his astonishment, Moss’s bill never made it out of the House committee.56 To break the gridlock, several representatives then forged a compromise bill naming the proposed Martin Luther King Holiday “Human Rights Day,” which passed unanimously in both branches of the legislature. Utahns had the option, Representative Sykes recalled, of calling it Martin Luther King Day or Human Rights Day. Without fanfare or extensive media coverage, the bill simply stated that the “third Monday of January [would] be observed as the anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also known as Human Rights Day.”57 Predictably, the compromise bill neither satisfied advocates for the King holiday nor silenced critics. Utah’s state delegation, in fact, was divided over the federal holiday. Senator Jake Garn opposed it, “citing enormous expense and national tradition,” while Senator Orrin Hatch, who had initially opposed it, “changed his position in support of honoring King.” Most lawmakers in the Utah State House opposed it for the same reasons that Garn did—the expense of

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giving state employees a holiday off and King’s perceived lack of contribution to the state. Representative Kaye Browning, a Republican from Weber and Davis counties, even went so far as to question “whether King deserves the special recognition saying he can think of other blacks who were more outstanding than King.” Similarly, Representative Ray Schmutz, a Republican from Washington County, remembered: “If we pass it, we’re saying in essence that Martin Luther King is a better man than both Lincoln and Washington put together. Or at least he’s equal to it. I don’t believe and I don’t think you’ll believe it. Second point is that we’re giving Martin Luther King the credit for the work done by many, many people.”58 For Reverend Davis, the objections were disingenuous and flat-out embarrassing. They were a “scapegoat” to obfuscate why lawmakers really opposed the King holiday. The “real reason,” he sneered, was “racial prejudice.” “Most Utahns have decided that Martin Luther King Day is a black holiday and because of the smaller numbers of blacks in the state it should not be celebrated.”59 In 1986, three years after President Reagan signed the King holiday into law, it was clear that it had little chance in getting passed in Utah, especially after the legislature passed the compromise bill giving Utahns the option of calling it Human Rights Day. What was also clear is that the LDS church hierarchy did not want to weigh in on what was clearly a controversial matter. “Simply put, the Mormon Church was in a bind on the King issue placed there by the racist pronouncements of Ezra Taft Benson,” remarked Steve Benson, the president’s outspoken grandson.60 Prudence dictated that the church remain silent on the King holiday, despite some Latter-day Saints writing to President Benson asking if the church could “take a strong stand” on the King holiday, which “would remove . . . the world’s perception of the Church as being racially biased due to the Church’s previous policy on priesthood holders.”61 There is no evidence that Benson supported the King holiday. In fact, Benson maintained close ties with Birch officials during his church presidency and read Birch literature, making it unlikely that he changed his views about the

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To bolster their support, BYU officials invited Coretta Scott King to visit campus in January 1986, a move vigorously protested by Birch Mormons in Utah County. They wrote letters to President Benson, to the BYU Board of Trustees and to BYU administrators, imploring them not to bring a perceived communist to campus. As one Bircher complained: “I wish to register a strong protest toward the administration of Brigham Young University in allowing that institution to be utilized to further a communist cause.”66 Utah’s refusal to honor the King holiday was further exacerbated in 1987 when Arizona Governor Evan Mecham—a staunch supporter of the Birch Society, a devoted member of the Freemen Institute and a close friend of Benson and Skousen—rescinded the King holiday in Arizona.67 Benson, in fact, appeared with

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Paradoxically, as Utah lawmakers opposed the King holiday, some BYU students and administrators at the LDS-owned university waged a public relations campaign in 1986 to support it. “The Rev. King deserves to be recognized by Utah,” noted the headline in the Daily Universe, the campus newspaper. “Students rallying for awareness of King’s mission,” ran another. King was a “great man who dared to dream and worked to fulfill that dream,” declared students in letters to the editor. BYU held a campus-wide rally on the day of the national King holiday to nudge the legislature to rename the holiday after him.64 John Fife, academic vice president at BYU, referred to King as “a man dedicated to a principle of equality” in a letter to faculty. He acknowledged campus support for the King holiday and encouraged students and faculty to attend the rally.65

civil rights leader.62 But neither did Benson direct the legislature to oppose the holiday. Indeed, his views about King were well known. Forrest Crawford, co-founder and former chair of the Utah Martin Luther King, Jr. Human Rights (MLK) Commission, established in 1991, candidly acknowledged the difficulty in getting the legislature to support the King holiday: “In 1986, some legislators were . . . uncomfortable with Dr. King as a person, because of King’s alleged communist affiliation and his views on Vietnam. They felt that King’s name was not worthy to be on the bill.”63

Coretta Scott King, 1988. At the invitation of Jeanette Williams, King spoke to the Utah legislature in 1986 urging passage of a holiday in her late husband’s name. Library of Congress, LC-HS503–4703.

Mecham on the podium during his inauguration and reportedly “set him apart” in the Arizona temple as Arizona’s next governor. Such close ties to the Mormon church president bolstered Mecham’s confidence to rescind Martin Luther King Day, which he did through executive order just weeks after he was sworn into office in 1987.68 Mecham’s executive order caused an uproar within the Mormon community in Arizona because it dredged up old wounds about the church’s past treatment of blacks and because it appeared to undermine church president Spencer W. Kimball’s historic revelation in 1978 permitting black men to hold the priesthood.69 The matter quickly devolved in 1989 when an embarrassing letter was leaked to the Phoenix Gazette revealing Ezra Taft Benson’s opposition to King. Julian Sanders, an ultraconservative Mormon from Arizona, addressed the letter to Ezra Taft Benson in his official capacity as church

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president. Sanders requested that Benson produce a statement supporting Mecham’s executive order. Most troubling, however, the letter quoted from Benson’s earlier writings when, as an apostle, he besmirched King as “the leader of the so-called civil rights movement.” The letter went on to say that King had “lectured at a Communist training school, . . . solicited funds through Communist sources, . . . hired a Communist as a top-level aide, . . . affiliated with Communist fronts, . . . often praised in the Communist press, and who unquestionably parallels the Communist line.” Saunders, moreover, compared King to “Lucifer” branding the late civil rights icon “a liar, adulterer and thief.”70

Steve Benson, Ezra Taft Benson’s grandson, leaked the letter to the press, clearly revealing divisions within the Latter-day Saint community and with his grandfather. A Pulitzer Prize– winning cartoonist at the Arizona Republic, Steve enthusiastically embraced the King holiday in Arizona and marched in support of it.71 His pro-King views angered his parents who viewed Steve’s support of the King holiday as belligerent to the wishes of his grandfather. “Stephen, your grandfather would not have approved of that,” his mother candidly noted, lamenting Steve’s participation at pro-King marches and rallies.72 Steve also produced a string of some fifty cartoons vilifying Mecham for rescinding the holiday and for exposing his corruption in office, which put him further at odds with his grandfather.73 A year into Mecham’s governorship critics accused him of misusing state funds and obstructing justice during the investigation, prompting the Arizona legislature to impeach him after only a short period in office.74 Dozens of Mecham loyalists declared his innocence and lashed out at Steve Benson for stoking discord in his cartoons by depicting the governor as depraved and profligate. His critics, meanwhile, lambasted Mecham for corruption and branded him a racist for rescinding the King holiday. News outlets reported these stark divisions within the Mormon community casting a shadow over Ezra Taft Benson’s church presidency. Newsweek Magazine called it “Arizona’s Holy War”; the New York Times declared that “Mormons [were] Split by Turmoil over Church Member Mecham.”75

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Although President Benson remained silent throughout the Mecham imbroglio, the LDS public relations department responded to the publication of Sanders’s letter by affirming Benson’s love for all people regardless of “color, creed or political persuasion.”76 If the Arizona episode was troubling enough, the church also had to deal with the continued fallout from Utah’s refusal to honor Martin Luther King Day. The church public relations team answered critics by explaining that LDS church employees received paid time off for the King holiday as did employees at BYU.77 In addition, church officials dispatched Richard Lindsay, managing director of public communications for the church, to deliver a tribute to King at the Utah State Capitol Building on the King holiday in January 1988. There Lindsay informed his audience that even though King had moral failings, “his vision was founded on faith.” Lindsay added, “Despite the oppression he saw, the bombings, the beatings, the blatant injustice that masqueraded in the robes of the law, he knew that God is a just and loving Father to all mankind.”78 The pressure to rename the holiday after King intensified during the 1990s. Some Utahns waged letter-writing campaigns to the state newspapers. One noted, for example, that “It is with a mixture of sadness and anger that I watch the elected officials of the state arrogantly and disrespectfully ignore a national holiday of major importance. I watch as the governor addresses the all-white, essentially all-male, overwhelmingly Mormon Legislature without paying a scintilla of respect to the slain leader.”79 Others, such as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission, were public advocates of naming the state holiday for King and lobbied the House and Senate to make the change. Even the church-owned and operated newspaper the Deseret News ran favorable stories about King. One headline noted that “King’s Teachings for Social Justice Still Ring True Today.” Another asked: “Are Legislators Doing Right by [the Civil] Rights Leader?”80 By the late 1990s, however, the winds in Utah were beginning to change. A younger generation of Mormons did not appear to harbor the negative perceptions about black people that their parents did.81 Other factors contributed

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Securing Hinckley’s participation at the NAACP regional conference was a major coup for Williams and an astonishing about-face for the LDS church and the NAACP. While NAACP leaders had met with LDS officials over the years, it was a strained relationship at best, especially during the heady days of the civil rights movement when Benson and Skousen inundated Mormon audiences with screeds against King.86 “When I found out [President Hinckley] accepted our invitation, I told his secretary to tell the president that he’d made my day,” Williams jubilantly noted.87 Hinckley’s speech, delivered on April 24, 1998, in Salt Lake City, thrilled Williams because it spoke to the needs of the African American community in Utah and because it signaled a new relationship between the LDS church and the NAACP.88 Hinckley’s gentle tone and measured words endeared him to his audience.

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Fresh off the successful NAACP conference, Williams probed further with Hinckley. In 1999, she hand-delivered a letter to his office asking him to support the Martin Luther King Holiday. James E. Faust, Hinckley’s second counselor in the First Presidency, responded to the letter by calling Williams to inform her that although the church would not publicly support changing the name from Human Rights Day to the Martin Luther King Holiday church officials would instruct Deseret News and other church-owned affiliates, including the KSL radio and television stations, to run favorable editorials supporting the change. The news gratified Williams. She recalled years later that “this was positive for me and the efforts for the name change.”91

All of these factors had converged by the mid1990s when Gordon B. Hinckley, a political moderate, became the LDS church president. A pivotal moment occurred in 1998 when he accepted an invitation to speak to the NAACP, the very group that Benson and Skousen had denounced as communist. Instrumental in this regard was Jeanetta Williams, president of the Salt Lake branch of the NAACP and one of the most vocal proponents to rename Human Rights Day the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday. Though a Baptist, Williams understood the political climate in Utah well. Having lived in the Beehive state since 1988, she knew the difficulty, if not impossibility, of getting the legislature to adopt the holiday without the support of the LDS church, the most influential lobbying arm in the state.85

He told the crowd of 250 that he had “mingled widely with people of all races” and that “the world is my neighborhood, and its peoples, regardless of status, are my friends and neighbors.”89 The climactic moment occurred when Hinckley urged black fathers to pray with their families and to parent through love and respect. His address was “warmly received” with a standing ovation. NAACP leaders also honored him with the “NAACP Distinguished Service Award.”90

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too. First, forty-nine states had already accepted the King holiday. Utah was the last holdout, which prompted significant pressure on Utah lawmakers to adopt it.82 Second, Ezra Taft Benson died in 1994 making it easier for top-ranking church leaders to open dialogue with black leaders both nationally and locally. Third, the LDS church began to crack down on right-wing extremism including persons who expressed racist views.83 And fourth, the NAACP increased pressure on the LDS church hierarchy to support the holiday.84

Pressure to support the King holiday also came from within the church. During Hinckley’s address to the NAACP, Darius Gray, an African American Latter-day Saint and a prominent voice within the Mormon black community, gently pressured leaders to adopt the change. As Hinckley spoke to the NAACP, Gray leaned over to the general authority sitting next to him and whispered, “Why don’t we support the King holiday?” The general authority nodded in agreement and said that he would take it up with Hinckley. After a period of several months, and at about the same time that Williams had been working behind the scenes with church authorities to recognize the King holiday, Hinckley instructed church lobbyists to move on the name change, ever sensitive to Utah being the last holdout to honor the famed civil rights leader.92 The moment of reckoning came in January 2000 when Representative Duane Bordeaux, an African American from Salt Lake City and

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Senator Pete Suazo, a Hispanic American also from Salt Lake City, co-sponsored a bill to rename the holiday after King—all of this initiated by the persistent efforts of Jeanetta Williams.93 Pressure had been mounting for over a decade to change the name. Williams’s relentless activism along with a groundswell of support across the state forced the issue. But acceptance of the holiday was far from certain. Even Hinckley’s support did not guarantee passage of the bill. Mormon lawmakers, long steeped in anti-King rhetoric, struggled to support a man they deemed subversive. In anticipation of another raucous debate over the King holiday, Bordeaux and Suazo went on a media blitz to generate support for their bill. “Dr. King stood for non-violence and justice and equality for all people,” Boudreaux affirmed during a media interview. “If people truly understood what he stood for, what legacy he leaves, I think they would be more likely to vote for these bills.” Likewise, Suazo noted that “Human Rights Day does not give due credit to the contributions of this great man. As a leader, [Dr. King] raised the consciousness and the prejudice and discrimination, corporate advancement, and especially voting rights.”94 In 2000, on the federal holiday to honor King, Utahns celebrated his life through “speeches, prayers, service projects, music, candles, bell-ringing,” the Deseret News reported. Activists made “repeated requests to rename the holiday in Utah,” giving vigorous support to Bordeaux and Suazo’s bill. At the same time, the NAACP honored King at a highly publicized luncheon. Salt Lake branch president Jeanetta Williams thanked the legislators for sponsoring the state bill while her colleague, Edward Lewis, the master of ceremonies at the luncheon, read the federal bill that Reagan had signed into law in 1983.95 Not least, support poured in from all over the country and across the state, from organizations ranging from the Utah Jazz and the Japanese American Citizens League to the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce Board of Governors and League of Women Voters. Most importantly, KSL, the church-owned and operated TV station, expressed support through an editorial, as did the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune.96 Undoubtedly these editorials played a significant role in getting grassroots’ Utahns to support the King holiday.

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House Speaker Marty Stephens (R-Far West) was another important ally. Stephens became increasingly agitated with the negative publicity concerning the state’s inaction on the King holiday and bluntly noted that supporting the proposed change “takes us out of the controversy.”97 Still, despite overwhelming bipartisan support for Bordeaux and Suazo’s bill, critics within the House caucus killed it, which they did through a committee vote of 5–4. When Stephens learned of the bill’s demise, he demanded a revote: this time it passed 6–4.98 When the bill reached the House floor it passed by a vote of 54–17; in the Senate 28–1. On March 16, 2000, Governor Michael Leavitt signed the bill into law designating the third Monday of January as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday.99 Overwhelmed with joy, Duane Bordeaux and Pete Suazo could scarcely control their emotions. “This brings us in line with the rest of the union,” Bordeaux jubilantly noted. “We will continue to build from this and tackle other issues related to justice and equality for all people.” Suazo happily noted that that King holiday would help Utahns fulfil the values of “justice, liberty and equality” enshrined in the Constitution. “Those were the promises of our forefathers, and Dr. King raised the consciousness of the country to say that these principles applied to all people, regardless of race, creed or religion.”100 Meanwhile, eight years after Utah lawmakers changed Human Rights Day to the Martin Luther King Holiday, LDS church president Gordon Hinckley quietly passed after a brief illness, prompting Jeanetta Williams to reflect on Hinckley’s life and legacy. She fondly recalled his “advocacy to rename Utah’s Human Rights Day in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.” “His backing,” she affirmed, “won praise from the NAACP and helped sell the Legislature on the name change.”101 But Williams knew that Hinckley’s was one voice among many in contributing to the passage of this important bill. Hinckley’s efforts, along with the tireless work of Terry Williams, France Davis, Robert Sykes, Duane Bordeaux, Pete Suazo, and especially Jeanetta Williams herself, played a critical role in getting the Utah legislature to honor a man it had once shunned.

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We are grateful to Jeanetta Williams, president of the Salt Lake branch of the NAACP, and Robert Sykes, former Utah congressman, for their support in the preparation of this article. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the journal, as well as Jed Rogers and Holly George, co-editors of the Utah Historical Quarterly. Their insights and constructive suggestions have made this a better work. 1 See Houston Style Magazine January 8–14, 2015, issuu .com/houstonstylemagazine/docs/hsm_1815; Jason Sokol, The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 252; Matthew Dennis, “The Invention of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday,” in We Are What We Celebrate: Understanding Holidays and Rituals, ed. Amitai Etzioni and Jared Bloom (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 179–83. 2 Phil W. Petrie, “The MLK Holiday: Branches Work to Make It Work,” The Crisis 107 (May–June 2000): 55. 3 First Presidency counselor Hugh B. Brown appears to be the only member of the church hierarchy who rejected traditional Mormon racial teachings. See Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, eds., The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 74–76; Edwin B. Firmage, ed., An Abundant Life: The Memoirs of Hugh B. Brown, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999), 142. 4 Two LDS apostles offered the most vivid expressions of Mormon racial teachings: Joseph Fielding Smith, The Way to Perfection: Short Discourses on Gospel Themes, 5th ed. (Salt Lake City: Genealogical Society of Utah, 1945), chaps. 15 and 16; and Bruce R. Mc Conkie, Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1958), 102–3, 107–8, 476–77, 553–54. For scholarly appraisals of the priesthood and temple ban, see Lester E. Bush Jr., “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8 (Spring 1973): 11–68; W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Harris and Bringhurst, Mormon Church and Blacks. 5 In 1974 the NAACP challenged Mormon racial teachings in a lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America. A Salt Lake City scout troop sponsored by the LDS church rejected a black scout member for a leadership position, citing that he could not hold the Aaronic Priesthood. See France Davis interview by Leslie G. Kelen, August 4, 1983, box 1, fd. 23, Interview with Blacks in Utah, 1982–1988, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah (JWML). Harris and Bringhurst, Mormon Church and Blacks, 106, discusses the LDS church’s response to the lawsuit. 6 James Dooley, at the time the branch president of the Salt Lake City chapter of the NAACP, recalled a meeting in the spring of 1978 in which he asked LDS church president Spencer W. Kimball to lift the ban. James Dooley interview by Leslie G. Kelen, December 6, 1983, interview 8, tape 104, transcript p. 30, Everett L. Cooley Oral History Project, JWML. 7 For Utah’s rejection of civil rights in the immediate post-WWII years, see “1961 Report: Utah Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil

Rights,” reel 7, part 27 (Utah): Selected Branch Files, Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1991); Wallace R. Bennett, “The Negro in Utah,” Utah Law Review 3 (Spring 1953): 340–48; and F. Ross Peterson, “Blindside: Utah on the Eve of Brown v. Board of Education,” Utah Historical Quarterly 73 (Winter 2005): 4–20. For the notion that civil rights bills were not moral issues, see First Presidency counselor N. Eldon Tanner, quoted in Glen W. Davidson, “Mormon Missionaries and the Race Question,” Christian Century 82 (September 29, 1965): 1185; and Johnie M. Driver, “L.D.S. Church Leaders Should Speak Out for Moral Justice,” March 9, 1965, box 1, fd. 29, Stephen Holbrook Papers, 1946–2005, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah. For laws barring miscegenation in Utah, see Patrick Q. Mason, “The Prohibition of Interracial Marriage in Utah, 1888–1963,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76 (Spring 2008): 108–31; and Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 85, 93, 118, 240–41. Hugh B. Brown general conference address, October 4–6, 1963, Conference Report (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1963), 91; see also Gregory A. Prince and William Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005), 69–71; and Harris and Bringhurst, Mormon Church and Blacks, 74–76. “1965 Session: Bill 62,” box 32, fd. 61, Legislature House Working Bills, 1896–1989, Series 432, Utah State Archives and Records Service, Salt Lake City, Utah (USARC). Matthew Harris has explored these points in greater detail in “Martin Luther King, Civil Rights, and Perceptions of a ‘Communist Conspiracy,’” chap. 5, in Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics, ed. Matthew L. Harris (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019). For Romney, see J.B. Haws, The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 2. Matthew L. Harris, “Watchman on the Tower”: Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, forthcoming, 2020), chaps. 2–3. Ezra Taft Benson, An Enemy Hath Done This, comp. by Jerreld L. Newquist (Salt Lake City: Parliament Publishers, 1969), 44; Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1958), 93. The best study of King’s alleged connection to communism is David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Penguin Books, 1981); and “The FBI and Martin Luther King,” Atlantic Monthly July–August 2002, 80–88. Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (New York: Simon Schuster, 1998). For Hoover’s assertion that the civil rights movement was a communist front group, see Hoover, Masters of Deceit, chap. 18; Hoover, A Study of Communism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), chap. 11. The Politician (privately published, 1956), 267–68, Matthew Harris files. D.J. Mulloy, The World of the John

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Notes

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Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), 16–22, provides a succinct overview of The Politician, as does David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995), 318–19. Benson sent copies of The Politician to fellow general authorities and ordered copies for the LDS Church History Library. For this point, see Benson to Joseph Fielding Smith, July 31, 1963, MSS Sc 1260, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (hereafter HBLL); and the Ezra Taft Benson–Robert Welch correspondence at the John Birch Society Headquarters, Appleton, Wisconsin, which contains receipts for copies of The Politician that Benson purchased for family and friends. For Benson’s allegations that Eisenhower and his cabinet affiliated with communism and Eisenhower’s response, see Harris, “Watchman on the Tower,” chap. 3. “A Race Against Time” (December 10, 1963; Provo, Utah); “We Must Become Alerted and Informed” (December 13, 1963; Logan, Utah); “The Internal Threat Today (December 19, 1963; Boise, Idaho), all in Ezra Taft Benson, Title of Liberty: A Warning Voice (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1964), 22–41, 42–60, 61–85 (quote on 58). For Benson’s critique of the NAACP as a communist front-group, see the Council of the Twelve Minutes, November 4, 1965, box 64, fd. 8, Spencer W. Kimball Papers, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City (CHL). Speech of Hon. Ralph Harding of Idaho in the House of Representatives, September 25, 1963, “Ezra Taft Benson’s Support of John Birch Society is Criticized,” in 109 Cong. Rec. (1963). Prince and Wright, David O. McKay, 295–98; Frank Hewlett, “Harding Assails Benson on Birch Issue,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 26, 1963; “Idaho Congressman Hits Benson Speech,” Deseret News, September 26, 1963; “Legislator, a Mormon, Scores Benson for Birch Activities,” New York Times, September 26, 1963. Harris, “Martin Luther King,” 133–36. Benson quoted in Council of the Twelve Minutes, November 4, 1965 Ezra Taft Benson general conference address, “Not Commanded in All Things,” April 6, 1965, unaltered version in David O. McKay Scrapbook no. 79, David O. McKay Papers, JWML. The reference to civil rights was dropped from the published version of the talk, per the wishes of First Presidency counselor Hugh B. Brown who believed that Benson’s language was inflammatory. See David O. McKay journal, May 3, 1965, box 59, fd. 5, McKay Papers. Compare with the published version of Benson’s address: “Not Commanded in All Things,” Improvement Era, June 1965, 537–39. Benson, An Enemy Hath Done This, 310; Peter B. Levy, The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban American during the 1960s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). Ezra Taft Benson, “Trust Not the Arm of Flesh,” Improvement Era, December 1967, 55–58; James T. Patterson, The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America (New York: Basic Books, 2012), chap. 11. Ezra Taft Benson memo to General Authorities, re: Martin Luther King, April 6, 1968, MS d 4936, CHL (courtesy of LDS church archivist William Slaughter);

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also in box 63, fd. 1, Kimball Papers. In addition, Benson sent the memo to his close friend, J. Willard Marriott. See Benson to Marriott, May 1, 1969, box 12, fd. 23, J. Willard Marriott Papers, JWML. See Benson, “Trust Not the Arm of Flesh.” This sermon was republished the following year in a pamphlet titled Civil Rights: A Tool of Communist Deception (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1968) and again under the same title in An Enemy Hath Done This, chap. 13. Benson’s other sermons were also republished in a number of venues. See, for example, Ezra Taft Benson, Title of Liberty; Benson, An Enemy Hath Done This; Benson, So Shall Ye Reap: Selected Addresses of Ezra Taft Benson, comp. by Reed A. Benson (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1960); Benson, God, Family, Country: Our Three Great Loyalties (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1974); Benson, This Nation Shall Endure (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1979); Benson, A Witness and a Warning: A Modern-day Prophet Testifies of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1988); Reed A. Benson, ed., The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1988). “U.S. Journal: Provo, Utah,” New Yorker, March 21, 1970, 122. Benson, “To the Humble Followers of Christ,” Improvement Era, June 1969, 43. Gary James Bergera, “‘This Time of Crisis’: The RaceBased Anti-BYU Athletic Protests of 1968–1971,” Utah Historical Quarterly 81 (Summer 2013): 204–29; J.B. Haws, “Church Rites versus Civil Rights,” chap. 3 in The Mormon Image in the American Mind: Fifty Years of Public Perception (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Darron T. Smith, “Black Student Revolts and Political Uprising in the Late Sixties and Early Seventies: Fanning the Flame of Black Student-Athlete Revolts,” chap. 4 in When Race, Religion and Sport Collide: Black Athletes at BYU and Beyond (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). For the LDS leadership cracking down on Benson, see Harris, “Watchman on the Tower,” chap. 4. Harris, “Martin Luther King.” In 1968 and 1970, according to statistics that BYU filed with the U.S. Office for Civil Rights, 0.03 percent of the student body were “Negroes.” In box 42, fd. 11, Robert K. Thomas Papers, HBLL. WAC officials criticized BYU officials for not recruiting black students or athletes. For strictures against interracial dating at BYU, see Ernest L. Wilkinson memo to Board of Trustees, re: “Charges of ‘Racism’ and ‘Bigotry’ Against the LDS Church,” October 29, 1969, 34–35, “Compiled Information Concerning African Americans, BYU, and the Church,” HBL; and Rebecca de Schweinitz,“‘There is No Equality’: William E. Berrett, BYU, and Healing the Wounds of Racism in the Latter-day Saint Past and Present,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 52 (Fall 2019): 67–68. Skousen, “The Communist Attack on the Mormons” (American Fork, UT: National Research Group, March 1970), 1. Skousen’s address drew the attention of the national news media. See Wallace Turner, “Conservative and Liberal Mormons Advise Church on Negro Exclusion Policy,” New York Times, June 21, 1970. For others echoing Benson’s civil rights views, see Jerreld L. Newquist, comp., Prophets, Principles and National Survival (Salt Lake City: Publisher’s Press, 1964); Jerome Horowitz, The Elders of Israel and the Constitution (Salt Lake City: Parliament Publishers, 1970).

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nest L. Wilkinson, January 23, 1970, box 177, fd. 16, Ernest L. Wilkinson Papers, HBLL. See also Benson, An Enemy Hath Done This, chap. 13. Chester Lee Hawkins interview with Alan Cherry, March 1, 1985, 22–23, African American Oral History Project, HBLL. Terry Lee Williams interview with Leslie Kelen, April 4, 1986, 58, box 7, fd. 5, Interviews with Blacks in Utah, 1982–1988, JWML. See An Act Relating to State Affairs in General; Declaring the Anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., As a Legal Holiday in the State, S.B. 17, box 58, fd. 14, Utah State Senate Working Bills, USARA. This bill omitted the phrase “Personal Preference Day” from the 1985 version. No reason is provided. Williams interview, 60. Williams interview, 69. Williams interview, 62. King’s FBI files are sealed until 2027, but a portion of them have been released through a Freedom of Information Act Request, forming the basis of David Garrow’s The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. Garrow skillfully argues that J. Edgar Hoover, the longstanding FBI director, abused his power by relentlessly targeting King. Hoover alleged that King was aligned with communists, but wiretaps, which formed the basis of King’s FBI files, indicate that he denounced communism. The wiretaps also reveal that in the 1950s two men in King’s inner circle had been active in the Communist Party but had renounced their affiliation before meeting King. See also Richard Gid Powers, Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI (New York: Free Press, 2004), 245–55. Williams interview, 63. John Daley, “Coretta Scott King Remembered Fondly in Utah,” KSL News, January 31, 2006, accessed December 20, 2019, www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=157299. Greg Burton, “Living in the Beehive State Still a Challenge for Blacks,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 19, 2004; Williams interview, 67. Williams interview, 71. Williams interview, 65. For Sykes’s bill, see H.B. 186, box 63, fd. 18, Utah House of Representatives Working Bills, USARC. Reverend France A. Davis and Nayra Atiya, France Davis: An American Story Told (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2007), 272; John DeVilbiss, “Utah, Region Balks at King Holiday,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, January 11, 1986. Sykes also recalled being convinced by Davis’s arguments. Harris telephone interview with Sykes, August 31, 2018. An Act Relating to State Affairs in General; Declaring the Third Monday in January as a Legal Holiday Known as Utah Peoples’ Day in Place of Personal Preference Day, H.B. 224, box 63, fd. 30, Utah House of Representatives Working Bills, USARC. The Human Rights Day compromise bill passed 69–0 in the Senate and 24–0 in the House. For the bill, including the names of its eleven sponsors, see H.B. 88, January 9, 1987, box 65, fd. 50, Utah House of Representatives Working Bills, USARC; Harris telephone interview with Sykes, August 31, 2018. Browning quoted in DeVilbiss, “Utah, Region Balks at King Holiday”; Schmutz quoted in Daley, “Coretta Scott King Fondly Remembered in Utah.” Davis quoted in DeVilbiss, “Utah, Region Balks at King Holiday”; Doug Robinson, “Rev. France Davis: A Force

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31 Hugh B. Brown general conference address, October 4–6, 1963. 32 “A Clear Civil Rights Stand,” Deseret News, March 9, 1965; “Letter of First Presidency Clarifies Church’s Position on the Negro,” December 15, 1969, Improvement Era, February 1970, 70–71. 33 Larry McDonald, “Americans, Stop Thinking Like Communists,” June 18, 1980, in 126 Cong. Rec. (1980); David L. Chappell, Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Random House, 2014), 96–97, 112, 118; Sokol, Heavens Might Crack, 245–53. 34 Chappell, Waking from the Dream, 95–98. 35 Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Ensign Publishing, 1958). For Skousen’s influence in national politics, including his stint on the lecture circuit, see Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 151, 154–55; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 84–85, 95, 101; Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 45. 36 Linda Sillitoe and David Merrill, “Freemen America” (part 1), Utah Holiday Magazine February 1981, 40, 52– 54. 37 Jim Boardman, “Freemen Institute a Burgeoning Political Force,” Deseret News, June 14, 1980; John Harrington and Vaughn Roche, “‘New Right’: and Utah Politics,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, May 8, 1980; see also Peter Gillins, “Amid Patriotic Trappings: Freemen Institute Preaches Born Again Constitutionalism,” UPI, June 20, 1982. 38 Linda Sillitoe and David Merrill, “Freeman America” (part 2), Utah Holiday Magazine, March 1981, 40, 52. 39 Orrin Hatch, “Tribute to W. Cleon Skousen,” in 152 Cong. Rec. S114-S115 (January 25, 2006). Alexander Zaitchik, Common Sense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2010), chap. 12; Sean Wilentz, “Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party’s Cold War Roots,” The New Yorker, October 18, 2010. 40 W. Cleon Skousen and R. Stephen Pratt, “Reverend King’s Ministry: Thirteen Years of Crisis,” Freemen Digest (January 1984): 15–20 (quote on 18). 41 Willard Woods, “Martin Luther King Day,” Freemen Digest (January 1984): 21–24 (quotes on 21, 23). 42 For Benson’s speeches at Freemen Institute functions, see box 1, fd. 3, Freemen Institute Records, 1963–1980, JWML; John Harrington, “The Freemen Institute,” The Nation, August 16–23, 1980, 152–53; John Harrington and Vaughn Roche, “Freemen Institute: Religious Roots, Ties?” Ogden Standard-Examiner, May 13, 1980. For the First Presidency cracking down on Skousen and the Freemen Institute, see First Presidency (Spencer W. Kimball, N. Eldon Tanner, Marion G. Romney) to all Stake Presidents, Bishops, and Branch Presidents in U.S., February 15, 1979, box 27, fd. 2, John W. Fitzgerald Papers, Special Collections, Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State University, Logan, Utah. 43 For references to Skousen in Benson’s talks, see Benson, Title of Liberty, 43, 116, 183; Benson, An Enemy Hath Done This, 88, 166. For Benson urging Latter-day Saints to read Skousen, see his letter to Elder Bremer, August 1, 1972, Harris files. Skousen depicted King as a “top Kremlin agent” in a memo to BYU president Er-

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for Good,” Deseret News, December 1, 2002; France Davis interview with Leslie Kelen, August 4, 1983, box 1, fd. 25, Interviews with Blacks in Utah, 1982–1988, JWML. Benson email to Matthew Harris, November 6, 2014. W. Julius Johnson to President Ezra Taft Benson, January 30, 1990, Harris files (courtesy of Steve Benson). Harris, Thunder from the Right, 9. Crawford, as quoted in Julie Howard, “Legislator Proposes Renaming the Holiday,” Daily Universe (Brigham Young University), January 13, 2000. “The Rev. King Deserves to Be Recognized,” “Students Rallying for Awareness of King’s Mission,” and “A Great Man,” Daily Universe, January 16, 1986; “Students and Faculty May Rally Monday,” Daily Universe, January 17, 1986. The University of Utah and Weber State University also honored the King holiday, nudging the state legislature to name the holiday after him. BYU students have had a long history of activism. See Bryan Waterman and Brian Kagel, The Lord’s University: Freedom and Authority at BYU (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998). John Fife to BYU faculty, January 16, 1986, box 15, fd. 6, Paul C. Richards Papers, JWML (courtesy of Walter Jones). Charlene Winters memo to Paul Richards, January 19, 1989 (box 15, fd. 6, Richards Papers), details other universities honoring the King holiday. BYU had been sponsoring events to honor King for at least a year before the Utah legislature debated a bill to name the holiday after him. See Jessie L. Embry, Black Saints in a White Church: Contemporary African American Mormons (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994), 186–87. Joe H. Ferguson to Ezra Taft Benson (with a copy to the BYU Board of Trustees and BYU president Jeffrey R. Holland), January 17, 1986, box 15, fd. 6, Richards Papers; see also Warren W. Hardy, “Says Utah Shouldn’t Have King Holiday,” Daily Herald (Provo, UT), February 14, 1986. It is not clear how President Benson responded to these protest letters, much less to Coretta Scott King’s invitation to campus. The Executive Minutes of the BYU Board of Trustees are not available to researchers. For Mecham’s ties to the Birch Society, see “Gov. Mecham to Address Birch Society Gathering,” Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1987. For Mecham’s ties to the Freemen Institute, see John Harrington and Vaughn Roche, “Cleon Skousen: Prominent Author and Political Activist,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, May 9, 1980. See Ronald J. Watkins, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Term and Trials of Former Governor Evan Mecham (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 97–98, for Skousen’s influence on Mecham. Sokol, Heavens Might Crack, 245–50, contains a succinct discussion of the King holiday in Arizona. For Benson and Skousen’s close ties to Mecham, including attending his inauguration and setting him apart in the temple, see Karen Coates, “The Holy War Surrounding Evan Mecham,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 22 (Fall 1989): 66; and Watkins, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, 97. For newspaper coverage of Mecham’s executive order, consult “New Arizona Governor Halts King Holiday,” Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1987; Thomas J. Knudson, “Arizona Torn by Governor-Elect’s Plan to Drop King Holiday,” New York Times, December 23, 1986; and Thomas B. Rosenstiel, “The Controversial New Governor of Arizona is Making His Mark on the State’s Politics,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 26, 1987.

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69 Scott McCartney, “Mormons Split by Turmoil Over Church Member Mecham,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 1988; “LDS Group in Arizona Urging Approval of a King Holiday,” Deseret News, October 21, 1990. 70 Julian Sanders to Ezra Taft Benson, October 1, 1989, published in “Sanders’ Letter Angers His Allies: King Slur Draws Rebuke,” Phoenix Gazette, October 6, 1989. 71 Steve Benson, “Ezra Taft Benson: A Grandson’s Remembrance,” Sunstone (December 1994): 29–37, recounts his relationship with his grandfather. Benson defended leaking the letter to the press: “Sanders had sent me his letter unsolicited. I had not agreed with Sanders’ demand that I not publicize his efforts to secretly elicit the support of the President of the Mormon Church in an effort to sabotage public efforts to ratify a state holiday for Dr. King.” In Benson email to Matthew Harris, November 6, 2014. See also Benson quoted in Ed Foster and Steve Yozwiak, “Anti-King Petitions Get Support, Thousands Sign, Drive Leaders Say,” Arizona Republic, October 10, 1989. 72 Steve Benson, “Ezra Taft Benson: Mormonism’s Prophet, Seer, and Racebaiter,” Blacfax: A Journal of Black History and Opinion 13 (Winter 2008): 23. Steve Benson became a strident critic of the LDS church. He was especially critical of his grandfather and eventually left the church. See Haws, Mormon Image in the American Mind, 154, 167. 73 Eduardo Pagán, “Razing Arizona: The Clash in the Church Over Evan Mecham,” Sunstone (March 1988): 15–21; Watkins, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, 88. 74 Watkins, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, esp. chap. 10; Melissa Rigg and Susan R. Carson, “Mecham Convicted,” Arizona Daily Star, April 5, 1988; Lindsey Gruson, “House Impeaches Arizona Governor,” New York Times, February 6, 1988. 75 “Arizona’s Holy War: Mecham’s Predicament Splits the Mormons,” Newsweek, February 1, 1988, 28; Scott McCartney, “Mormons Split by Turmoil Over Church Member Mecham,” New York Times, March 12, 1988; see also “LDS Group in Arizona Urging Approval of a King Holiday,” Deseret News, October 21, 1990. 76 “Sanders’ Letter Angers His Allies, King Slur Draws Rebuke,” Phoenix Gazette, October 6, 1989. Benson read this statement when he was first inaugurated as the church president. Don L. Searle, “President Ezra Taft Benson Ordained Thirteenth President of the Church,” Ensign, December 1985, accessed on December 20, 2019, lds.org/ensign/1985/12/president-ezra-taft-benson -ordained-thirteenth-president-of-the-church?lang=eng. 77 Jerry P. Cahill to W. Julius Johnson, February 26, 1990, Matthew Harris files. Cahill was the Director of International Communications for the church at the time he wrote the letter. See also “LDS Group in Arizona Urging Approval of a King Holiday.” 78 Lindsay address at the Utah State Capitol, January 18, 1988, Richard P. Lindsay addresses, 1976–1994, CHL. 79 “Give King Holiday Its Due,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 5, 1997. 80 Abigail Van Buren, “King’s Teachings for Social Justice Still Ring True Today,” Deseret News, January 20, 1992; Amy Donaldson, “Are Legislators Doing Right by Rights Leader?” Deseret News, January 20, 1997. 81 For this point, see David E. Campbell, John C. Green, and J. Quin Monson, Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 61–62; and their article “Survey

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Salt Lake Tribune, October 6, 2018. 89 Gordon Bitner Hinckley, Discourses of President Gordon B. Hinckley—Volume 1: 1995–1999 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 532–38 (quote on 533). 90 John L. Hart, “Fathers Needed as ‘Pillars of Strength,’” Church News, May 2, 1998, accessed December 20, 2019, lds churchnews.com/archive/1998–05–02/fathers-needed -as-pillars-of-strength-13445; see also Kristen Moulton, “Mormon President Addresses NAACP,” Associated Press, April 25, 1998, accessed December 20, 2019, apnews .com/71112137fd737f6e1cef4cabeee26abe; and “News of the Church—NAACP Leadership Meeting,” Ensign, July 1998, 74. 91 Matthew Harris telephone conversation with Jeanetta Williams, June 11, 2019; Williams email to Harris, June 12, 2019. 92 Matthew Harris telephone conversation with Darius Gray, January 20, 2016. 93 For Bordeaux’s bill (H.B. 302), see le.utah.gov/~2000/bills /hbillint/HB0302.pdf; for Suazo’s bill (S.B. 121), see le.utah.gov/~2000/bills/sbillint/SB0121.pdf, both accessed December 20, 2019. For Williams’s collaboration with Suazo and Bourdeaux, see Petrie, “The MLK holiday,” 55; and especially Williams, “History of the Name Change of Human Rights Day to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Utah’s Constitution Amendment,” July 30, 2018, Matthew Harris files (courtesy of Jeanetta Williams). 94 “Will Utah Rename Holiday for King?” Deseret News, January 17, 2000; see also Lindsay Palmer, “Legislature Opens Holiday,” Daily Universe, January 13, 2000. 95 Susan Whitney, “Remember King: Songs, Prayers, Talks and Tears on Rights Day,” Deseret News, January 18, 2000. 96 NAACP Salt Lake Branch, accessed December 20, 2019, naacp-saltlakebranch.org/branch-activities.html; Williams, “History of the Name Change”; Petrie, “The MLK Holiday,” 55. 97 Lee Davidson, “Former Utah House Speaker Named Chief Lobbyist for Mormon Church,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 22, 2017; Dillon, “Will Utah Rename Holiday for King?” 98 For passage of the bill after the revised vote, see Jordan Tanner, Committee Chair, to Marty Stephens, House Speaker, February 7, 2000, le.utah.gov/~2000/comreport /HB306H10.pdf; Max Roth, “Utah Was the Last State to Name MLK Day, and It Came Close to Failing,” Fox 13 Salt Lake City, January 15, 2018, fox13now.com /2018/01/15/utah-was-last-state-to-name-mlk-day -and-it-came-close-to-failing/; and “Utah Designates Dr. King’s Birthday a Holiday; Last State to Adopt the Day,” Jet, April 24, 2000, 4, which comments that two representatives missed the initial vote, but the bill “was revived after two absent legislators were called to overturn the vote and get the bill to the floor.” 99 For Leavitt signing the bill into law, March 16, 2000, see le.utah.gov/~2000/htmdoc/sbillhtm/SB0121.htm, accessed December 20, 2019; see also Lucinda Dillon, “Leavitt Praised as He Signs Law Designating King Day,” Deseret News, April 6, 2000; Petrie, “The MLK Holiday,” 55. 100 Dillon, “Leavitt Praised as He Signs Law Designating King Day.” 101 “The Globe Reacts to Gordon B. Hinckley’s Passing,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 29, 2008; see also “Tributes to President Hinckley,” Ensign, March 2008, 4.

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Clarifies Mormons’ Beliefs about Race,” Deseret News, March 30, 2012. See also Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), chap. 6. In 1999, New Hampshire recognized the King holiday, stipulating it as a paid holiday for state employees. In 2000, South Carolina made it a paid holiday. This new law replaced an earlier law that gave state employees a choice whether to honor the King holiday or one of three designated Confederate holidays. See “Some States Boycotted MLK Day at First,” UPI, January 21, 2013, accessed December 20, 2019, upi.com/Some-states-boycotted -MLK-Day-at-first/57461358775502/; Michael Brindley, “N.H.’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Didn’t Happen Without a Fight,” New Hampshire Public Radio, August 27, 2013, accessed December 20, 2019, nhpr.org/post/nhs-martin -luther-king-jr-day-didnt-happen-without-fight #stream/0; Sokol, Heavens Might Crack, 251. For Gordon B. Hinckley’s dialogue with the NAACP, see Harris, “Martin Luther King,” 140. For the church cracking down on religious extremism, see Haws, Mormon Image in the American Mind, 178–80; Harris, “Watchman on the Tower,” chap. 5; Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 188–89. Harris, “Watchman on the Tower,” chap. 5. For background and context to Williams, as well as her perceptive understanding of Mormon culture, see her interview with Jennifer DeMayo, September 9, 1993, African American Oral History Project, HBLL. See also Doug Robinson, “Woman of Controversy: Williams’ Leadership of the NAACP in S.L. Earns Support and Criticism,” Deseret News, June 18, 2006. For the LDS church’s lobbying efforts concerning public policy issues in Utah, see Adam R. Brown, Utah Politics and Government: American Democracy among a Unique Electorate (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 92–96; and Rod Decker, Utah Politics: The Elephant in the Room (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2019). For the church’s lobbying efforts in national public policy issues, see D. Michael Quinn, “Exporting Utah’s Theocracy Since 1975: Mormon Organizational Behavior and America’s Culture Wars,” chap. 7 in God and Country: Politics in Utah, ed. Jeffery E. Sells (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005). Jason Swenson and Carrie A. Moore, “LDS Leader to Keynote Conference—of NAACP,” Deseret News, April 4, 1998; Albert Fritz interview with Leslie G. Kelen, February 24, 1983, box 2, fd. 6, Interviews with Blacks in Utah, 1982–1988, JWML; James E. Dooley interview with Leslie G. Kelen, December 6, 1983, interview 8, tape 104, Everett C. Cooley Oral History Project, JWML. Fritz and Dooley were past presidents of the NAACP. Swenson and Moore, “LDS Leader to Keynote Conference.” That relationship continues to this day. In 2018, the LDS church began a partnership with the NAACP to work together on education and employment initiatives for black Americans. Danielle Christensen, “LDS Church and NAACP Announce Plans for Education and Employment Initiatives,” Church News, July 17, 2018, accessed December 20, 2019, lds.org/church/news/lds -church-and-naacp-announce-plans-for-education -and-employment-initiatives?lang=eng; David Noyce, “Mormon Leaders Again Meet with NAACP Brass as Work on Joint Education, Jobs Initiative Continues,”

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Race, Latter-day Saint Doctrine, and Athletics at Utah State University, 1960–1961 BY

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22 Utah State University’s 1960–1961 school year was a particularly tumultuous and chaotic one. While the Aggie football team celebrated nine wins to two losses—its best year in school history—the basketball team struggled to match its tremendous success of the previous year, and head coach Cec Baker announced his resignation before the season was over.1 The university’s newspaper, Student Life, reported that some angry fans responded by hanging an effigy of the former coach.2 Meanwhile, in January, USU president Daryl Chase called a meeting with the school’s African American athletes—including Darnel Haney and other members of the basketball team—to strongly advise them against causing trouble by dating white women. Simultaneously, the publication of a book entitled Mormonism and the Negro by USU journalism professor John J. Stewart revealed racism within the university, the local community, and Latter-day Saint beliefs and sparked a campus-wide discussion about the place of Mormonism at a growing university with a significant international student presence.3 A lot of this commotion manifested itself in letters to the editor of the school newspaper where concerned students, alumni, and faculty debated Latter-day Saint doctrine on race, whether or not the local Latter-day Saint community was narrow minded in its political and world views, and the efficacy of professors sharing their criticisms of Latter-day Saint doctrines and Mormon culture. While some of these topics related to national or even international problems, much of this correspondence concerned local issues in which Mormonism was the fulcrum.

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The 1960–1961 Utah State University men’s basketball team. Courtesy Special Collections, USU.

23 Scholarship on African Americans and the racism they experienced in twentieth century Utah has primarily focused on discriminatory laws and practices in Ogden, Salt Lake City, and Provo.4 This essay seeks to add Utah State University and the campus community in Logan to this body of work, including how Mormonism informed a part of the rigidity toward racial equality and social changes in the state. The 1960–1961 school year at Utah State was a year in which conservative white alumni, administrators, and a portion of the student body pushed back against the larger movement for equality. Utah State was not unique in this regard—similar events unfolded at many predominantly white institutions and states in the country—but the frictions created that year offer insight into how the intersections of race, religion, and local politics took shape in Utah in the mid-twentieth century. This episode in Utah history fits squarely within the civil rights movement, although it is more indicative of its location within the West

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than representative of the freedom struggle as a whole. While students at Utah State were debating whether Latter-day Saints were prejudiced and exclusionary, segregationists violently rioted on the University of Georgia’s campus in January 1961 in direct response to the court-ordered admission of Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter, the school’s first African American students. Although some Georgia students opposed the violence, a large number were invested in trying to maintain segregation.5 In contrast, Utah State, like other colleges and universities outside of the South, had admitted African American students before the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Mignon Barker, an African American from Salt Lake City, became the first black woman to graduate from a Utah college when she completed a degree in 1921 at Utah State Agriculture College.6 However, as in other western locales, racial discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations remained an endemic part of society even though certain color barriers had been broken or were not as stark

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as in other parts of the country.7 Utah’s law against interracial marriage, on the other hand, more closely aligned the state with the South than its neighboring western states. The Utah legislature bolstered the law against interracial marriage as late as 1939 and was the secondto-last state in the West to allow interracial couples to marry when it removed the statute in 1963. Even though discriminatory laws in Utah changed before the Supreme Court ruled against interracial marriage restrictions in Loving v. Virginia (1967), cultural and institutional prejudice against interracial marriage was distinct in Utah compared to other states in its region in the early 1960s.8

Knowing that interracial relationships—especially between white women and black men— were a cause for alarm in their community, Utah State University president Daryl Chase, vice president Milton R. Merrill, and dean J. Elliot Cameron called a meeting with the few African American athletes on USU’s athletic teams on January 15, 1961, to address the issue. According to news reports, the administrators wanted to inform them “of public criticism directed at USU regarding the number of black students on campus and their social activities.”9 At this meeting, Chase took the opportunity to strongly advise these black students against interracial dating. A later Salt Lake Tribune article published on February 4 recorded Chase’s reasons for calling the meeting with the school’s black students. First, he wanted to explain “that some persons ‘felt that too many scholarships were being given to Negro, out-ofstate students.’” Second, he wanted to “inform them that ‘we . . . have a problem with Negro students dating white girls.’” Chase termed such dating “very unwise” and then showed the group a U.S. News and World Report article about an interracial couple at Alfred University the previous February.10 The 1960 article detailed the events following the interracial relationship of Dorothy Lebohner and Warren Sutton. Lebohner, a white freshman, was described as “startlingly slim, tender-looking, fair and blonde-haired” with a “fragile, fairylike quality about her, and a pair of innocent-looking, pin-up lips.” On the other hand, Sutton, an African American basketball player, was described as “6 feet 3 inches

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tall with a physique of classic proportions, but rather heavy facial features.” The two started dating the summer before Lebohner’s freshman year at Alfred University, a racially integrated campus in New York.11 After both students dropped out of school, Dorothy’s parents decided to send her to Florida to forget about Warren, but the couple planned a secret rendezvous to run off together. When Edward Lebohner—Dorothy’s father and Alfred University’s treasurer—discovered his daughter’s disappearance, he obtained a police warrant for her arrest for being a “wayward minor.” Robert Bird, the author of the article, asked his readers a rhetorical question: “Is marriage between a white girl and a Negro morally permissible? Or practically possible?” Bird queried a few African American students’ views on the subject, including those of one student who surmised that interracial relationships are to succeed in America because they “just cause headaches. People are cruel, children are cruel. It’s just natural. It would be better to live in Europe if you had an interracial marriage rather than buck society here. It can’t be done.”12 To keep the administration’s hands clean, Chase created an unofficial policy against interracial dating and made the black students the responsible parties for averting racial issues—rather than making a commitment to racial equality.13 “We are very inexperienced (in Negro-white relationships) on this campus,” Chase stated, “and I don’t think we could avoid this sort of thing,” referring to the “irreparable damage” the negative publicity had caused Alfred University. That story provided Chase substantiating evidence that interracial dating and the controversy that followed would reflect poorly on universities and their administrators. Chase knew his community well, sympathized with the broader opposition to interracial relationships, and hoped to avoid the proverbial headache that Alfred University had experienced by preventing it from happening in the first place. However, this meeting ultimately resulted in questions concerning USU’s racial policy and required the administrators to try to set the record straight— that USU had no racial policy—on multiple occasions over the next few weeks. According to senior Tom Jones, the editor-in-chief of Student Life, the truth of what

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At least one student disapproved of the way that the administration handled the community’s concerns about the “social activities” of African American students. Jacob W. Kijne, a graduate student from the Netherlands studying irrigation engineering, shared his contention with the administration’s actions via a letter to the editor of Student Life: “I do not believe that that it is the right way to solve the problem by advising the persons involved to abstain from the not accepted activities . . . the administration of this University should have done better by issuing a statement to guarantee and defend the personal freedom, regardless of criticism from outside the University.”17 The administration’s shock at both student speculation and the public inquiries into USU’s racial policy that followed are evidence that the administrators did not anticipate any racial issues.18 In notes Chase made on January 21, 1961, he revealed how rarely the issue of race had been broached on campus: “The subject has never come up in any Board meeting; nor has any Board member spoken to me personally about the subject as a problem of the school.

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actually transpired at that meeting “played little part . . . as some students eagerly heard, accepted, and passed on some sad stories concerning race relations on campus.”14 Some of the rumors circulating on campus included that black athletes would be stripped of their scholarships for dating white women and that women living in residence halls would be penalized for accepting dates with “the Negroes.” Vice President Merrill wrote to Chase on January 21 about the rumors and noted that “the campus is seething (the description of a reasonably judicious informant) with the report that you called all of the Negro students in and issued an ultimatum to the effect that interracial dating would result in immediate expulsion of the Negro involved.”15 Merrill likely overstated the reaction to Chase’s meeting with the black students by saying that the whole campus was “seething.”16 Generational differences between the administration and students likely played a role in Merrill’s perception of how vocal the campus community opposition was, and perhaps he was surprised to hear that even a few people would be upset if the rumors about expulsion for interracial dating were true.

25 Daryl Chase, president of USU from 1954–1968. Courtesy Special Collections, USU, USU-A0915b.

All our policies deal with students—not race.”19 While there was no segregation policy at USU and the university operated under the premise of seeing and dealing with students and not their race, the administration’s approach reflected a form of proto-colorblind racism.20 “The rules of the University,” Chase wrote, “as found in the Catalog, the Student Body Constitution, and in the Faculty Code, are dealing with human beings. As such, it makes no racial distinction; and in harmony with this, the school is administered.”21 The void of a statutory racial policy at USU was, in practice, filled by racial bias held by Chase and members of the community with whom he corresponded. These letters illustrate the reluctance, and even open opposition, of both university administrators and the community to any conscious racial equality. The sudden discussion of race issues on campus probably prompted the administration

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to launch an investigation into the academic standing of the few “Negro students on campus.” Although small in number, black male students were particularly visible because of their high profile on athletic teams. J. Elliot Cameron reported to Chase on January 21, 1961, that there were only twelve black students on campus: ten “boys,” seven of whom were athletes on scholarship or assistantship to play football or basketball, and two “girls.”22 Cameron also reported the cumulative and fall quarter grade point averages (GPAs) for all black students to Chase in an undated document retained in Chase’s papers.23 “President,” Cameron began, “the two girls listed are in good standing. . . . All other students are on probation because of low fall grades, or low cumulative grades.” In the process of evaluating the academic performance of USU’s black students, the administrators failed to take into consideration the ways in which racism had already impacted the educational experiences of those students at the primary, secondary, and university levels. Darnel Haney, a member of the 1960–1961 basketball team, did not attend school with white students until his freshman year of high school, having gone to segregated schools in his hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. Haney’s father was murdered when he was just seven years old. His family of twelve relied on the odd jobs he and his siblings could find—such as picking potatoes and shining shoes—to supplement his mother’s income as a domestic worker and the government welfare they received.24 Although Haney struggled academically at USU in 1960–1961, he went on to receive a M.S. in Sociology from USU in 1973, writing a master’s thesis titled “Factors Contributing to the Black High School Dropout Rate.”25 Haney also related the insulting experience of being in USU classrooms and overhearing other students talk amongst themselves about him. Once during a biology lecture, the professor used the expression “there must be a nigger in the wood pile” in Haney’s presence. This set of economic, educational, and racial circumstances, in addition to the time-consuming task of being student athletes, made life and academic performance difficult for black students at USU.26 Records do not indicate what academic probation meant for these student athletes, but

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evidence suggests that at least one community member hoped that USU would turn black students away based on the racist assumption that black students were more disposed to immoral and criminal behavior. “Please believe me,” Wayne B. Garff wrote to Chase in February of 1961, You will have plenty of backing in taking a strong stand on the racial issue. . . . We feel sure that the majority of people are greatly incensed over the inroads and demands of a small minority. Many of us feel that the pendulum has swung too far too quickly in permitting our colored associates to have unusual privileges because of a rabid minority. On the issue of morals, we encourage you to dismiss from the college any persons who will not uphold the moral standards of our institution and of our state and federal laws. Most of us are perfectly willing to permit people to have freedoms as long as they do not impose on our equal freedoms. . . . We want you to know that we are behind you in upholding the dignity and integrity of our Alma Mater.27 It is likely that Garff, a resident of Salt Lake City and a 1936 graduate of then–Utah State Agricultural College (USAC), had every hope that USU would remain a predominantly white institution. Census records indicate that during the years Garff attended USAC, the African American population of Cache County was somewhere between one and four persons. When Garff typed his letter to Chase, African Americans made up 0.5 percent of Utah’s population of 890,627, were largely concentrated in Ogden, and were outnumbered by both the Native American and Japanese populations. Without any likely personal interaction with African Americans, Garff’s prejudice was informed by racial stereotypes and a fear of white Utahns losing the power that their dominant share of the state’s population (98.1 percent) guaranteed them.28 Garff proclaimed himself a spokesman for USU alumni and other Utahns who thought of African Americans as outsiders who did not belong in Utah. The Utahns Garff insisted on representing were bent on retaining

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Even though social acceptance was conditional at best for African American students, USU administrators seemed to think that the university was making gains in developing a multicultural campus. Senior editor Tom Jones quoted President Chase in a Student Life article as saying, “We are proud of the cosmopolitan character of the student body. I think that it can truthfully be said that to a remarkable degree we are learning how to work and study and socialize together as members of the great human family. Our staff openings, student offices, scholarships, and donors are open to all, are dispensed to all, and are retained by all on the basis of merit.”31 Concurrent national events, such as the student sit-in movement in North Carolina and the Supreme Court’s Boynton v. Virginia (1960) decision ending Jim Crow

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While Chase publicly spoke of accommodating racial and ethnic diversity on campus and affirmed that the only means of judgment was based on academic merit, underneath all of that public posturing was the truth of the matter: neither he nor the local community wanted USU to be the vanguard of racial equality and were more committed to retaining the racial status quo.33 A month before his meeting with USU’s black students, Chase received a letter from a local attorney, L. D. Naisbitt, who disapproved of USU’s recruitment of black athletes. Naisbitt wanted to “give Basket Ball [sic] to the white boys. . . . Generally speaking [black athletes] are no permanent good to the University and in most cases the University is no good to them. I appreciate the good work that is being done at the University but in my humble opinion the above practice is a mistake and national recruiting, especially colored boys should be abolished.”34 In other words, USU should only recruit local, young white men. To be sure, an examination of the 1960–1961 basketball roster reveals that there were as many players from Columbus, Indiana, as there were from the whole state of Utah: three. Wyoming and Idaho had each supplied USU with two players.35 Naisbitt’s explicit aversion to black players on USU’s basketball team and his disdain of national recruiting (read as recruitment of black players) in favor of local recruiting stemmed from an underlying desire to maintain the existing racial boundaries at USU and in the state of Utah.

Along with alumni like Garff, Chase received a message expressing concern about interracial dating from Trustee David W. Evans. In a memorandum dated January 25, 1961, ten days after Chase’s meeting with the black students, Chase recorded that he “received a call from Trustee Evans, who seemed quite concerned about the rumors in Salt Lake about the relationships between Haynie [sic] and a girl in North Logan who, it was represented, was pregnant. He wanted to know if I were aware of it and doing anything about it. . . . He urged me to keep him up to date on the negro question and said we might have a special committee of the Board look into it, etc.”29 On the other side of that story stood Daryl Haney himself who experienced the community’s judgment firsthand. About dating interracially as a student athlete at USU, Haney remarked, “of course that wasn’t accepted at all. And since we were a losing team [during the 1960–1961 season], I was a big problem for Utah State. They wanted me out of there. They watched me every place I went.” According to Haney, other black athletes were dating interracially as well, but they did so secretly to avoid the negative attention that could potentially jeopardize their athletic careers.30

segregation in public transportation, provided some perspective for USU administrators evaluating their campus. Colleges across the country were sites of social change, protest, and even violence during the decade of the 1960s.32 President Chase wanted the USU student body to be proud of the fact that things were not as bad in Logan as they were other places and that USU was able to stay above the political unrest and racial fray that was disrupting universities and making national headlines.

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racial barriers in the state, including on college campuses. They perceived the presence of African Americans at USU as a threat to their alma mater, their morals and social customs, and their accustomed interpretation of state and federal laws.

Chase’s response to Naisbitt affirmed that the university’s policy was technically inclusive, although his main defense for the presence of black athletes in USU athletics was tied to maintaining competitiveness with other athletic programs. “As you know,” wrote Chase, “our

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upon his arrival from California or that Mormonism would be a part of it. In his autobiography, McGill described touring Salt Lake City and the Utah campus before school started in 1958 with Dave Costa, a member of the football team. McGill noticed the absence of black people and quickly learned that Salt Lake City operated like a segregated city. Costa took McGill to a diner that refused to serve him before Costa convinced the waitress to make an exception to the restaurant’s segregated service policy. At that point, McGill was unaware of the existing racism in Utah and in the LDS faith: “No one told me of the sad and unfortunate racism that permeates the culture of beautiful Utah. Nobody told me how Mormon scripture specifically states that black people are descendants of evil, and that black men aren’t even allowed to become full members in the lay priesthood of the Mormon Church.”37

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doors are open to all academically qualified students, regardless of their nationality, race, or religion. This is the policy and spirit of the University. We segregate and eliminate students only on the basis of scholastic achievement and character.”36 Chase wanted to keep USU’s football and basketball teams competitive, rather than “second or third-rate,” and did not want these programs to be cut for the sake of keeping the teams stocked with only white players. USU’s in-state competition, the University of Utah, had black athletes on its athletic teams, including national superstar Bill McGill, who joined the Utes basketball team in 1958. McGill, a native of Los Angeles, created an impressive résumé at the University of Utah. In 1961 he led the Utes to a NCAA Final Four appearance and, during his senior year in 1961–1962, he notched an impressive 38.8 points per game. McGill did not expect that he would be met with racism

A two-page spread from the 1961 Buzzer. Cornell Green (top left) remains one of the most successful Aggie athletes in USU history. The Dallas Cowboys signed him in 1962, and he went on to have a long career as a defensive back for the Cowboys. Courtesy Special Collections, USU.

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While university administrators dealt with queries into USU’s racial policies and pressure from alumni and trustees to maintain

the status quo, debate surrounding John J. Stewart’s Mormonism and the Negro entered into the fray. As such, Mormonism became an integral part of campus discussions about race and racism. Stewart was an associate professor of journalism, editor of publications at Utah State University, and a faculty advisor to the school’s newspaper, Student Life, when he published Mormonism and the Negro in 1960. Stewart had three other books in print that displayed his knack for writing on Mormon-oriented historical themes: Joseph Smith: Democracy’s Unknown Prophet, Thomas Jefferson and the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and The Eternal Gift: The Story of the Crucifixion and Resurrection.39 An article appearing in the December 14, 1960, Student Life featured Stewart and his new book, The Eternal Gift, wherein Stewart was quoted as saying, “In all literature there is only one

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Chase claimed he had no issue with coaches recruiting a “Bill McGill,” although he did have a problem with the number of black athletes, particularly on the basketball team, but for a different reason than Naisbitt did: “It makes us appear before the public as an institution moving toward professionalism in athletics, and this is a situation we want to resist.” Chase knew that Utah State’s athletic teams would need to recruit athletes within and outside of the state to remain competitive with other teams in the West but worried that too many black players on the basketball team would imply that USU had a liberal recruitment policy more synonymous with professional sports than amateur athletics.38

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story as beautiful as that of the birth of Jesus Christ at Bethlehem, and that is the story of his birth at Calvary 33 years later—the birth that is called death.” Entitled “Utah State Professor Writes about Savior,” this Student Life article demonstrates the consistent standing that LDS topics had in university news. They needed no introduction to the newspaper’s audience. Authors assumed that student readers were Latter-day Saints or already familiar with the LDS church, and LDS viewpoints and news were readily represented.40 The author of the Stewart article illustrated this by stating that the book was “given to church and other groups during the Christmas and Easter seasons” where “church” signified the LDS church and “other groups” likely referred to minority denominations in the area.41 Further evidence of a prominent LDS influence and readership of Student Life is the frequent advertisement of events at the LDS Institute of Religion on campus. One such notice announced Elder Howard W. Hunter as the headline speaker at the annual Joseph Smith Memorial event to be held at the LDS Institute building. This announcement appeared on the same page as the Stewart “Savior” article. The upcoming program with Hunter was to feature a chorus provided by an LDS fraternity.42 In fact, LDS sororities and fraternities were very popular on campus and occupied several pages in the school’s yearbook.43 At the time Stewart wrote Mormonism and the Negro, the LDS church had supplied few public statements regarding the racial temple and priesthood restrictions, creating a space for apologists like Stewart to recycle sparse quotes from past church leaders, adding their own interpretation of the practice.44 To justify the institutional racism practiced by the LDS church, Stewart employed centuries-old white supremacist thought: “Is it not possible to see an act of mercy on the part of God in not having the Negro bear the Priesthood in this world, in view of his living under the curse of a black skin and other Negroid features? . . . Who is to say that . . . the Negro is not—so far as his temporal well being—better off not to have the Priesthood?”45 Behind Stewart’s support for a black race restriction on priesthood was an underlying belief that being born black

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was also a societal curse. “In our society today,” Stewart wrote, “from which situation is the Negro suffering most: (1) In not being permitted to hold the Priesthood in the LDS Church, or (2) In having a black skin and other Negroid features which stigmatize him in the eyes of most Whites?” Stewart argued that both white America and church leaders should be absolved for their role in systematically denying African Americans equality in society and in the church; in Stewart’s contrivance, God was the one responsible for these seeming racial injustices on earth because it was he who ultimately placed a spirit in a cursed black body. “If you say this Church is unjust in not allowing the Negro to bear the Priesthood,” Stewart wrote, “you must, to be consistent, likewise say that God is even more unjust in giving him a black skin.”46 In the conclusion of Mormonism and the Negro, Stewart encapsulated his interpretation of LDS doctrine on race in eight clear points. Stewart warned readers in his sixth point of the resulting dangers of interracial marriage: although “there is nothing in Church policy that forbids nor discourages us from extending brotherly Christian love to the Negro . . . [that] does not and should not include intermarriage, for we would bring upon our children the curse of Cain, or rather, we would bring unto ourselves children from those spirits destined to be the seed of Cain.”47 Mormonism’s fear of interracial marriage, although similar to that found nationally, had an added element of severity because it would bring the curse of Cain into an otherwise “clean” and “untainted” lineage of practicing members. Both men and women were barred from participating in the ordinances performed in LDS temples, which Latter-day Saints believe are essential to exaltation, and denied the chance of serving proselytizing missions. Because the church prohibited black men from priesthood ordination, they were ineligible for leadership positions within the church’s lay clergy.48 In almost every sense, having black family members would make it theologically and practically impossible to participate fully in LDS culture and religious activity. While his statements did not carry the same weight and authority, Stewart’s views

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According to Petersen, black assimilation into the white race by way of interracial marriage would result in a cursed, racially mixed society whose members would be ineligible for full church participation. LDS teachings added another layer of resistance to interracial marriage as Mormons feared the divine ramifications of creating and having more descendants of Cain on Earth. Stewart thought he was performing a service to the USU community by writing Mormonism and the Negro, but at least two of his colleagues profoundly disagreed. After word about the book spread, professors J. Golden Taylor and T. W. Daniel wrote letters of complaint to the university’s Committee on Professional Relationships and Faculty Welfare. On January 13, 1961, Taylor and Daniel requested that Stewart be censured for the use of his university title and position on the book’s title page, an action that they argued implied the university’s sanction for content that they “violently

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While as the subject of your letter I have no objection to its publication— an author will profit by criticism, be it good or bad—yet as editor I do have a responsibility to the University as to what appears in its publications. . . . And you yourself in your letter provide at least four reasons why it should not be; e.g., “The faculty of Utah State University—in their official capacity as faculty members—ought to have exactly nothing to do either in attacking or supporting the doctrines of the Mormon church.”51

Now what is our policy in regard to inter-marriage? As to the Negro, of course, there is only one possible answer. We must not inter-marry with the Negro. Why? If I were to marry a Negro woman and have children by her, my children would all be cursed as to the priesthood. Do I want my children cursed as to the priesthood? If there is one drop of Negro blood in my children, as I have read to you, they receive the curse. There isn’t any argument, therefore, as to inter-marriage with the Negro, is there? There are 50 million Negroes in the United States. If they were to achieve complete absorption with the white race, think what that would do. With 50 million Negroes inter-married with us, where would the priesthood be? Who could hold it, in all America? Think what that would do to the work of the church!49

opposed.”50 Taylor also requested that Stewart print this letter opposing Mormonism and the Negro in the staff newspaper, a publication that Stewart was in charge of. Vice President Merrill encouraged Stewart to hold off publishing the letter in the staff newsletter, and Stewart ultimately did not publish it, in part because it could look like an attack on “the Mormon church.” In notifying Taylor of his decision, Stewart wrote,

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broadly represented those of church leaders. In a speech delivered at an education conference at Brigham Young University in 1954, LDS church apostle Mark E. Petersen reminded his audience what was at stake if interracial marriage became accepted and widespread:

Stewart also responded directly to the Committee on Professional Relationships and Faculty Welfare, further demonstrating his view that the university should be supportive of and subservient to Latter-day Saint racial viewpoints because Latter-day Saints were its “major public.” Stewart wrote: “It is my belief that not only this book but the others as well . . . are a credit to the University, among a large portion of its constituency—to its major public.”52

Although Stewart wanted people both inside and outside the LDS faith to have a better understanding of its doctrine in regard to race, it was the Mormon community, USU’s “major public,” who stood to gain from an acceptance of his book and the doctrine it defended. After the university’s Committee on Professional Relations and Faculty Welfare launched an inquiry into whether Stewart should be censured for the book, Stewart wrote the committee, asking, “Is not the University’s welfare inseparably connected with the goodwill and support of its constituents, the majority of whom are members of the LDS faith and practically all of whom are Christians? And is not this goodwill and support dependent, in turn,

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upon the University’s properly serving that constituency and showing a proper respect for its feelings and convictions?” The value of Mormonism and the Negro to USU Latter-day Saints, in Stewart’s own words, was the reassurance that no “member need feel any shame, apology or embarrassment” about any LDS doctrine. Many LDS members “feel ill at ease or critical” of church doctrine concerning blacks, but if this doctrine was properly understood, Stewart argued, members “would not feel critical of it.” While he certainly cared about his own name and reputation as an employee of the university, Stewart defended his work because of how it would assuage the collective conscience of Latter-day Saints and the USU majority within the broader context of progressive and changing ideas of racial equality and civil rights.53 Still, there were university students and religious groups who were concerned about racial inequality and sought ways to improve racial equality and to make international and racial minority students feel more welcome on campus. A close reading of news reports shows that the local LDS constituency largely sat on the sidelines in this movement. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that it was the Unitarian Fellowship on campus that sought a meeting with the administration to ask for clarification of USU’s racial policy.54 Another article indicated that “a student movement aimed at doing away with race prejudice in the area is gaining momentum” and that “over 70 students met at the Unitarian Fellowship Seminar,” where interested faculty members also participated. Because of all of the attention the meeting attracted, the advisor of the Unitarian Fellowship wrote a letter to the editor of Student Life to clarify the purpose of this discussion group: “In view of the publicity given to the Logan Unitarian Fellowship in connection with recent racial tensions on the campus it is felt that a statement explaining the stand of this organization is in order. . . . Unitarians believe that only through free inquiry and thorough discussion can social problems be dealt with constructively.” The Unitarian Fellowship believed that it had a responsibility to help USU students of all races, ethnicities, and nationalities “feel wanted and accepted. Only by dealing with these problems openly, and in the

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democratic tradition, can we build a sound foundation for the future.”55 Alongside the Unitarian Fellowship, the Lutheran Student Fellowship also concerned itself with improving student relations and helping minorities find equal treatment at USU. Karl Smith, president of the Lutheran Student Fellowship and chairman of the American Student–Foreign Student Relations Committee, wanted international students to experience a greater welcome than that currently offered by the community.56 This committee—also referred to as the International–American Student Relations Committee—traveled to Salt Lake City to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. give an address at the University of Utah on January 31, 1961.57 This was the environment in which black student athletes such as Darnel Haney had to learn how to navigate and in which the cluster of controversies surrounding race at USU occurred. Although USU allowed African Americans to compete on its collegiate athletic teams—BYU did not have a black basketball player on its team until 1974—some of the athletes did not find social acceptance due to their minority status in race and religion.58 As a black man from Phoenix, Haney made friends with other students from different states and traditions: “USU had a lot of kids from New York who came in for the theater programs. So I had a lot of friends in that area and . . . from out of state who were [also] dealing with the community and being kind of ousted too. If you weren’t LDS, you were not basically accepted.”59 Even President Chase recognized that Mormon culture created exclusive boundaries that contributed to a sense of superiority. However, he continued to rationalize this situation, stating, “Mormons’ concept of one group’s being superior to another” was parallel to ancient Greeks, Judaism, and Japanese Shintoism, cultural groups who also drew ethnic boundaries to reinforce their dominance. Daryl Chase, himself a Latter-day Saint from Nephi, Utah, began his career as a seminary teacher in the church’s religious education system. He received doctoral training at the University of Chicago and became an administrator at various LDS Institutes before accepting a position as Dean of

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We have something of a parallel to face close at home. The book Mormonism and the Negro is written from an authoritarian point of view. It condemns all members of the LDS Church who do not hold to the ideas in the book. . . . I hope hundreds of thousands of Mormon people, who reject a doctrine which is so un-Christian, so un-democratic, so un-American, and so unreasonable and so contrary to all the light thrown upon the nature of man and the universe that mankind has been able to accumulate since honest science began to operate in the western world. If we have to hate, let’s hate harmful ideologies and not people.62

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Hoping to clarify the “Mormon viewpoint,” Paul Griffin, a sophomore student active in the LDS Delta fraternity, responded to Spence’s comments with his own letter to the editor.64 While he agreed with Spence that black people should not be denied the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Griffin affirmed that Stewart’s thesis was supported by official church doctrine. Griffin also spoke to the experience of LDS students encountering criticism of Mormon theology from faculty on campus, something he thought was inappropriate in an institution of higher learning: “I did not come to Utah State to defend my religion against some instructors on campus who preach atheism. . . . I do not go into a classroom to have the instructor call my religion trash, or to hear Jesus Christ compared with Hitler. . . . No instructor has the right to raise false contention against any group, for this represents in my mind, bigotry and prejudice no different than that to which many have already objected.”65

Within Chase’s campus community, several people took to the pages of Student Life to debate the influence of Mormonism on the local culture and campus norms. Along with the administration’s issue with interracial dating, Professor Stewart’s Mormonism and the Negro was a catalyst for these discussions in the editorial section of Student Life. Dr. Jack R. Spence, a professor at USU, wrote that Stewart’s book should be regarded as just one author’s opinion and not official church doctrine. However, Spence went on to write that he was “completely opposed” to the temple and priesthood race restrictions because “in practice it does seem to give some religious support (mainly due to personal interpretations) to discrimination, and as such is morally unacceptable.” In the same issue of Student Life, another letter writer likened Mormon ideology to authoritarian rule in communist China:

Pawitter Singh Sidhu, an engineering student, read Stewart’s book and found its rationale faulty: “I fail to understand why black skin is a curse. There is no logical reasoning to justify this, except one’s racial or color prejudice with which one’s mind was poisoned from childhood by one’s environment . . . To defend this deep-rooted prejudice, one has no choice but to find protection under Biblical references.” Sidhu also compared the racism he found in Mormonism and the Negro to the caste system in India: “I request the worthy author to learn from the harm which came upon India due to the acceptance of this so-called rational explanation of a harmful teaching.”63

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Students at Utah State.60 “This is not a Logan problem,” Chase went on to say, “isolated from the rest of the world as some would make it. We are talking about world problems.”61 By Chase’s account, “Mormons” and the “Logan” population were interchangeable and, for all intents and purposes, synonymous. When Chase compared Mormonism to historic cultures, it was an attempt to justify the apparent ancient and modern impulse of social stratification. For Chase, racial issues were an inherent part of humanity and not a unique part of Mormonism or even white America.

The public discussion of Stewart’s book offered an opportunity for other opposing viewpoints to assert their criticism of Mormon hegemony. Underscoring Haney’s view that the predominant LDS culture was exclusive, Peter Bunting, a member of the Forestry Club and a transfer student from George Washington University (GWU), compared the two campus environments in a letter to Student Life. Bunting claimed that a GWU student would “make an earnest effort to understand those around him,” something he “found lacking in many of the people in Utah, particularly

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those persons of the LDS Church.” Bunting went on to say that “until these people are willing to give their time, and possibly money, in an earnest effort to understand, tolerate, and work with the people outside their own minute sphere, that the closed-mindedness and prejudices that are now present will continue and will be a constant hinderance [sic] in the social maturing of the persons having them.”66

Other letters to the editor of Student Life continued to shift the conversation toward the larger problems they had with the dominant Mormon culture. Bob Atlas, a member of the “open-minded” pseudo-fraternity Mu that included women, wrote: “There is separation of state in this nation. If there isn’t, maybe Utah should become the Mormon Republic, instead of one of the fifty states . . . if you really believe what you preach, and have verifications, the best minds in the world couldn’t change your beliefs. Why not give Utah a chance to come up from 1861 to 1961 before 1962 arrives.”67 Tom Lyons added, “In my opinion, all of these letters reflect the stolid parochialism that can keep Utah State from being a first-rate university—a place where there is a free interchange of ideas from all over and not merely a reflection of the local culture.”68 This “local culture” had a profound impact on the scholarly career of the historian Jan Shipps, who came to Utah State with her husband and son in 1960. Shipps witnessed the campus conversation about race and LDS doctrine. Her nine-month experience living within the predominantly Mormon community of Logan while finishing her bachelor’s degree sparked her curiosity about Mormonism and served as a catalyst for her productive career. Shipps wrote about this telling year in her book Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons, noting both the publication of Mormonism and the Negro and conversations within the student body about interracial dating between African American athletes and white women.69 These two events influenced her perception of the markers of Mormon community and identity before the LDS church undertook some major changes and saw considerable international growth in the twentieth century.70

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The 1960–1961 school year at Utah State University provides fruitful grounds to examine Utah’s twentieth-century racial history. Unanticipated debate ensued in the aftermath of university president Daryl Chase’s meeting with black students in January 1961. Interested persons on both sides questioned the university’s racial policy. USU’s administration cited a policy of dealing with students and not race and yet responded by placing the responsibility of handling such issues on the few male black students who were already precariously navigating the community’s racial sensitivities. While the university recruited black athletes to improve its competitive edge against other athletic programs, President Chase considered restricting scholarships available for black student athletes on the basketball team as a way of protecting USU’s racial image and non-professional sports status. The simultaneous arrival of Stewart’s Mormonism and the Negro and its attendant dialogue and backlash was opined a “fiasco” by USU administrators confronting racial inequality on campus for the first time.71 Mormonism and the Negro prompted interesting discussions of what kind of academic and religious freedom should be offered to faculty and students of the LDS faith on a secular campus within the predominantly LDS setting of Logan, Utah. This episode ultimately sheds light on the ways that LDS doctrine and practice, combined with racism and conservative politics, affected African Americans and shaped racial conflict in mid-twentieth-century Utah. It also demonstrates how racism within Mormonism cannot be truthfully told as a separate story in Utah history and politics. Notes 1

Utah State University, Buzzer (Logan, UT: ASUSU, 1961), 97, Special Collections and Archives, MerrillCazier Library, Utah State University, Logan, Utah (MCUSU); Hank More, “Ags Prepare for Sun Bowl Duel,” Utah State Student Life, December 14, 1960; “USU Basketball Chief Coaches Final Season,” Utah State Student Life, February 14, 1961, 1. 2 John Hill, “Local Activities Are Printed in Papers throughout America,” Utah State Student Life, February 28, 1961, 2. 3 John J. Stewart, Mormonism and the Negro (Orem, UT: Benchmark Division, Community Press, 1960). 4 Eric Stene, “The African American Community of Ogden, Utah: 1910–1950” (master’s thesis, Utah State University, 1994); Margaret Judy Maag, “Discrimination

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stituency in the student body. During Chase’s tenure as president, this international student population grew tremendously. In 1952, there were 111 international students. By 1966, there were 565, many of whom were from Iran. At the 1961 commencement at the end of the school year, Utah State awarded four of its twelve doctoral degrees to international students from Iraq, India, Egypt, and Canada. Several more master’s degrees were awarded to international students, including students from Sudan, Iran, Pakistan, Thailand, and Syria. See Robert Parson, “International Students,” in Encyclopedic History of Utah State University (2009), Library Faculty and Staff Publications, paper 121; Utah State University, Buzzer (Logan, UT: ASUSU, 1966), 154, MCUSU; and Utah State University, Annual Commencement, June 9, 1961, USU Digital Commons, accessed August 30, 2019, digitalcommons.usu.edu /commencement. Untitled note, January 21, 1961, box 36, fd. 5, Chase Papers. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that colorblind racism took the place of state-legitimated discrimination in the post–Civil Rights era to reinforce white privilege. I use the word “proto-colorblind racism” to describe USU’s race policy because there was structural support of white privilege at USU without outright segregation policies. See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014). Untitled note, January 21, 1961, Chase Papers. “Negro Students on Campus,” n.d., box 36, fd. 5, Chase Papers. Crosschecking the names in this GPA report with the 1960–1961 men’s basketball roster confirms that Chase wanted this information that school year, sometime after January 26. “Negro Students on Campus,” n.d., Chase Papers, and “Utah State Men’s Basketball AllTime Roster,” USU Men’s Basketball, accessed October 27, 2016, http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools/ust /sports/m-baskbl/auto_pdf/2015-16/misc_non_event /USUMBBAlltimeRoster.pdf. “Darnel L. Haney Interview,” Facing the Color Line: Race and Ethnicity in Cache Valley, digital exhibit online, accessed August 30, 2019, 1, digitalcommons.usu .edu/usudiglib/8. Darnel L. Haney, “Factors Contributing to the Black High School Dropout Rate” (master’s thesis, Utah State University, 1973). In 1966, Dr. James Coleman, a sociologist from Johns Hopkins University, published a survey on the state of American education to satisfy a requirement from the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The data from Coleman’s research suggested that by the time African American students reached twelfth grade, they were approximately three-and-a-quarter years behind in school compared to their white counterparts. More recent studies have affirmed that racial discrimination persisted and still persists at predominantly white institutions of higher learning and that black students are more likely to experience class and race-based microaggressions from their fellow white students. Black student organizations offer support to minority students, but Utah State did not have a black student union until 1969. See Haney, interview, 7; James S. Coleman, “Equality of Educational Opportunity” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,

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Against the Negro in Utah and Institutional Efforts to Eliminate It” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1971); F. Ross Peterson, “‘Blindside’: Utah on the Eve of Brown v. Board of Education,” Utah Historical Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2005): 4–20; Gary James Bergera, “‘This Time of Crisis’: The Race-Based Anti-BYU Athletic Protests of 1968–1971,” Utah Historical Quarterly 81, no. 3 (2013): 204–229. For more information on the integration of the University of Georgia, see Robert A. Pratt, We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegregation of the University of Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002). For news footage of interviews with students supporting segregation, see “Series of WSB-TV Newsfilm Clips of Statements by Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver, Athens Mayor Ralph M. Snow, Georgia State Treasurer George B. Hamilton, Lieutenant Governor Garland T. Byrd, and Mrs. Alice Stancil Regarding Integration of the University of Georgia,” Georgia, 1961 January, WSB-TV newsfilm collection, reel 0048, 00:00/38:03, Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia, accessed August 30, 2019, crdl.usg.edu/id:ugabma_wsbn _wsbn38256. France Davis, Light in the Midst of Zion: A History of Black Baptists in Utah (Salt Lake City: University Publishing, 1997), 114. For more information about the characteristics of the civil rights movement in the West, see Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 278–310. For an excellent review of interracial marriage laws in Utah, see Patrick Q. Mason, “The Prohibition of Interracial Marriage in Utah, 1883–1963,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2008): 108–131. “USU Inquiry Finds Race Rumors False,” Deseret News, January 20, 1961, found in box 36, fd. 5, Daryl Chase Papers, 1954–1968, USU_3.1/10-2, MCUSU (hereafter Chase Papers). “Head of USU Clarifies Race Stand,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 4, 1961, found in Chase Papers. Robert S. Bird, “Integration—And a Campus Romance: A Reporter’s Close-Up of an Incident at a Northern College,” U.S. News and World Report, February 22, 1960, 101, included in Chase Papers. Bird, “Integration—And a Campus Romance,” 100, 102. “Head of USU Clarifies Race Stand.” “Truth Plays No Part as Rumors Run Rampant,” Utah State University Student Life, January 20, 1961. M. R. Merrill to Daryl Chase, January 21, 1961, box 36, fd. 5, Chase Papers. If the whole campus was indeed “seething,” more activist responses would have been generated. Only about seventy students and staff showed up to a subsequent meeting to discuss racial issues on campus. Jacob W. Kijne, letter to the editor, Utah State Student Life, January 24, 1961. Biographical information about Kijne can be found in Advancements in IIMI’s Research, 1989–91: A Selection of Papers Presented at Internal Program Reviews (Singapore: Stamford Press, 1992), 264, and in his curriculum vitae, accessed September 20, 2019, tools.bard.edu/files/events/file.php ?eid=101963. Although Utah State was a predominantly white institution, there was a considerable international con-

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1966), 273; Joe R. Feagin, “The Continuing Significance of Racism: Discrimination Against Black Students in White Colleges,” Journal of Black Studies 22, no. 4 (1992): 546–78; Erica M. Morales, “Intersectional Impact: Black Students and Race, Gender and Class Microaggressions in Higher Education,” Race, Gender and Class 21, no. 3/4 (2014): 48–66; and “Black Student Union,” Encyclopedic History of Utah State University. Wayne B. Garff to Daryl Chase, February 6, 1961, box 36, fd. 5, Chase Papers. Pamela S. Perlich, Utah Minorities: The Story Told by 150 Years of Census Data (Salt Lake City: Bureau of Economic and Business Research Monograph, David S. Eccles School of Business, University of Utah, October 2002), 8. “Memorandum,” January 25, 1961, box 36, fd. 5, Chase Papers. “Haney Interview, 5.” From Haney’s point of view, opportunities for civil rights activism in Logan were nonexistent. Even if Logan’s small group of African Americans were able to find a way to be involved, Haney felt that it would likely have jeopardized their athletic careers and upset campus administrators and the community. “Truth Plays No Part.” Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “The 1960s and the Transformation of Campus Cultures,” History of Education Quarterly 26 (Spring 1986): 1–38. As Horowitz points out, student activism on college campuses was not a 1960s phenomenon; wealthy, elite students had caused stirs on campus since the late-nineteenth century. However, Horowitz also argues that “no one surveying the campus scene in 1959 could have predicted the 1960s.” “USU Inquiry Finds Race Rumors False.” L. D. Naisbitt to Chase, December 16, 1960, box 36, fd. 5, Chase Papers. “Utah State Men’s Basketball All-Time Rosters.” Daryl Chase to L. D. Naisbitt, January 19, 1961, box 36, fd. 5, Chase Papers. Kyle Goon, “Utah Basketball: Utes Pioneer Bill McGill Dies at 74,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 12, 2014; “Billy McGill to be Inducted into Pac-12 Hall of Honor,” Utah Utes, accessed February 21, 2014, utahutes.com /news/2014/2/21/Billy_McGill_to_be_Inducted_into _Pac_12_Hall_of_Honor.aspx; Billy McGill and Eric Brach, Billy “the Hill” and the Jump Hook: The Autobiography of a Forgotten Basketball Legend (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 85–88, 89–90. Chase to L. D. Naisbitt, January 19, 1961, box 36, fd. 5, Chase Papers. John J. Stewart, Joseph Smith: Democracy’s Unknown Prophet (Salt Lake City: Mercury Publishing, 1960), Thomas Jefferson and the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1959), and The Eternal Gift: The Story of the Crucifixion and Resurrection (Orem, UT: Bookmark, 1960). A great example can be found in the press coverage of the dedication of the LDS Institute building prominently situated near the student center on campus. See “Church Official Presides: LDS Dedicates Institute,” Utah State Student Life, November 11, 1960. “Utah State Professor Writes about Savior,” Utah State Student Life, December 14, 1960. It is hard to know the exact proportion of Latter-day Saint students at USU during this period. In 2013, the

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LDS population at USU was about 86 percent, while the LDS population of Utah as a whole was about 60 percent. Research by Utah demographer Pam Perlich has demonstrated that the LDS population has declined over time. See Lindsay Whitehurst, “As Mormon Missionaries Leave, Utah Colleges Look Out of State for Students,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 8, 2014, and Celeste Tholen Rosenlof, “60% of Utahns LDS in 2013, Gallup Says,” KSL, February 24, 2014, ksl.com/?sid=28799562. Buzzer, 1961, 84–94. The First Presidency’s most recent statement on the matter was made in 1949. The First Presidency reiterated Brigham Young’s belief that “Negroes” were cursed descendants of Cain and concluded by affirming that dark skin was a “handicap” and a consequence of premortal “conduct.” “Under this principle,” the First Presidency stated, “there is no injustice whatsoever in this deprivation as to the holding of the priesthood by the Negroes.” Although First Presidency counselor Hugh B. Brown offered some remarks in support of equal civil rights in October 1963 as part of his general conference address, the First Presidency did not make another statement on the matter until December 1969 when it announced that “Negroes, while spirit children of a common Father . . . were not yet to receive the priesthood, for reasons which we believe are known to God.” See documents in Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, eds., The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 64–66, 74–76, 79–83. Stewart, Mormonism and the Negro, 49. Stewart, 48. Stewart, 53. Even though women in the LDS church cannot be ordained to the priesthood, they can participate in temple ordinances. Black women, however, were disqualified from receiving temple covenants and were also ineligible to serve proselytizing missions. The first black woman to serve an LDS mission, Mary Frances Sturlaugson, was called shortly after the priesthood was extended to “all worthy males” in June 1978. See Golden A. Buchmiller, “3 Black Members Called on Missions,” Church News, September 16, 1978. Mark E. Petersen, “Race Problems—As They Affect the Church,” typescript, fd. 1, Mark E. Petersen speech, 1954, Ms0376, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. Annette Peterson to Daryl Chase, “Departmental Memorandum,” April 25, 1961, Chase Papers. John Stewart to J. Golden Taylor, February 18, 1961, Chase Papers. Emphasis mine. John Stewart to Committee on Professional Relations and Faculty Welfare, January 23, 1961, 6, Chase Papers. Stewart to Committee, January 23, 1961, 6, 1; Stewart, Mormonism and the Negro, 7. “Says Racial Dating ‘Very Unwise,’” Salt Lake Tribune, February 4, 1961. Bruce O. Watkins, “Fellowship Explained,” Utah State Student Life, January 31, 1961. “Senate Hears Committee Plan for Better Student Relations,” Utah State Student Life, January 27, 1961. John Cannon, “Recent Events Aim Toward Better Relations,” Utah State Student Life, February 3, 1961. “First at Brigham Young,” New York Times, May 4, 1974. Senior Charles Belcher, one of the African American

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62 Jack R. Spence and George Meyer, letters to the editor, both in Utah State Student Life, February 10, 1961. 63 P. S. Sidhu, letter to the editor, Utah State Student Life, March 7, 1961; Buzzer, 1961, 196–97. 64 Buzzer, 1961, 87, 239. 65 Paul Griffin, letter to the editor, Utah State Student Life, February 14, 1961. 66 Peter Bunting, letter to the editor, Utah State Student Life, February 24, 1961. 67 Bob Atlas, letter to the editor, Utah State Student Life, March 10, 1961; Buzzer, 1961, 207. 68 Tom Lyon, letter to the editor, Utah State Student Life, February 21, 1961. 69 Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 371–72, 387. 70 Shipps, Sojourner, 364–67. 71 M. R. Merrill to Daryl Chase, January 21, 1961, Chase Papers.

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students who competed on the USU track team, was the student body second vice president that school year. According to Haney, Belcher was largely elected by the international student body. He earned his bachelor’s degree from USU and then went on to earn a master’s degree from San Francisco Theological Seminary and a PhD from Ashland Theological Seminary. After his death in 2008, Congresswoman Barbara Lee honored Belcher in Congress. See Buzzer, 1961, 285; Haney, interview, 7; and “Honoring Reverend Charles Belcher,” 110th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 154, no. 141 (September 8, 2008), E1710–E1711, accessed August 30 2019, congress.gov/crec/2008/09/08/CREC-2008-09 -08.pdf. 59 Haney, interview, 6. 60 “Portrait of a President,” USU Magazine, Winter 1966, 6–9. 61 Untitled note, January 21, 1961, Chase Papers.

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Cover of the 1961 Green Book. Courtesy New York Public Library.

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CO O P E R - R O MPATO

In February 2019, Green Book won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film follows the travels of pianist Don Shirley on a concert tour through the Midwest and South before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made segregation illegal. Its title refers to The Negro Motorist Green Book, a tour guide designed to list safe places for African Americans to eat, spend the night, and find other amenities when traveling across the United States when many establishments throughout the nation were “white only.”1 Victor Hugo Green, a postal employee from Harlem, published the Green Book under his own imprint from 1936 until his death in 1960, with a short gap during World War II; his wife, Alma Green, continued as editor after Victor’s death.2 Green collected listings of hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that catered to African Americans, and he encouraged readers to submit recommendations for locations to be included in the guide: in early editions, the author suggested, “There are thousands of places that the public doesn’t know about and aren’t listed. Perhaps you might know of some? If so send in their names and addresses and the kind of business, so that we might pass it along to the rest of your fellow Motorists.”3

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Utah in the Green Book: Segregation and the Hospitality Industry in the Beehive State

The Green Book and a similar guidebook, the Travelguide: Vacation and Recreation without Humiliation, which was published between 1946 and 1957, portrayed African Americans as confident, mobile, American consumers.4 The guides argued that businesses would see the power of economics and welcome African Americans.5 Despite such an optimistic outlook, a number of states—including Utah—lagged behind in listing businesses that welcomed African Americans.6 With this article, my purpose is to explore the hotels that were open to African Americans in Utah and to understand how they fit within the fabric of the state. My argument is threefold. First, hotel proprietors

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down the stairs in a movie at that time.”10 When an interviewer asked further about what she had experienced, Benns elaborated:

Accounts abound of famous African American performers—including Marian Anderson, Ella Fitzgerald, and Harry Belafonte—who performed in Salt Lake City’s white-only hotels and were forbidden to eat or stay in those locations.12 Even though a 1948 Utah law made de jure segregation illegal, “de facto segregation policies persisted for another decade.” Repeated efforts to strengthen the state’s civil rights legislation failed on Capitol Hill throughout the 1940s and 1950s.13

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and guests often grappled with questions, searches, and arrests by the local police; the owners and guests could also be the victims of violence, some of it racially motivated. These hotels were often located in economically challenged parts of town, meaning that black tourists were routed to the low rent district. Second, they were often owned or operated by African American women, and hotel ownership could at times be a viable way for these women to advance economically. Last but not least, these businesses frequently became important political and social gathering places for African Americans.

In the early 1900s, Utah’s cities offered a variety of hotels for overnight white guests. Most prominent among these hotels in Salt Lake City were the Hotel Utah, established in 1911 and largely funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; the Newhouse Hotel, built in 1912 by mining magnate Samuel Newhouse, a son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and the Peery Hotel, opened in 1911 and built by the Peery brothers.7 Salt Lake City was a travel destination for so-called Mormon tourism: Latter-day Saints and others visiting the church’s headquarters. This provided the state with much revenue, and it not until the late 1940s did state officials started to advertise aggressively for other kinds of tourists.8 After World War II, increased spendable income, vacation time, and the affordability of automobiles all contributed to the rise in Americans’ mobility. The segregation of hotel spaces, however, continued to persist in Utah until the mid-1960s with the passing of the Civil Rights Act. Governmental support of segregated accommodations stretched back to the nineteenth century. As F. Ross Peterson explains, the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision opened the floodgates for legally segregating numerous aspects of daily life, and Utah was among the many states with laws segregating housing, public accommodations, theaters, and restaurants.9 Bernice Benns, who was born in 1932 and moved to Salt Lake City in 1946, explained that as an African American teenager, “We saw a lot of movies. Of course, we saw them in the balcony. Because you couldn’t go

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There were certain restaurants that you couldn’t go in. Like, right now, the Utah Cafe which sits up on Main Street. I can remember when you couldn’t—when Blacks couldn’t go in there. If you go in, and every table was vacant but maybe two, they’d say, oh, it’s all reserved. You couldn’t go there. The Hotel Utah. Blacks couldn’t live there. Couldn’t get a room there.11

Prominent African American newspapers also attest to the difficultly black performers had finding hotels in Utah. Although geographically Salt Lake City could be a convenient stopover for national tours, culturally it could be very difficult for African Americas. In 1946, Norman Grantz sponsored a cross-country tour of African American musicians titled “Jazz at the Philharmonic.” Grantz would only book performances where audiences were mixed: “If Negroes and whites are forced to sit by side at his concerts they will lose many of their prejudices,” he asserted. When asked what he thought about hotels, however, he said they were still a problem; Salt Lake City, for example, was described by Grantz as “like . . . South Carolina.”14 This comparison of Utah and the West in general with the South was frequently invoked during the decades of segregation. Over a decade after Grantz likened Salt Lake City to South Carolina, Alice Dunnigan laid bare the discrimination faced by African Americans as well as other people of color in Utah. Writing in the Kansas City, Kansas, Plaindealer, Dunnigan noted that

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Because of these challenges that African American travelers faced while journeying through Utah, travel guides like the Green Book were desirable and necessary. What follows is a chronological discussion of the Utah hotels included in the Green Book with a brief history, as gleaned from newspaper accounts and tax records. Because I rely heavily newspaper records in this research, the events that are reported are largely shaped by what a white newspaper-reading audience would have been interested in consuming: accounts of violence enacted by people of color. These statistics about black violence (as well as accounts of racialized violence) were then used to shore up and enforce Jim Crow attitudes and laws.20 In other words, one way that white people justified segregation to themselves and others was by citing statistics and accounts of the criminality of people of color. Salt Lake City newspapers, in emphasizing this violence, were not just passive reflections of events but rather shapers of the attitudes of whites and perpetuators of discrimination against people of color.

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The LDS church was often blamed for Utah’s slowness in adopting civil rights legislation. For example, in 1959, the Utah Senate killed a civil rights measure, leading to the headline “NAACP Scores Mormons for Blocking Bill” and an assertion that the lobbying by the Restaurant Association and Apartment House Owners Association won out, because the legislation did not have the strong support of the church.16 Several black interviewees who participated in an oral history project addressed the particularly strong racial prejudice they encountered in the state because of the church and the culture it promoted in the state. In 1983, Benns recounted to the interviewee what she told her children: “I explain to them that in a place like Utah, you are not going to get the type of chances that other kids get. . . . It’s nothing against you, it’s just the way people see it in Utah.”17 Wilfred Bocage, vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Salt Lake chapter in 1983, related how, when he first arrived in Utah some years earlier, he came with the knowledge that the LDS church did not allow African Americans to hold the priesthood: “I could not be a Priest. So that said to me that . . . I’m going to be going into an environment that’s going to consider me less than a full fledged citizen.” He then described how he saw that attitude extended “in everyday business, that goes on in this state.”18 Several other interviewees directly related the refusal of the LDS church to admit African American men to the priesthood until 1978 with the extent and vehemence of the racial prejudice they faced while living in Utah. Accounts like these suggest that African American tourists traveling through Utah must have experienced discrimination in their day-today encounters.

In July 1964, the U.S. enacted the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations including housing, hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues. Despite this national law (and earlier city and state laws), business owners continued to turn African Americans away in many states. Alfred Fritz, president of the Salt Lake chapter of the NAACP in 1964, described how under the federal law “a person who registers a complaint of discrimination must wait 120 days to receive redress.” He and others had advocated unsuccessfully for Utah to pass civil rights legislation for fourteen legislative sessions. In 1965, Utah finally passed the Public Accommodations Act, which protected African Americans from discrimination in Utah establishments.19 This of course did not end racial discrimination in housing, as many accounts of men and women of color describe difficulties in renting apartments and purchasing homes in Utah after the passing of the Public Accommodations Act.

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A considerable number of restaurants in various cities in Utah have admitted that they do not serve Negroes, Mexicans, Indians or Orientals. Negroes are refused service in hotels, motels, motor and trailer courts, restaurants, bars, taverns, bowling alleys, night clubs, pool- halls, dance halls, swimming pools and other places of entertainment and recreation in Salt Lake City and Ogden, Utah.15

The New Hotel J. H. Between 1936 and 1939, the Green Book contained no listings at all for Utah. Most African Americans driving cross-country at this time

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Salt Lake City businesses that appeared in the Green Book from the 1940s to the 1960s, as shown on a present-day map of the city. Map created by Deb Miller. Utah Division of State History.

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The late 1940s proved to be an extraordinarily difficult time for Ida Hampton as she was the victim of a violent racist attack on her home. The Salt Lake Telegram reported that on March 17, 1948, “Two Salt Lake county men, alleged ringleaders of a juvenile gang of 10 boys and two girls . . . demolished the interior of an unoccupied house.” Alfred Smith and Ralph Middleton, two white men from the Chesterfield neighborhood, admitted to taking part in “the almost total destruction of a two story frame house” owned by Hampton at 1237 West 2300 South. Hampton had recently purchased the home and had moved some furniture and household items into it. She discovered the horrific event when she brought friends to visit the house. The Telegram described the extent of the damage: “Every window in the dwelling was smashed, sashes were knocked out, doors

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The year 1950 saw the end of the Hamptons’ ownership of the J. H. Hotel after a raid by the anti-vice police squad. On Tuesday, July 11, Hampton was arrested as a “disorderly person,” which could indicate a range of offenses. The following day, she pled guilty in the city court; Hampton remained in jail as of Thursday, July 13, because she had not yet paid the fine of seventy-five dollars and therefore faced spending fifteen days in jail. (Note that this punishment was far worse than what the two white men, Smith and Middleton, received for destroying her home two years earlier.) With Hampton in jail and away from the hotel, very early Thursday morning, the police responded to a “complaint by a tenant that someone was in his room and wouldn’t let him retire.” The police arrested nine unregistered men at the hotel and charged them with vagrancy and trespassing; several were also charged with drunkenness. The “transients” (as they were called in the newspaper article), who ranged in age from twenty to forty, appeared in court and were given a ten-day suspended sentence if they left the city immediately. Those who were charged with drunkenness were ordered to pay a ten-dollar fine as well. Moreover, the police also arrested a housekeeper, Mrs. Lee Arnett, as a “disorderly person,” as well as one Alfred Clarence Smart, with the same charge. Smart

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The 1940 edition of the Green Book introduced one Utah listing: “the New Hotel J. H.” in Salt Lake City, located at 250 West South Temple.22 The advertisement proclaimed it was “the newest and best hotel West of Chicago and East of Los Angeles.” Rooms were fifty and seventy-five cents a day or four dollars a week. An advertisement from 1941 in the Salt Lake Telegram touted “hot and cold running water in all outside rms. Radios,” with the rates having increased to one dollar for one person and $1.50 for two.23 According to city directories and newspaper advertising, James H. Hampton, an African American who had previously worked as a chauffeur for a taxicab company, owned and managed the hotel.24 In 1946, the city directories began to list Ida M. Hampton, his widow, as hotel manager.25 The New Hotel J. H. continued to be the lone listing for Utah in the Green Book until the late 1940s.26

were torn from hinges, panels kicked out, electric light fixtures and wiring was torn up, flooring was ripped up, and dishes smashed.” Garage doors, windows, and awnings were also ruined; in addition, Hampton’s rabbit hutches were found in a nearby canal. Investigators found a note penciled on one of the inside walls declaring the racial motivation for the crime: “If colored people live here, we’ll strike again—The Black Bart gang.”27 Presumably, the vandals had taken the name “Black Bart gang” from a recent Universal Studios about a notorious cowboy robber. Despite the utter destruction of Hampton’s home, Smith and Middleton were only charged with second-degree burglary for stealing a radio from Hampton’s house.28 Both men eventually pled guilty to theft, and the youths were referred to juvenile court.29 The only punishment Smith and Middleton received was probation, and the newspapers made no mention of Hampton getting any kind of compensation for the loss of her house and possessions.30

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could take a more southerly route and bypass Utah altogether: Interstate-80 had yet to be constructed. Those African Americans who traveled to Utah often stayed with friends or family; black newspapers across the country contain social announcements of those traveling and their sojourns with friends and extended family. Of course, just because a venue was not listed in the Green Book did not mean that it did not exist; there might have been hotels and tourist homes open to African Americans in the 1930s.21

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was heavily fined, and Arnett was given a six month jail sentence to be suspended if she left the city.31

Although the newspaper articles do not make it clear the specific “disorderly” actions of Hampton that led to her arrest, it seems clear that the police were cracking down on the hotel, and the courts wanted to expel many of its visitors (registered or unregistered) from the city. This would be one of several African American hotels in the city that were labeled as dens of “vice” that must be eradicated. Several days after the raid, the Salt Lake Telegram reported that the “Salt Lake City commission Wednesday revoked the rooming house license issued to Ida Hampton for the J and H Hotel, 250 S. West Temple. The license was recalled on recommendation of Salt Lake police officials.”32 After leaving the hotel business, Hampton lived for two more years in Salt Lake City, dying at age sixty-four on December 20, 1952. She was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery, as her husband had been.33 Ida Hampton’s experience as the subject of both a gang attack and an anti-vice raid—as well as the uneven justice administered in those events—shows some of the difficulties a black woman could face in mid-century Salt Lake City. New to the 1951 edition of the Green Book was the Hotel Sam Sneed (or Sam Sneed Hotel) at 250 West South Temple, the same property, with a new name and now managed by Charles V. Sneed.34 Sam Sneed, formerly of Wichita, Kansas, might have been the hotel’s namesake and also the headwaiter at the blatantly racist Coon Chicken Inn on Highland Drive in Salt Lake City in the 1940s. This restaurant, which closed in 1957, catered to white customers and relied on many African American stereotypes, including a crude, twelve-foot-high caricature of a black face that customers had to walk through the enter the establishment.35 By the 1954 edition of the Green Book, the Jenkins Hotel had joined the Utah listings with its location as 250 South West Temple, which means it had replaced the Sam Sneed Hotel (which, in turn, had replaced the New Hotel J. H.). Like the Sneeds, the new owners, Roy and Mary Jenkins, apparently had Kansas roots; they owned several properties in that

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state, including two apartment buildings and a “recreation center.”36 In the late 1950s, the Jenkins Hotel changed hands, with Bertha and Wardel L. Sanders as the proprietors of the hotel.37 The Jenkins Hotel was ready to be turned over to new proprietors in late 1960; advertisements proclaimed that the hotel, with its twenty rentable units, was available for lease.38 Charles Tamplin was listed in the Polk directory as manager of the Jenkins Hotel in 1961; one year later, it no longer appeared in the directory.39 Today, a parking lot stands in its place.40 This establishment, one of the few in Utah available to African Americans, remained open for at least two decades but dealt with much turnover and was targeted by the local police. It seems safe to say, based on the career of the hotel at 250 South West Temple, that African Americans traveling to Salt Lake City or attempting to run a hotel there did not have the easiest of roads ahead of them.

The Hotel Astoria The other lodgings in the city listed by the Green Book carried with them some of the same difficulties as the New Hotel J. H. and its successors. The 1948 edition of the Green Book had expanded to include three more entries, the first two of which were the Astoria and the Hotel Astoria (very likely the same place), an establishment located at 528 1/2 West 200 South.41 The Hotel Astoria was advertised in the Salt Lake Telegram as “the West’s Best Colored Hotel,” with rooms at $1.25 a night or six dollars a week and up.42 The half address probably indicates that the Astoria had a back or side entrance, which suggests that the hotel might have offered accommodations to both African American and white patrons, with whites using the front door and people of color required to use a side or back door.43 Or it may suggest that there was a café in the front of the hotel, with the half address indicating a side entrance for all patrons. Newspaper accounts give a glimpse into the early history of this hotel, and many of the events that are reported involve violence. Before the hotel became the Astoria, it had operated for several decades as the Macedonia Hotel (or Hotel Macedonia). The Macedonia might also have functioned as a rooming house

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In the 1920s, a number of newspaper accounts described violent events at the Macedonia that were either perpetrated or experienced

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By March 1928, the Macedonia was up for auction, and the auction advertisement gives a good view of its size: “3-story brick Hotel building. . . . Two storerooms on ground floor and 44 rooms in balance of building, basement, entire building steam heated.”48 The hotel continued operations and continued to appear in the news with Latino residents until 1937, when a deportation case entered the news, that of a Mrs. Mary Kelly, “alleged to be a Syrian,” accused of running an operation involving vice.49 That next year, an anti-vice

by Latino men, often identified in the reports as Mexicans. The scholar Khalil Gibran Muhammad has argued that in the early twentieth century African Americans were associated with criminality and that whites encouraged this connection to foster segregation. This argument can be expanded in a western context to the association of criminality with other people of color; articles about the knife fights, shootings, and robberies at the Macedonia were quick to mention the ethnicity of the people involved.47

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of sorts, with a clientele of ethnic minority laborers.44 Newspaper records further attest to the association of the hotel and its minority guests with criminality. In 1917, for instance, a murder took place at the hotel, allegedly committed by the white manager, Maude Linker; her husband, Thomas Linker; and an African American resident, W. H. Brooks. All three were accused of murdering a wealthy white rancher, Joseph Briggs, a visitor to Salt Lake City who reportedly flashed too much cash when he stopped by the Macedonia.45 The trial of Thomas Linker was complicated by the death of William Scott, a black porter living at the Macedonia who was a prime witness against Linker. Scott died on the eve of Linker’s trial, but it was later determined he died from an accidental overdose of morphine. Linker was then acquitted and the charges were dropped against his wife and their alleged accomplice, Brooks.46

The Macedonia Hotel as it appeared in a tax assessor photo, circa 1936. Courtesy Salt Lake County Archives, file 1-2359.

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raid by police ended up with charges against two African American residents (Luella Bass and Jess Curry), as well as a Margaret Kennedy (who was presumably white because the newspaper did not identify her race).50 Sordid accounts of murder and violence at the Macedonia (as well as natural deaths) continued in Salt Lake City newspapers throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, further connecting its minority patrons to misfortune and criminality.51

Then, in the mid-1940s, the Macedonia appears to have been sold, and its name changed to the Astoria. A prominent African American newspaper, the Arkansas State Press, mentioned that John A. (Doc) Jamieson, who had formerly managed the Oasis in Arkansas, was now the manager of the Astoria, “a 45 room modern hotel, with a private bar and cabaret.”52 Jamieson, a World War I veteran and a member of the NAACP, had enjoyed a remarkable career that included Ivy League degrees and fifteen years as a trainer for the New York Giants.53 Perhaps in accordance with his experience, the Hotel Astoria’s new business model incorporated entertainment. A 1946 advertisement declared the hotel’s recently opened Palm Room to be “Salt Lake’s Gayest Nite Spot,” with dining, dancing, and “the Superb Music of the 4 Jays and Their Aristocratic Rhythms.”54 Another advertisement heralded “the Music of the Aristocrats of Rhythm, Direct from the Cafe Zanzibar,” a popular night club in New York City that featured African American performers.55 And, for at least a time, a boxer going by Tiger Flowers offered free instruction every evening in the public gym of the Astoria, located at “528 W. 2nd South,” for people interested in working with fight promoters.56 The hotel could also be the scene of violence: in 1946, the Hotel Astoria was the site of “an alleged knifing brawl,” during which one Private First Class Roosevelt Jent was critically wounded in his abdomen and leg.57 The evidence suggests that black travelers did visit the Astoria. One B. H. Hillard, in a 1952 Arkansas State Press article, described traveling across the country and pausing for a rest at the Hotel Astoria, whose “manager was the late Doc Jamieson of Little Rock.” Hillard wrote that the

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hotel “is very nice for tourist stop overs.”58 Although Hillard mentioned the Astoria in 1952, the hotel’s fortunes had already changed by at least 1950. Real estate advertisements from 1948 listed a “high-class colored hotel” available in Salt Lake City, “doing a fine business” with forty-four rooms and “a café, bar, dance floor, billiards parlor and gymnasium,” a description that fits the Astoria.59 Jamieson himself died in November 1950, and the 1951 Green Book, a special railway edition, reflected a loss of accommodations for African Americans in Salt Lake City, with only two overnight options. Both Astoria entries were dropped from the 1951 issue, and newspaper advertisements for the hotel had ceased. The building continued to change hands—and then to decline—throughout the next two decades. In 1957, the Green Book added a Salt Lake City listing for the Harlem Hotel at the site of the former Hotel Astoria; according to the 1960 Salt Lake City directory, Eliza Perkins was the proprietor.60 An undated “Economic or Location Obsolescence” card appears in the Salt Lake County tax assessor files that states “owner is trying to fix it up some. It is in low rent district.”61 The 1964 tax assessor file lists a hotel, café, and store; the file includes a note dated 1977 claiming, “Bldg Boarded up.” In addition, a handwritten note on the original tax assessment sleeve states, “Bldg has unsafe sign on door—closed up,” with the instruction “salvage for 1976.”62

The YWCA Beginning in 1948, one Green Book listing for Salt Lake City appeared that differed from the others in both its underlying structure and its physical location: the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) residence at 306 East 300 South, which offered lodging to girls and women.63 The YWCA, originally founded in the mid-nineteenth century, was established in Salt Lake City in the early twentieth century. In addition to providing lodging, the organization offered “social services, education, and leadership training for women.”64 The organization as a whole was originally only interested in the needs of white women and supported segregation. Only in the 1920s did the YWCA turn its attention to women of color.”65

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How Salt Lake City’s chapter of the YWCA engaged with African Americans and racial issues can be glimpsed in occasional newspaper articles, advertisements, and an interview with Doris Fry, an African American woman born in Utah in 1906. Fry recalled that when she was

a teenager, she attended several dances at the Salt Lake City YWCA, as well as dances at the African American Masons’ building and hall.71 During World War II, the organization sponsored integrated events for soldiers, as well as United Service Organizations (USO) dances.72 The YWCA also supported the opening of a USO for African American soldiers on 201 East 100 South, despite local residents’ protests.73 In addition, during the 1940s, the YWCA hosted meetings of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, a national organization founded by Carter G. Woodson, a son of former slaves who earned a doctorate from Harvard University.74 Lastly, a notice from the 1959 Salt Lake City YWCA advertises that the Civic and Society Club was sponsoring “a program to commemorate Negro History Week.”75

Segregation, however, continued in the YWCA, even as its members took up a call to challenge racism in the 1930s.66 A national report about the YWCA, published in 1943 or 1944, surveyed over six hundred chapters in the U.S. and looked at the number of African American members, as well as how many of the activities offered by the organization were interracial. Not surprisingly, the results revealed that very few activities were actually integrated.67 As a response, in 1946, the YWCA “adopted the Interracial Charter, marking a major turning point for the YWCA from a movement tolerant of segregation within its own ranks, to a genuinely interracial movement, seeking to pursue the cause of racial justice both within its organisation and throughout the world.”68 It may have been at this point that the Salt Lake City YWCA started to offer rooms to African American women, or it might have done so earlier and notice only reached the Green Book in time for the 1948 edition.69 Despite the call for integration, however, the YWCA struggled both to define and to implement desegregation in the organization.70

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A dance hosted by the USO and YWCA, June 2, 1943. Ray King, photographer. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 9584.

The Salt Lake City YWCA remained in the Green Book until the end of its publication in 1966. It is unclear how many African American tourists actually stayed there, since women would not have been able to stay with husbands or male family members. Of course, African American women did travel on their own; for example, France A. Davis, pastor of the Cavalry Baptist Church, described how his mother traveled by train alone from “Georgia to New York. To Washington D.C. To Florida. . . . Going to Oregon, going to California. Wherever there was some relatives of hers, she went to visit.”76

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Joan Nabors, an African American woman who taught preschool in Salt Lake City, described how she went from Illinois to Salt Lake City via train in 1960, in order to visit her fiancé and look for a job.77 It is quite possible women such as these took up residence at the YWCA.

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St. Louis Hotel

Also appearing in the 1954 edition of the Green Book was the St. Louis Hotel at 242 1/2 West South Temple, which the 1951 Salt Lake City directory listed as “hotel St. Louis café,” with proprietors George R. and Mrs. Mary James.78 As France Davis has written, for evening entertainment African Americans could go to either the St. Louis Hotel or the Hampton Hotel, as well as other venues, including Redwood Ranch and Dixieland.79 William Price, an African American resident of Salt Lake City and former employee of the whites-only Hotel Utah, described how after black musicians had played at white clubs in town, they would often perform at the black clubs by the St. Louis Hotel: “So if you wanted to see any black entertainer after they got through performing for the white audience, they usually spent some time after hours at those two clubs and you

could go down and see them.”80 The St. Louis Hotel continued operating into the 1970s; in 1974 the Polk gives its proprietor as Milford Ordway, and the last notice I have found for the hotel dates from 1975.81

The Pacific Hotel In the late 1950s, the Green Book listings in Salt Lake City expanded to include the Pacific Hotel on 241 Rio Grande Street. At the start of the decade, the Pacific’s management had advertised it as a “whites only” hotel.82 That changed in 1957, when an African American couple, LaVerne C. and Scenora Jenkins, became the hotel’s proprietors. At least on paper, their path resembled that of other black hoteliers in Utah. LaVerne was born in Missouri in 1915, had two years of college education, and, by 1940, was a waiter with the Union Pacific, living in Ogden. Scenora was born in Oklahoma and belonged to the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Only six years after the Jenkins took on the Pacific Hotel, Scenora died there of natural causes.83 Despite the Jenkins’ record of personal striving, the Pacific Hotel was apparently an unremarkable establishment (with its six toilets and six bathtubs) in an economically depressed

A tax assessor photo of the Pacific Hotel, circa 1936. Courtesy Salt Lake County Archives, tax ID 15–01–179–003.

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For the first time, the 1959 Green Book listed restaurants in Salt Lake City: the Bamboo Restaurant (755 South State Street), the Rotisserie Inn (323 South Main), and “Horman Restaurant” (1270 East 2100 South; correctly, Harman Café). As Jacob Green remembered, “Harmons was the first restaurant here to open the door and allow Blacks in freely.”85 The Bamboo Restaurant appears in the tax assessor records on an unidentified and undated sheet as “755 South State—occupied by a noodle House Restaurant—It is the result of combining two old pioneer houses and adding a commercial front end some space at the rear for storage.”86 Despite the Rotisserie Inn’s closure in 1957, the hotel and restaurant listings for Utah’s capital city remained unchanged from the 1959 edition of the Green Book until the end of its publication run in 1966.87

Ogden Whereas the hotel offerings in Salt Lake City had diminished in the 1951 Green Book, the Utah listings expanded that year to include a hotel in the railway city of Ogden: the Royal Hotel at 2522 Wall Street, which continued to be listed

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Salt Lake City Restaurants

in the travel guide until its last edition, in 1966. African Americans initially moved to Ogden in the nineteenth century with the growth of the railroad, where they worked in the industries and services associated with the road. World War II then saw an influx of more African Americans working in the armed services and with defense in general, and many men and women decided to remain in Ogden after the war ended.88 The growing presence of African Americans in Ogden was reflected in a cluster of businesses on the south side of Twenty-Fifth Street, where “military and railroad personnel provided a steady and paying clientele for those businesses.”89 These included the Davis Hotel, the Royal Hotel, and the Porters’ and Waiters’ Club.

neighborhood.84 What is notable is that the Pacific Hotel was one of the few lodgings open to African Americans visiting Salt Lake City, no matter who they were.

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A notice from the Embry Chapel AME Church of its choral music broadcast over radio station KLO. Scenora Jenkins sits in the front row, at the far right. Ogden Standard-Examiner, May 1, 1949, 8.

The first accommodation in Ogden open to all African Americans was the Davis Hotel at 2548 Wall, owned by Leager V. Davis, a Louisiana-born African American woman. Davis and her husband—Alonzo H. Davis, a dining car chef for the Union Pacific Railroad—began operating the building as a lodging house in 1938; by 1939, they had opened a club at that address.90 But in 1939, tragedy also befell the couple. On September 7, 1939, Alonzo Davis and Oscar Foster, a shoe-shiner, were fatally shot over a gambling issue.91 Testimony at the trial stated that James Floyd, an African American dining car waiter, entered the basement of the hotel to confront Davis. Davis told Floyd to leave the basement, Floyd pulled a gun, and Davis tried

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to flee, stumbling over Foster. In shooting at Davis, Floyd accidentally shot and killed Foster as well.92 Floyd was convicted of voluntary manslaughter by a jury who recommended the maximum penalty, ten years in state prison.”93 The judge imposed a one to ten year sentence.94

After her husband’s death, Leager Davis filed a suit against the Union Pacific Railroad for $4,194, the back salary due to him between 1937 and 1939 after he had been unfairly dismissed from his position.95 Davis alleged her husband was dismissed after being arrested and put on trial for a violent altercation; however, he was acquitted of all charges.96 More specifically, in October 1937, Davis was acquitted of the “intent to commit murder” of another African American man, Jack Wilson, at the Davis hotel the previous March; according to the Ogden Standard-Examiner, “Davis was accused of shooting Wilson in the thigh as he entered the hotel with two city detectives. Davis testified that he had repeatedly requested Wilson to stay away from his place and fired only to frighten him and in self defense.”97 Then, in 1942, the federal government took over the Davis Hotel and converted it into military housing, prompting Davis to buy the Royal Hotel at 2522 Wall Street. The three-story hotel was originally built in 1914 and, in 1935, became a hotel serving Basques who worked in the local sheep industry. Under Davis’s ownership, the hotel catered to an African American clientele. The hotel basement also provided office space for black servicemen during WWII and, in later decades, a meeting place for the Ogden chapter of the NAACP. The three-story building is still in existence and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The hotel is now a low-incoming housing facility for those dealing with mental health and substance abuse challenges.98 Something of the business of the Royal can be gleaned from interviews with African Americans conducted during the 1980s. Alberta West, an African American woman who moved to Hill Air Force Base in 1942 from Texas and started a café in Ogden, described how surprised she was to see Leager Davis when she arrived in Ogden in 1942; West had met Davis in Houston, Texas, over twenty years earlier and knew

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her socially. When asked to describe the Royal Hotel, West stated that the hotel was “lovely, real lovely” and that Davis lived on second first floor in an apartment with “beautiful, beautiful furniture.” In relating the activities that happened at the hotel, West elaborated, “She had a club in the basement, that the American Legion ran it. They had dances down there, and all kinds of parties . . . [the] second and third floors were rooms where the Porters stayed when they came here.” According to West, after Davis’s husband died, her sister came to live with her and help out with the hotel; West described how Davis would take vacations to see her family in Texas and Louisiana and would bring in another woman to assist her sister while she was gone.99 The interviewer repeatedly asked West if Davis had any kind of trouble running the business as a woman, but West deflected the questions, asserting that Davis was a respectable, savvy businesswoman. The same oral history project interviewed another important African American woman in Ogden’s history, AnnaBelle Weakley-Mattson, of the Porters’ and Waiters’ Club and Hotel. That business first opened in 1916 as a place for black railroad employees to rest between runs. Over time, William Weakley, Weakley-Mattson’s husband, became the man most associated with the hotel, which was subsidized by the railroads and catered to their employees. (Perhaps because it of this, the hotel never appeared in the Green Book.) Yet it was a popular and longstanding institution, in large part because of the lounge, which Weakley-Mattson ran and which gained a reputation for hosting famous jazz and blues musicians. Operating the club and hotel was not without troubles. Weakley-Mattson recalled how “Mrs. Davis made a bid for the railway business” in the late 1940s and early 1950s, which then split that clientele between the two hotels.100 “Then there wasn’t that much railroad business as it was because they had two hotels housing railroad crews. Then it made it less likely that you could profit very much and yet we had an investment in the hotels there to house the railroad crews and also had a contract with these people.”101 Even worse, Weakley-Mattson also described how the police would often come looking to the African American owned businesses if there was trouble in town and often

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A mid-century postcard advertising El Rancho Provo. Courtesy of the author.

targeted her; for example, in 1952 a police raid left her with $20,000 in fines, attorney fees, and other costs.102 As evident in these interviews, both Weakley-Mattson and Leager Davis provided strong examples of African American entrepreneurs in the Utah hotel business who were very active in local political and social organizations.

Utah and Beyond In the mid-1950s, Utah’s listings expanded in the Green Book as well, this time in a southerly direction. By 1957, the Utah locations included accommodations national parks, namely the Bryce Canyon Lodge (erroneously listed in “Brigham”) and Zion Lodge at Zion National Park, as well as a hotel in Provo, El Rancho Provo (1015 South State) and the Cedar Crest Lodge Motel (555 South Main Street) in Cedar City. The Green Book at this point reflected both the travel and presence of African Americans along the Wasatch Front, from northern Utah to the national parks of Zion and Bryce in the south.103 This raises the complicated question of segregation in America’s national parks,

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where practices could differ greatly by each park. In December 1945, the Secretary of the Interior amended the rules of the National Park Service (NPS) to prohibit segregation of any kind within NPS jurisdictions—a rule that was communicated to NPS concessionaires. However, full desegregation of all the national parks would take years. Segregation lingered into the 1950s and 1960s at the Shenandoah and Blue Ridge national parks, for instance.104

African Americans who drove across the United States in the 1950s could face radically different experiences of segregation. A 1959 article in the Detroit Free Press entitled “A Negro Tourist Reports: We Were the Big Attraction,” described how Ben Holman and two other travelers took a three-week trip from Chicago to South Dakota and Wyoming. Holman noted that in small towns “we were practically a travel hazard at times as motorists risked a collision to do a double-take.” The men endured much ignorance; for example, an “old-timer” in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, asked if they were baseball players. But overall, they said, they found people quite accommodating. Referring no doubt to the Green Book or Travelguide, Holman

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wrote, “We had been prepared to use a guide which listed places where Negroes could find accommodations without embarrassment. But after a few days, we put the guide in the trunk of the auto and forgot about it.”105 As this article suggested, the guidebook was not needed, for all hotels and restaurants were open and welcoming to the men. However, because it appeared on the travel page of the newspaper, one might wonder if Holman’s article was a kind of advertisement as well, targeted at African Americans who were wary of traveling to states like Wyoming and South Dakota.106 Another group of African Americans, traveling through the Southwest in 1955, had a completely different experience, one with tragic consequences. A number of hotels turned the travelers away, leading to excessive fatigue and a fatal car crash: “They could not have found a welcome at any of the courts from the Texas border to Albuquerque,” stated Edward L. Boyd of the NAACP. Boyd cited a recent survey in which “less than six per cent of more than 100 hotels and tourist courts on US-66 in the city were welcoming Negro tourists.” He estimated that about two hundred to four hundred African American tourists traveled through the city every month. Most hotel owners ignored the city’s antidiscrimination ordinance, so tourists were forced either to sleep in their cars or to carry on driving while extremely tired.107 Discrimination in housing and accommodations for African Americans continued in the 1960s, despite a number of state laws that banned it. A 1964 editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican pointed out an obvious contradiction: “There is no discrimination in public accommodations, we say, although there may be certain hostelries in the immediate area which suddenly find they have no vacancies when a Negro family shows up and asks for a room.”108 To that end, the 1963–1964 edition of the Green Book contained an introductory page entitled “Your Rights, Briefly Speaking!” that included a list of states and their specific laws regarding discrimination, as well as the office in those states where travelers could complain to. Utah was absent from this list.109 Even with the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Green Book authors felt obliged, in 1966, to discuss “Civil Rights: Facts vs. Fiction,” including the public

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accommodation rule and a list of thirty-one states with even stronger protections. As before, Utah was not part of that list.110 With the passage of the Civil Rights Act, publications like the Green Book might have seemed unnecessary, but African Americans tourists in the West still experienced discrimination. The memoirist Lauret Savoy described one such experience from the late 1960s, when she was seven years old and visiting western national parks with her parents. Savoy tried to buy postcards from a store but was shunned by a white clerk who refused to even accept the young girl’s money.111 Although the Green Book ceased publication in the 1960s, not long after the passing of civil rights legislation, Savoy’s account is a reminder that many tourist sites and organizations still did not welcome people of color. gh During its decades of publication, the Green Book facilitated African American travel throughout the United States by helping black tourists find safe, welcoming places to eat and rest. As a historical artifact, it provides an opportunity to understand how willing the people of particular locales—in this case, Utah—were to open their businesses to African Americans. Unfortunately, according to the record left by the Green Book, few of Utah’s restaurants and hotels allowed African Americans to patronize them. Equally unfortunate was the reality that those establishments and their owners were often the targets of police raids and racially motivated violence, thereby reinforcing the stereotyped association of crime with people of color. Despite this, the history of Utah’s desegregated hotels is a vibrant one, filled with the appeal that a proprietor like Doc Jamieson could bring to a hotel or the agency of women such as Leager Davis and AnnaBelle Weakley-Mattson, who parlayed hotel ownership into personal success and then into community progress. Notes 1

Later editions of the Green Book expanded to be international in scope. Twenty-one editions of the Green Book published between 1936 and 1966 are available online in the New York Public Library Digital Collections. The guide was published under the name The Negro Motorist Green Book through 1951; the title then

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Coleman’s dissertation, “A History of Blacks in Utah, 1825–1910” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1980). Bernice Benns, interview with Leslie G. Kelen, June 9, 1983, interview 1, 8, “Interviews with African Americans in Utah, 1982–1988,” Ms0453, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, transcript available online, accessed November 14, 2019, collections.lib.utah.edu/search ?facet_setname_s=uum_iaau. Benns, interview 1, 20–21. Ronald G. Coleman, “Blacks in Utah History: An Unknown Legacy,” The Peoples of Utah, ed. Helen Z. Papanikolas (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1976), 136; Peterson, “‘Blindside,’” 4–5; Rebecca Andersen, “The Great White Palace: African American Segregation in Utah,” Utah Humanities, accessed September 9, 2019, utahhumanities.org/stories/items/show/228. Peterson, “‘Blindside,’” 9. Based on the collection of interviews with African Americans living in Utah, I would amend Peterson’s assertion to say that forms of segregation continued in Utah longer than “another decade” after 1948. J. Herschel Barnhill, “Civil Rights in Utah: The Mormon Way,” Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West, ed. Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), 125. Helen Davis, “‘Jazz at Philharmonic’ Deals Blow to Race Bias,” Chicago Bee, May 26, 1946, 13. Alice Dunnigan, “Human Rights Committee Shows Racial Bias on Increase in the West,” Kansas City (KS) Plaindealer, August 30, 1957, 1. “NAACP Scores Mormons for Blocking Bill Salt Lake City,” Los Angeles Tribune, April 3, 1959, 6, 19; see also, “Civil Rights Measure Dies in Utah Senate Committee,” (Little Rock) Arkansas State Press, April 10, 1959. Benns, interview 1, 17. Wilfred Bocage, interview by Leslie Kelen, September 7, 1983, 44, “Interviews with African Americans.” “NAACP Press Utah—More Civil Rights,” Daily Utah Chronicle, November 9, 1964, 1. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1. In addition, the Travelguide listed several options for accommodations not included in the Green Book. See Rugh, “Selling Sleep,” 73–75. Newspapers do offer some evidence of African American tourists to Salt Lake City in the 1930s and 1940s, although they do not record where the visitors spent the night or dined. For example, a 1949 article describes how members of the Washington, D.C. Educational Touring Club visited Salt Lake City, after which they presented Utah’s governor “with a certificate of good will.” As the article explained, “The club is an organization to promote good will for colored people.” “Negro Club Pays Call on Governor,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, August 22, 1949, 7. Green Book, 1940, 45. The New Hotel J. H. was also known as the “J. H. Hotel” or the “J & H Hotel.” The 1940 Salt Lake City directory included the hotel’s address, with no manager or proprietor, and listed Hampton’s personal address as “Hampton, Jas H. (New Hotel J. H.) 250 West South Temple.” U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1940, 381, 651, digital image, accessed November 15, 2019, ancestry.com. For a

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changed to The Negro Travelers’ Green Book (without and then with a possessive apostrophe) through 1959, The Travelers’ Green Book through 1961, the Green Book in 1962, and Travelers’ Green Book through 1966. The New York Public Library Digital Collections, accessed March 5, 2019, digitalcollections.nypl.org. 2 “Navigating the Green Book,” New York Public Library, accessed November 14, 2019, publicdomain.nypl.org/green book-map/. 3 The Negro Motorist Green Book (New York: Victor H. Green, 1938), introduction (hereafter Green Book). 4 Leslie Nash, ed., Travelguide: Vacation and Recreation without Humiliation (New York). The Travelguide was created by William “Billy” Butler, a musician and bandleader, who had traveled extensively for his work. See Cotten Seiler, “‘So That We as a Race Might Have Something Authentic to Travel By’: African American Automobility and Cold-War Liberalism,” American Quarterly 58 (2006): 1091–1117, and Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 105–128. A number of scholars have discussed African American “automobility” and travel during segregation. Paul Gilroy, “Driving While Black,” Car Cultures: Materializing Culture, ed. Daniel Miller (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 81–104; Mark Foster, “In the Face of Jim Crow: Prosperous Blacks and Vacations, Travel and Outdoor Leisure, 1890–1945,” Journal of Negro History 84, no. 2 (1999): 130–49; Kathleen Franz, “The Open Road: Automobility and Racial Uplift in the Interwar Years,” Technology and the African American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 131–54; Jennifer Reut, “Travelguide: Vacation and Recreation Without Humiliation,” National Trust for Historic Preservation (blog), February 18, 2019, accessed March 5, 2019, saving places.org/stories/. 5 Seiler, “So That We as a Race,” 1104. 6 Susan Sessions Rugh, “Selling Sleep: The Rise and Fall of Utah’s Historic Motels,” Utah in the Twentieth Century, ed. Brian Q. Cannon and Jessie L. Embry (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009), 73–75. 7 Ray Boren, “Hotel Utah, 100 Years of History,” Deseret News, June 7, 2011; “Beautiful Hotel Utah Opens Friday,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 3, 1911, 9; Marc Haddock, “Newhouse Hotel—and Landmark to Explosive End,” Deseret News, November 9, 2009; “Returned Missionary Surprised at Growth,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 19, 1910, 2. 8 Stephen Sturgeon, “The Disappearance of Everett Ruess and the Discovery of Utah’s Red Rock Country,” Utah in the Twentieth Century, 30–31. 9 F. Ross Peterson, “‘Blindside’: Utah on the Eve of Brown v. Board of Education,” Utah Historical Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2005): 6. In 1939, the white realtor Sheldon Brewster proposed that a ghetto or “special residential district” be created in Salt Lake City for African Americans. The area, he proposed, would stretch “from Sixth South to Ninth South and Main to Fifth East.” According to Sheldon, although the 1930 census only listed 1,108 African Americans in Utah, “an influx of members of that race is expected soon and that certain interests are attempting to buy and rent a group of houses for them.” “Negro Area Plan Draws Protests,” Salt Lake Telegram, November 2, 1939, 7. For a history of earlier African Americans in Utah, see Ronald G.

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local advertisement for the hotel, see Salt Lake Tribune, July 22, 1941, 19. Salt Lake Telegram, March 15, 1941, 28. See, for example, Salt Lake Tribune, August 16, 1943, 15. According to the 1930 U.S. census, Ida Hampton was born about 1898 in Kansas and was working as hotel maid in Salt Lake City; her husband, James Hampton, was born about 1885 in Tennessee and worked as chauffeur for a taxicab company. 1930 United States Federal Census, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County, Utah, page 1A, enumeration district 0060, FHL microfilm 2342155, James H. Hampton, digital image, accessed November 14, 2019, ancestry.com. U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1946, 683, digital image, November 15, 2019, ancestry .com. According to his death certificate, James Hampton died in Salt Lake City on May 20, 1945, from coronary thrombosis. He was born in 1871 and is buried in the Mount Olivet Cemetery. Utah, Death and Military Death Certificates, 1904–1961, s.v. “James Hampton,” Certificate of Death, May 20, 1945, digital image, accessed November 14, 2019, ancestry.com. Various Salt Lake City newspaper notices from the 1940s document the J. H. Hotel. See, “Trio Returned to Denver,” Salt Lake Telegram, November 13, 1941, 7; “Storage Room Fire in S.L. Hotel Causes $500 Loss,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 15, 1948, 19; “Transient Booked on Arson Count,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 16, 1948, 22. “Two Alleged Leaders of Juvenile Vandal Gang Held,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 22, 1948, 17. “Court Arraigns Gang Suspects,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 23, 1948, 15; “2 Men Bound over on Burglary Count,” Salt Lake Telegram, April 6, 1948, 17. “Theft Sentencing Set for May,” Salt Lake Telegram, April 19, 1948, 17. “Vandal on Probation,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 23, 1948, 10B. “Police Arrest 12 at Hotel,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 13, 1950, 14. “Revoke Rooms Permit,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 20, 1950, 10. U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1951, 422, and 1952, 407, digital image, accessed November 15, 2019, ancestry.com. According to her death certificate, Ida Kathleen Fitzpatrick Hampton was born in December 1887 in Topeka, Kansas. Her death certificate lists her father as “Ahab J. Fetzpatrick” from Alabama and her mother as “Mary E. Nettles,” birthplace unknown. Utah, Death and Military Death Certificates, 1904–1961, s.v. “Ida Kathleene Hampton,” digital image, accessed November 15, 2019, ancestry. com. According to the 1920 U.S. Census, Ida Hampton’s father, Ahab Fetzpatrick, was living with Ida’s sister, Sheva Abbott, in Ogden on Grant Street and working as a carpenter. They later moved to Los Angeles, California. 1920 United States Federal Census, Ogden, Weber County, Utah, roll T625_1869, page 14B, enumeration district 152, Ahab Fetzpatrick, digital image, accessed November 15, 2019, ancestry.com. Charles Sneed’s wife is listed as Nora F. Sneed. U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1952, 483, digital image, accessed November 15, 2019, ancestry .com. “Timely Topics,” Wichita Post-Observer, July 24, 1953, 4; France A. Davis, “Utah in the 40s: An African Ameri-

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can Perspective,” Beehive History 25 (1999): 27, accessed March 5, 2019, collections.lib.utah.edu/details ?id=419944. “Mrs. Roy Jenkins, 1309 Van Buren St, will leave Topeka, Monday, August 17, to rejoin her husband, Roy Jenkins, in Salt Lake City, Utah, where the Jenkins’ now make their home.” “Social and Personal,” Kansas Whip (published as Kansas American), August 14, 1953, 6; see also, “Recreation Center Moves to 118 East 4th,” February 4, 1955, 4, and “Social and Personal,” Kansas Whip, April 1, 1955. U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1959, 568, 992, and 1960, 596, 1039, digital images, accessed November 18, 2019, ancestry.com. See, for example, the advertisement in “Business Opportunities,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 18, 1960, C11. Polk Salt Lake City Directory (Salt Lake City: R. L. Polk), 1960, 596, and 1961, 572. The earlier tax records for this hotel and property are not in the Salt Lake County archives, either in the tax ledgers or the dead tax records. The 1948 Green Book listed the Astoria between 400 and 500 West and a Hotel Astoria at 200 South. The specific street address of the Hotel Astoria is given in 1949 the Green Book as 528 1/2 West 200 South, a location that fits both of the 1948 listings. Since I have been unable to uncover any information about the other Astoria, I assume that this may be a case in which the two listings in the Green Book refer to the same establishment. The specific street address is given in the1949 Green Book; the 1948 edition only lists 2nd South as the address. Green Book, 1948, 76, 1949, 70; see also Sanborn Map Company, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County, Utah, 1950 (New York: Sanborn, 1950), sheet 121, accessed November 1, 2019, collections .lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6000cfw. The Hotel Astoria advertised for six dollars per week “and up” in the paper. Salt Lake Telegram, August 19, 1946, 11, November 30, 1946, 11. My thanks to the Salt Lake County archivists for their help, especially to archivist Daniel Cureton. See Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). “Man and Wife Held in Murder Mystery,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, May 25, 1919, 13; “Former Ogden Man and Wife Held for Murder,” Ogden Daily Standard, May 26, 1919, 5. “Witness for State Dies on Eve of Trial,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 17, 1919, 24; “State Chemist Will Analyze Scott Medicine,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, July 11, 1919, 12; the article states that Scott had an overdose of morphine in his stomach, but formaldehyde from the embalming process interfered with the results. “Knife Is Used in Fight over Woman,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 9, 1922, 7; “Mexican Uses Knife on Intended Victim,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 26, 1919, 24; “S. L. Policeman Shoots down Alleged Thief,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 3, 1925, 1, 9; “Man Charged with Slashing Hotel Guest,” Salt Lake Telegram, November 4, 1927, 2. Auction notice, Salt Lake Telegram, March 2, 1928, 24. “Vice Charges Made in Deportation Case,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 4, 1937, 15 (qtn.); see also, “Laborer Drops Dead in S. L. Hotel Room,” Salt Lake Telegram, January 19, 1929, 2; “Police See No Fun In Breaking Down Doors,” Salt Lake Telegram, November 1, 1930;

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71 Doris Fry, interview with Leslie Kelen, March 31, 1984, 6, “Interviews with African Americans.” 72 Susan Whitney, “History of YWCA Comes to Life at Exhibit of 100 Salt Lake Photos,” March 24, 2006, accessed March 5, 2019, deseretnews.com. 73 “Site Picked for Negro USO Center,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 10, 1944, 17; see also Salt Lake Telegram, May 17, 1944, 11. 74 “Meeting Held,” Salt Lake Telegram, February 14, 1940, 19. 75 “Negroes to Note History Week,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 14, 1959, 10. 76 France Davis, interview with Leslie Kelen, March 31, 1984, interview 2, 2, “Interviews with African Americans.” 77 Joan Nabors, interview with Leslie Kelen, December 30, 1987, 16, “Interviews with African Americans.” 78 Green Book, 1954, 66; U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1952, 491, digital image, accessed November 27, 2019, ancestry.com. By the time of its listing in the Green Book, the St. Louis Hotel and café had been in existence for well over a decade; it originally appeared in the 1936 city directory as the St. Louis Hotel, with proprietor George R. James, at 23 South West Temple; by the 1939 directory, the café is listed as 242 West South Temple with a hotel as 242 1/2. U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1936, 693; 1939, 761, digital images, accessed December 16, 2019, ancestry.com. The 1940 city directory lists several hotels clustered on this block of South Temple, including the Columbus Hotel (254 W.), the “New Hotel J H” (250 W.), the St. Louis Hotel (242 1/2 W.), and the New Lindsay Hotel (240 W.). U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1940, 1125, digital image, accessed December 16, 2019, ancestry.com. 79 Davis, “Utah in the 40s,” 27. 80 William Price, interview with Karen Lyman, 1982, interview 1, 11, “Interviews with African Americans.” 81 The 1972 Polk directory lists George R. James as proprietor of the St. Louis Hotel. The 1974 Polk gives Milford Ordway as the proprietor. Note that the St. Louis Hotel is not listed in the 1976 Polk city directory. U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1972, 695; Polk Salt Lake City Directory (Salt Lake City: R. L. Polk), 1974; see also, Salt Lake Tribune, February 10, 1975, 31. 82 Green Book, 1959, 67; Salt Lake Tribune, October 27, 1952, 28; U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1960, 895, digital image, accessed November 27, 2019, ancestry.com. The 1960 Salt Lake City directory lists proprietors LaVern C. and Mrs. Senora Jenkins; note that these Jenkins are not to be confused with the proprietors of the Jenkins Hotel. The Rio Grande Hotel building is listed in the tax accessor records as built in 1911. 83 U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995, Ogden, Utah, 1956, 305, and Salt Lake City, Utah, 1957, 558, digital images; U.S. WWII Draft Cards Young Men, 1940–1947, s.v. “Laverne Charles Jenkins”; and 1940 United States Federal Census, Ogden, Weber County, Utah, Year: 1940; Census Place: Ogden, Weber, Utah, roll m-t0627-04222, page 15A, enumeration district 29–17, Laverne Jenkins, digital image, all accessed November 15, 2019, ancestry.com. 84 Tax assessor file, tax ID 15-01-179-003, 1938, 1958, 1978, SLCA; Polk Salt Lake City Directory (Salt Lake City: R. L. Polk), 1958, p. 797; Provo (UT) Daily Herald, April 12, 1963, 4, and June 21, 1963, 4.

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“Deportation Looms for Young Mexican,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 18, 1932, 21. “Police Jail Three in Antivice Raid,” Salt Lake Telegram, February 9, 1938. “Man Charged with Murder,” Salt Lake Telegram, December 12, 1938; “Jail Sentence Imposed on Liquor Sale Charge,” Salt Lake Telegram, April 28, 1939; “Battery Suspect Ordered to Find New Room,” Salt Lake Telegram, January 31, 1942; “Fall Death in Hotel Declared Accidental,” Salt Lake Telegram, April 4, 1944; “Obituaries: Herbert L. Noble,” Salt Lake Telegram, December 23, 1940. (Little Rock) Arkansas State Press, June 21, 1946, 8. “John A. Jamieson,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 19, 1950, 23; U.S., Headstone Applications for Military Veterans, 1925–1963, s.v. “John A. Jamieson,” digital image, accessed November 1, 2019, ancestry.com. Salt Lake Telegram, January 5, 1946, 5. Salt Lake Tribune, January 26, 1946, 6; John Wriggle, Blue Rhythm Fantasy: Big Band Jazz Arranging in the Swing Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), chap. 3. Salt Lake Telegram, June 24, 1948, 30. This trainer was perhaps “Young Tiger Flowers,” who appeared in World War II–era fights. “Bulletin,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 4, 1946, 9; see also “Suspect Held in S. L. Knifing,” Ogden Standard Examiner, June 5, 1946, 5. The newspaper states that Roosevelt Jent was twenty-three years old; from Fort Lewis, Washington; and being cared for at Fort Douglas. B. H. Hillard, “Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City,” (Little Rock) Arkansas State Press, May 30, 1952, 7. Salt Lake Telegram, July 5, 1948, 18. U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1960, 499, digital image, accessed November 15, 2019, ancestry.com. Economic or location obsolescence card, tax assessor file, 528 West 200 South, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County Archives, West Valley City, Utah (SLCA). Tax assessor file, tax ID 15-01-108-014, ID 1801170701, SLCA. Green Book, 1948, 76. The boarding house was at 306 East 300 South; the YWCA clubhouse address was 322 East 300 South. See, for example, “Daily Calendar of Events,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 11, 1939, 8. Nancy Marie Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 3. “History,” YWCA, accessed November 19, 2019, ywca.org /about/history/. Helen Laville, “‘If the Time Is Not Ripe, Then It Is Your Job to Ripen the Time!’ The Transformation of the YWCA in the USA from Segregated Association to Interracial Organization, 1930–1965,” Women’s History Review 15 (2006): 359–83. Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, 160. Laville, “‘If the Time Is Not Ripe,’” 370; see also Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, 162–69. I have not yet been able to track down when the Salt Lake City YWCA began to offer overnight accommodations to African American guests. Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, 167; Laville, “‘If the Time Is Not Ripe,’” 372. According to the YWCA, “In the 1940s and 1950s, YWCA pushed to integrate racially segregated housing at associations across the U.S.” See the entry for “1955” at ywca.org/about/history/.

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85 Green Book, 1959, 67; Jacob Green, interview with Leslie Kelen, April 23, 1984, interview 1, 17, “Interviews with African Americans.” Green also mentioned the Lunt motel (at 500 East and 400 South) as the only one he remembered allowing African Americans. Note that the 1972 Polk city directory lists Mrs. Louse P. Creger as manager of Harman Café. 86 Tax assessor file, tax ID 16-07-105-003, SLCA. 87 “Death Takes Cesare Rinetti, 88,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 20, 1971, 26. 88 Eric Stene, “The African-American Community of Ogden, Utah: 1910–1950” (M.A. thesis, Utah State University, 1994), accessed September 17, 2019, digitalcommons .usu.edu/etd/4526/. 89 France Davis, “Utah in the 40s,” 26. 90 Richard C. Roberts and Richard W. Sadler, A History of Weber County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Weber County Commission, 1997), 398; Polk Ogden City Directory (New York: R. L. Polk), 1936–1939; 1940 United States Federal Census, Ogden, Weber County, Utah, roll m-t0627-04222, enumeration district 29–17, page 12B, digital image, Leager V. Davis, accessed December 2, 2019, ancestry.com. The 1950 Sanborn map indicates that this building, in combination with no. 2546, contained twenty apartments. Sanborn Map Company, Ogden, Weber County, Utah, 1950 (New York: Sanborn, 1950), sheet 049, accessed March 5, 2019, collections.lib .utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6fx7ms8. 91 “Floyd Facing First Degree Murder Charge,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, September 12, 1939, 7; “Ogden Waiter Held in Double Slaying” Salt Lake Tribune, September 8, 1939, 14; “Nine Persons Held as Police Gather Evidence Regarding Death Cases,” Ogden StandardExaminer, September 11, 1939, 12. 92 “Court Opens Death Trial,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, September 26, 1939, 2A. 93 “Ogden Slayer Convicted of Manslaughter,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 19, 1940, 8. 94 “Waiter Facing Term in Prison,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, January 22, 1940, 2. 95 “Pay Due Husband, Wife Alleges in U.P. Suit,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, June 9, 1940, 13A. 96 “Widow Starts Damage Suit,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, April 27, 1940, 8. 97 “Jury Acquits Accused Negro,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, October 28, 1937, 3. I have not been able to discover how the suit against the Union Pacific Railroad was settled. 98 Roberts and Sadler, A History of Weber County, 398; Miriam Murphy, “Royal Hotel Served Basques and African Americans,” Beehive History, October 1996,

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accessed December 2, 2019, issuu.com/utah10/docs; Mitch Shaw, “Evictee of Low-Income Housing for Mentally Ill Says Its Rules Are Unreasonable,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, January 27, 2016. 99 Alberta West, interview with Leslie Kelen, May 15, 1984, 24 (qtn.), 40–41, “Interviews with African Americans.” 100 AnnaBelle Mattson, interview with Leslie Kelen, October 21, 1983, part 1, 14, “Interviews with African Americans”; see also Stene, “African-American Community of Ogden,” 17–20. 101 Mattson, interview, part 1, 14–15. 102 Mattson, interview, part 1, 21. 103 Green Book, 1957, 65, 1959, 67. Other national parks were listed for the first time in the 1957 edition, including Crater Lake in Oregon and Yellowstone in Wyoming. The 1959 edition of the Green Book corrected the location of Bryce Canyon National Park. 104 Title 36—Parks and Forests, Federal Register, December 8, 1945, 10, no. 240, 14866, accessed December 4, 2019, govinfo.gov/app/collection/fr/1945/12/08; Reed Engle, “Laboratory for Change,” Resource Management Newsletter (January 1996), available online at “Segregation and Desegregation at Shenandoah National Park,” National Park Service, accessed March 5, 2019, nps.gov/articles/segregation-and-desegregation-at -shenandoah.htm; Susan Shumaker, “Untold Stories from America’s National Parks: Segregation in the National Parks,” The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, accessed March 5, 2019, pbs.org/nationalparks /about/untold-stories/. I have been unable to discover if there were segregated overnight accommodations and camping sites at Zion or Bryce prior to 1957, and I plan to continue researching this for another project. 105 Ben Holman, “A Negro Tourist Reports: We Were the Big Attraction,” Detroit Free Press, June 28, 1959, B7. 106 Holman, “A Negro Tourist Reports.” Susan Sessions Rugh records how, ten years earlier in Cheyenne, Wyoming, “Reverend Raymond Calhoun, his wife, and their two infant children were denied accommodations at eight different places.” Rugh, “Are We There Yet?” 75. 107 “Motels Not Open to Negro Tourists Says NAACP Man,” Albuquerque (NM) Journal, August 16, 1955, 1–2. 108 “No Segregation?” Santa Fe New Mexican, June 3, 1964, 4. For a similar account of housing discrimination, see Nabors, interview, 23. 109 Green Book, 1964, 2–4. 110 Green Book, 1966, 2. 111 Lauret Savoy, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2015), 15.

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Private Visions: Outsider Art on Utah’s Cultural Landscape

Some of Utah’s most captivating historical constructions are the artistic installations that have been labeled outsider art. This article highlights seven examples of Utah’s outsider art over the past 130-plus years, arranged roughly in chronological order. They include the following: “The Old Curiosity Shop or Crazy House” in Salt Lake City; the “King World Inscription” near Moab; Van’s Hall in Delta; Gilgal Garden in Salt Lake City; the Bottle House in Teasdale; Pizy Alldredge’s yard art in Oak City, Millard County; and Ralphael’s Church/School in Salt Lake City. The term outsider art was coined in the early 1970s and refers to the large-scale artistic creations of individuals working outside the realm of traditional art—and even traditional construction.1 Many cultures from around the world have produced significant examples of outsider art and scholars have used a number of terms to describe the artistic works of the craftspeople, artisans, and visionaries who have followed their own private muses to generate unique cultural environments. These terms include marginal art, naïve art, rural folk art, self-taught art, primitivism, vernacular and popular urban art, art of the mentally deranged, Art Brut, and visionary art environments.2 Regardless of the labels assigned to these works and regardless of their wide variety and individualized nature, they share a number of common characteristics. Their creators were usually manual workers who embarked on their artistic careers after retirement. They were mostly men, oftentimes widowers, although there were some women and even a few couples. The artists generally used salvaged or recycled materials such as broken crockery, glass, beads, metal, or broken equipment. Concrete and stucco were especially favored materials because of their malleability, strength, and low cost. Most outsider art is located outdoors, usually on the artist’s property. A good number of the creators took many years, sometimes decades, to complete their works. They commonly employed themes of religion and patriotism, God and country, as well as tributes to honorable labor: farming, lumbering, the building trades, pioneering and settlement, and the hard work of common folks. Artists’ works were often unpopular with their neighbors and sometimes prompted questions

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Miller was also generally regarded as being of an unsound mind and “suffering with chronic religious mania.”6 Although he was considered “harmless and even a great favorite among children,” he was not without critics.7 In 1904, some of Miller’s neighbors feared that his “crazy” preaching would corrupt their children, even though he rebutted that he was reciting the Swedish alphabet to them. The ensuing investigation by the authorities resulted in his

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Swedish immigrant Anders John Miller created two elaborately festooned houses on the “Tenth Ward Bench,” an eastside Salt Lake City neighborhood, between about 1880 and his death in 1913.3 Miller was born in 1837, converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in his native land, and probably came to Utah in the late 1870s.4 He first appears in the 1879– 1880 city directory, which lists his occupation as “painter” and his residence as the north side of Third South between Eighth East and Ninth East (later referred to over the years more precisely and variously as 273 and 277 South 800 East and 803 East Third South). The 1885 city directory lists his occupation intriguingly as

The “Gentleman Whitewasher,” as some called Miller, was a well-known character throughout the city, recognized for his distinctive dress as much as for his considerable skill in his profession. He reportedly dressed every day in a white shirt, black tie, swallowtail coat, black trousers, and white fabric gloves. In addition, Miller often tied a white apron around his waist. A concern about riding on streetcars caused him to walk everywhere, carrying his long-handled brushes and large bucket.5

“The Old Curiosity Shop” or “Crazy House,” Salt Lake City

“toy manufacturer,” but thereafter he is consistently referred to as a whitewasher or “kalsominer.” That was the trade he was best known for in the city for almost a quarter century.

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about the artists’ mental stability. Some artists combined words with images. Animal images were often a part of outsider art installations. The projects often became an obsession, compelling their creators to continue against daunting odds. The following are some of the noted outsider art installations in Utah.

Anders Miller residence in the Salt Lake City Tenth Ward, as the neighborhood was called. C. R. Savage, photographer. Utah State Historical Society, photo no. 8680.

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Anders Miller residence. Note the shrine-like installations, bunting, and other decorations. Utah State Historical Society, photo no. 8681.

commitment to the state mental hospital in Provo.8 Other neighbors soon interceded on Miller’s behalf, and he was eventually released and moved back into his rented house on Eleventh East.9 Miller’s involuntary commitment to the state hospital, as well as the language used to describe him, connect his experience to a key theme in contemporary and even scholarly discussions of outsider artists: a tendency to characterize such artists as unwell and eccentric. Some of the latest research, however, bypasses the preoccupation with an individual’s perceived instability in an effort to understand how his or her artwork fulfilled a therapeutic need—often in response to personal traumas.10 This could have been the case for Anders Miller. Even before Miller’s stint at the state hospital, locals referred to him as “Crazy Miller,” and he was cited in newspaper articles in the early 1900s as an “aged recluse,” “eccentric character,” and “unfortunate man.” The “unfortunate” description is based on two key events. The first was the death and burial at sea of Miller’s sweetheart, Olga Hanson, who was coming to join him in Utah in the early 1880s. The news

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of her death triggered a long-term physical illness; he eventually recovered but the illness reportedly threw him into a perpetual state of mental instability. When he finally recovered, he began pursuing two obsessions. The first was what would become a thirty-year vigil of burning a candle in the window of his small house to guide Olga, whom he believed would come find him when the sea gave up its dead. His second obsession was decorating the outside and inside of his homes in the manner shown in the photographs of the period.11 The adornments on Miller’s homes consisted largely of bunting—usually red and white, although sometimes blue as well—draped across the front of the house and property. The black and white photos that exist of his house do not, of course, portray the colors, but Miller’s obituary refers to him as “the man known for living in a house of many colors.”12 There were also artificial flowers and wreaths, garlands, and shrine-like installations featuring framed paintings, among other objects. Miller draped the interior walls of his house in bunting and lace curtains, accented with bunches of dried

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King World Sandstone Carving, Moab

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The second unfortunate event in Miller’s life was actually the way he died. Whether from his ever-present candle in the window or some other source of flame, his adornments caught fire one day and burned down his house. Miller survived that first fire. This probably happened in the mid-1890s, when his address, as listed in the city directories, changed from 277 South 800 East to 343 South 1100 East.14 The owner

On January 17, 1913, Miller’s coal oil lamp exploded in this house and set fire to the decorations. Miller, who was seventy-five years old at the time, managed to escape the burning house but reportedly went back in to rescue his cat. He suffered severe burns and died a couple of weeks later.16 The elaborate environment that he had created over the years expired with him. His last words reportedly were, “I have waited many years, but I will see Olga now pretty soon.”17

One woman who lived in the neighborhood recalled that Miller also decorated with clay birds, fruit, and plants, which he made as a hobby. Some of the birds he painted in their natural colors, while others he enlivened with vivid hues and a profusion of dots. Miller made hundreds of these birds and gave them away to visitors, who would come on Sunday evenings—the only time he accepted visitors—to view the “Old Curiosity Shop.” There were often twenty-five to fifty people waiting in line to go through the house.

of the Eleventh East house allowed Miller to move there under the express condition that he would not decorate the place. But decorating was an obsession for him, and soon, little by little, he started draping bunting and lace curtains and placing his clay birds and fruit in the new house.15

In 1935, an itinerant man—known variously as Aharron Andeew, Aaron Andrew, Andrew Aliason, Harlan Andrew, and M.C.F.

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foliage. A lace spread with a few large wreaths of artificial flowers always covered the bed, reportedly representing his sweetheart’s grave.13

The King World bas relief, near Moab, Utah. Aaron Andrew (as he was known locally) created this sculpture in the mid-1930s. Today, it is located on the property of the Moab Regional Hospital. Utah State Historic Preservation Office.

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Two undated photographs of Aaron Andrew, who was also called Aharron Andeew, Andrew Aliason, Harlan Andrew, and M.C.F. Hhaesuss. Source of original photos unknown. Duplicate copies, Utah State Historic Preservation Office.

Hhaesuss—carved a bas relief sculpture into a large sandstone boulder located about halfway up a steep, rocky hillside east of Highway 191, just north of Moab. The long, narrow boulder is approximately twenty-five feet long, four feet wide, and six feet tall. The carving, which covers less than half of the boulder’s face, consists of a man on a horse (though only the head of each is actually shown) and an enigmatic inscription. The man is wearing a Cossack-type hat and has military-style ornaments on his collar. The eastern and western hemispheres are depicted on the two collar ornaments and, more visibly, on the hat. A sword and what appears to be a double-barreled shotgun are over his shoulders. The inscription contains the date “1935,” “Hhæsuss” (an apparent reference to Jesus), “America,” the sculptor’s name (Aharron Andeew), and the phrases “King of America” and “King World.” The man’s profile in the sculpture may be Andrew himself. A 1986 article in a local publication provides the most descriptive account of Andrew’s time in Moab, based on the recollections of Lloyd Parriott, whose family befriended him when Lloyd was fourteen years old. In the summer of 1935, Andrew was passing through southeastern Utah and decided to stay in Moab for a while. He became known locally as Aaron Andrew. A local family, the Parriotts, allowed

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him to set up camp on their property just off the road at the north end of town with his pack horses, donkey, and goats, near where he would carve the sculpture. For the several months Andrew was in Moab he worked occasionally for Ruth and Dale Parriott on their ranch. The Parriotts thought he came from southern Europe or Asia Minor, and he spoke with an accent that might have been Turkish or Armenian. They recollected that Andrew was “quiet and unobtrusive and, with the exception of a few odd habits, never bothered anyone.” He never revealed much about his background, though at various times he claimed to have been a former cavalry officer and to be a German. Little else was known about him.18 Andrew was known for his personal habits. Every Sunday morning he would dress himself in a regalia that was part military, part priestly, and would parade like a sentry back and forth in front of his camp with his sword and rifle. One of the few photographs of Andrew at that time shows him wearing a large ceremonial necklace of medals over a long robe or greatcoat, an unusual hat, a long sword at his side, and what may be a rifle on his back. The medals, shaped like large coins, featured inscriptions similar to his sandstone carving: his profile, his name, his titles, and relief maps of the continents of the eastern and western hemispheres.

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While Andrew himself apparently lived a life marked by ostracism and misunderstanding, his sculpture has remained in very good condition over the years and surprisingly has not been vandalized much, especially given that it was in a visible location just off the highway. Around 2000, it was incorporated into a new commercial water park at the site, dubbed the King World Water Park. The park’s promotional brochure noted that the “mysterious King World carving has baffled archeologists, treasure hunters and residents for generations.” After the water park went out of business in 2008, locals arranged to have the sculpture moved, apparently to protect it and display it more prominently. Andrew’s creation is currently

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Billy Van was born in 1882 in Kansas City and moved to the fledgling community of Delta around 1907. He married Elsie Jacob in 1916, and together they had six children.20 Billy Van had an inventive mind, skilled hands, and an entrepreneurial spirit. His outsider-art tendencies first surfaced around 1920 when he installed life-size figures on top of his one-story garage and accompanied them with dialogue-like signs on the façade—not your typical commercial signs. These were patterned after Mutt and Jeff, popular comic strip characters at the time. Van eventually removed the rooftop figures and added a second-story dance hall to the building. Other promotional pieces included a wishing well out front, merry-go-rounds, an open-air theater, a menagerie, (complete with monkeys, pigs, and a badger), and life-size mechanized mannequin sets: one of musicians who could “play” music and one of animated baseball players.21

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The plain exterior of this commercial building on Delta’s Main Street belies its exotic interior. The elaborate, bejeweled second-floor dance hall was created by Billy Van de Vanter (known locally as Billy Van) between the late 1930s and early 1940s. Unlike many works of outsider art, this is an interior installation. It is also unusual in that it was part of an overtly commercial venture, a dance hall that Billy Van had operated above his auto repair business for a while before deciding to decorate the interior. Despite those differences, Van’s Hall fits easily into the tradition of outsider art. Billy Van was not a trained artist, but he did have a streak of creativity, and he was a skilled craftsman. The dance hall interior builds on some of the earlier embellishments he had installed on the exterior of his Main Street building.

Van’s Hall, Delta

In addition to Parriott’s recollections, a handful of contemporary newspaper articles describe the struggles of a man who must be the creator of the King World bas relief. In November 1935, Ogden police arrested one Andrew Aliason—a fifty-eight-year-old Turk who wore a necklace of medals and called himself “King of America”—at the request of the city’s residents. The people writing about this man were quick to point out the characteristics that signaled his mental instability. These descriptions also provide a few clues about Andrew’s past: that he reportedly had spent some of his childhood in a Baltimore orphanage and that he had worked as an artist in Massachusetts until 1925, when he was reborn as king of the world. Sometime in the fall of 1935, Andrew asked P. F. McFarland of West Weber if he could set up camp on McFarland’s property. Among the usual descriptions of his clothing, herd, and weapons, McFarland noted how Andrew was always carving, sewing, or stamping different materials and how that handiwork was very fine; notably, a shield Andrew carried was embellished with a man’s head in profile. In December 1935, Andrew scuffled with the Weber County sheriff and was finally judged to be insane and committed to the Utah State Hospital, where he died in 1954.19

located in an attractive setting on the western edge of the Moab Regional Hospital property (450 West Williams Way), and the artwork of a seeming outsider has now become a valued community asset.

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His motives and message were unclear except that he claimed to be the king of America, king of the world. According to Lloyd Parriott’s account, the townspeople become increasingly concerned about Andrew’s strange habits and militaristic ways and asked him to leave town.

Billy Van began dressing up the dance hall in the 1930s with thousands of pieces of mirror and glass; it became his crowning achievement. The focal point is the large, mirror-surfaced ball suspended in the middle of the hall and

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Three views of the interior of Van’s Hall in Delta, Utah. Note the mirrored ball, with its miniature replica of the LDS temple in Salt Lake City, as well as the banner promising “We Dance Next Sat.” Roger Roper, photographer. Courtesy of the author.

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The most extensive, and perhaps best-known, outsider art installation in Utah is Gilgal Garden near Trolley Square in Salt Lake City. Gilgal was the creation of a retired masonry contractor and former Latter-day Saint bishop, Thomas B.

Gilgal Garden, Salt Lake City

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Billy Van died in 1942, but the dance hall continued in operation until the 1960s. The family retained ownership until 2006, when they sold it to a group dedicated to the preservation and restoration of the dance hall. In the early

Although the dance hall has not been used much since the 1960s, due in large part to building code issues, it has remained remarkably well preserved. The building is used occasionally for events such as class reunions, special dances, and tours, and some day it may once again be an active part of the community.

1990s, the Delta Historic Preservation Commission, family members, and other residents of the community took an interest in saving this unique landmark. They were instrumental in getting the building listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. Subsequently, they have secured a series of small grants from the Utah State Historic Preservation Office to help stabilize the structure and make other repairs.

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encircled by a miniature train and an airplane, which move in opposite directions. The ball is topped by a replica of the Salt Lake City LDS Temple. (Van had carved an impressively accurate scale model of the temple with his penknife in earlier years).22 This is one of several Mormon icons in the dance hall—including Angel Moroni heralds in the entrance stairway—a bit of irony, given that Billy Van was not himself a Latter-day Saint and the dance hall had a decidedly rowdy reputation. While the imbibing of alcohol may not have been allowed on the premises, there were apparently no restrictions about allowing imbibers into the dance hall, unlike the dances sponsored by the LDS church elsewhere in Millard County. Van’s Hall had a reputation in the county as a lively and wild place: “good girls” didn’t tend to go there, especially if their parents had any say in the matter.23

Sphinx. With its finely carved face of Joseph Smith Jr. and its use of sphinx symbolism, this sculpture figuratively links Thomas Child Jr.’s beliefs to antiquity. Roger Roper, photographer. Courtesy of the author.

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Monument to the Priesthood. The stone arch, the obelisk, and the set of four books pictured here form a monument to what Child believed were sources of spiritual revelation. Also visible is a replica of a birdhouse Child created in his youth. Roger Roper, photographer. Courtesy of the author.

Child Jr., who was born in 1888 and lived in the city’s Tenth Ward virtually his entire life. (This was the same neighborhood Anders Miller lived in, and their lives overlapped. Child would have been in his mid-twenties when Miller died, so it seems likely that he would have visited Miller’s home, although it doesn’t appear to have been a direct inspiration for Gilgal.) Beginning around 1945 and continuing until his death in 1963, Child created a series of twelve original sculptures (and more than seventy features, overall) in the middle-block property behind his house at 452 South 800 East.24 Most of these works are devoted to religious themes, primarily Mormon and biblical (Gilgal itself refers to an Old Testament memorial made of stones), but some are in recognition of the building trades, which he greatly admired as well. He even created a living memorial to his wife, Bertha, who died in 1966. Among the major works are a stone sphinx with the head of Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the LDS church, and the Monument to Trade, which

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features a larger-than-life-size statue of Child himself wearing brick pants and surrounded by masonry tools. Unlike other outsider-art practitioners, Child was more the architect of his creations than he was the actual builder. He relied heavily on his son-in-law Bryant Higgs, his son Tom Child, Grant Fetzer (one of his neighbors), and a renowned local sculptor, Maurice Brooks, whom he hired to create the sculptural works. (Brooks employed a unique technique for sculpting the stones that involved use of an oxyacetylene torch.) Child also used other laborers, some of whom were reportedly ward members on church welfare. Many of the stones were extremely large—one weighed in at seventy-eight tons—and required special equipment both to be collected and to be set in place. As might be expected of a retired mason, Child was particular about the stones he would use. He did considerable scouting around and had stones brought in from various canyons along the Wasatch Front.25

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Monument to Trade. This statue includes a representation of Child, a retired masonry contractor, wearing pants made of bricks, and building trade implements. Roger Roper, photographer. Courtesy of the author.

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Most notable for its direct relationship to Gilgal’s religious message was Child’s extensive involvement in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He served as bishop of the Tenth Ward for nineteen years and as a member of the Park Stake High Council for eighteen years. His garden, which also abutted the Tenth Ward chapel property, may have been a private depiction of his religion, but its overall message was entirely consistent with church teachings. Although Child operated without the blessing or support of either his home ward or LDS church headquarters, he intended the garden to be an instructional tool, especially for young people. He

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Unlike many outsider artists, Child was very much a community insider. He was a well-respected masonry contractor who had constructed dozens of prominent buildings in the area, including the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Salt Lake City, Ogden High School, the Bushnell Hospital (later known as the Intermountain Indian School) in Brigham City, and buildings on the University of Utah and Brigham Young University campuses. He served on various boards and committees and co-directed the Days of ’47 pioneer celebration during its first ten years of existence.26

Child stands next to a statue of himself within the Monument to Trade at Gilgal Garden in Salt Lake City. Utah State Historic Preservation Office.

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Some of Child’s neighbors described him as “nutty” to take on such a project as Gilgal, but they indulged him perhaps because he was a long-time community leader.28 Child acknowledged that, “You may think I am a nut, but I hope I have aroused your thinking and curiosity.” The Tenth Ward newsletter supported his efforts, as indicated in a 1950 article: “Brother Child has carried his skills as a builder into his home and yard and has made a hobby of depicting scenes and ideas of the scriptures in stone. At the present time he is constructing several monuments in stone that deserve state-wide attention and should be preserved for future generations.”29

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established a sequence of presentation, building from one topic to another, and would use musical accompaniment (through a phonograph, a reed organ, or family members singing hymns) at certain locations along the tour.27

Just so, thousands of visitors from Utah, the United States, and foreign countries have visited and enjoyed Gilgal Garden. After Child’s death, the neighboring Fetzer family owned and maintained the garden, opening it to the public on Sunday afternoons for many years. In 2000, after a threat of demolition to make way for something more profitable and less vandal-prone, Salt Lake City acquired the garden from the Fetzer family. It is currently maintained and operated as a city park under the care of the Friends of Gilgal Garden. The garden is identified as a singular feature and “contributing resource” in the Salt Lake City

Eastside Historic District that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.30

Bottle House, Teasdale In 1925, Tora Selander, a Swedish twenty-something, was traveling alone in southern Utah. The vistas from Bryce Canyon inspired her—as they do most visitors—but her vision was more purposeful than those of the average tourist. She determined that someday she would find a home out in that vast landscape. “That is where I am going when I am ready to settle down. Somewhere in that country I will find a permanent camp.”31 It took a while, but in 1956 Selander and her Connecticut-born husband, John Nelson, bought the abandoned schoolhouse in Teasdale and set out to not only rehabilitate the building but also to create a museum. It would display their collection of artifacts from around the world, including an extensive trove of southwest Native American blankets and other items. The story of their collecting adventures was an epic in its own way, but that was only their first chapter in Teasdale. Their first museum burned, apparently along with many of the artifacts, and John died in 1963. By the early 1960s, however, Tora was working on a new project: a structure that served as both house and museum and was built of salvaged materials, including thousands of beer and seltzer bottles collected from the local dump. It took her ten years, according to her son, Pete Nelson.

The bottle house created by Tora Selander Nelson in Teasdale, Utah. Cory Jensen, photographer.

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Nelson’s house still stands, abandoned, although sections of the bottle walls are still visible. It embodies the creative use of found- and recycled-objects that is common to many outsider artists. Layered on top of Nelson’s creativity was her passion for collecting and sharing cultural artifacts. In a 1958 Salt Lake Tribune article, she explained herself: “What I am trying to do here is bring out appreciation of beauty in cultures not our own, geographical awareness and historical perspective. Together, these things help one to escape from the too-narrow personal groove. I can think of no development more important to the time in which we live.”33

Pizy Alldredge’s Yard Art, Oak City Mervyn Jay Alldredge, “Piz” or “Pizy” as he was known, created a distinctive collection of figures from common, often discarded, household and farm implements and materials. A

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self-taught welder, he worked many years for the Union Pacific Railroad. Like many other outsider artists, Pizy didn’t start his creative endeavors until after his retirement, around 1970. Alldredge, who was born in 1910, had also worked at farming and tending livestock on the family homestead in Oak City, Millard County, and he even worked for a time as a cowboy in Nevada and California. He served for fifty years as a weather reporter for the U.S. Weather Bureau, for which he received statewide recognition. Alldredge also served as a scoutmaster, town constable, and as a member of the town board.34 He was a community insider, but his artistic creations fit comfortably within the realm of self-taught outsider art.

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Tora found logs and dragged them home behind her car to create the basic structure. The bottles, laid bottoms-out and set in mud mortar, formed the infill material for the walls. This homemade structure became her longtime dwelling and the repository for her new collection of artifacts. The bottle walls were an attraction to the local youth, however, who delighted in shooting at them. As a result, she ended up covering most of the walls with wood. Tora Selander Nelson died in 1988 in Richfield, just short of her ninety-second birthday.32

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Detail of Nelson’s house, showing her construction techniques and the make of individual scavenged glass bottles. Cory Jensen, photographer.

Like his father, the town blacksmith, Alldredge found satisfaction in heating and bending metal, although for artistic rather than practical purposes later in his life. Until his death in 2001, his home in Oak City was surrounded by his creations. He also made dozens of smaller, shelf-size figures, but his yard art was the most visible and demonstrative expression of his ingenuity. His house was a drive-by attraction that locals shared with their out-of-town guests. Alldredge began welding pieces of scrap metal together after seeing a resemblance between a donkey’s head and a discarded combine part. This hobby of creating folk art from salvaged materials dominated his thirty-year retirement. His work depicted scenes of frontier life, ranch work, community dances, storybook

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Yard art outside the Oak City home of Mervyn Jay “Pizy” Alldredge, as photographed in 1993. Alldredge was a selftaught welder who created whimsical sculptures from farm and household materials. Roger Roper, photographer. Courtesy of the author.

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A number of recent articles and documentaries, most of which are readily available online,

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The best-known active outsider art installation in Utah currently is probably Ralph (Ralphael) Plescia’s creations in and around his building at 1324 South State Street in Salt Lake City.36 After Plescia obtained the building from his father around 1970, he started creating his view of Biblically inspired beliefs—with some significant interpretive twists—and he has continued that endeavor to the present. Ralphael’s Church/ School is one of those captivating worlds that rivals outsider art expressions anywhere in terms of its personal vision and expression.

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After Alldredge’s death in May 2001, his yard art was removed and distributed among his family members, who had a great appreciation for it. A descendent acquired his house soon after his death, remodeling and upgrading it. Later, that remodeled house was replaced with an entirely new one. Still, a remnant Pizy artifact remains in the yard, as of my latest drive-by sighting.

Ralphael’s Church/School, Salt Lake City

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characters, and life-size human and animal figures. Alldredge won numerous blue ribbons at the Millard County Fair over the years, and the Utah Arts Council exhibited some of his miniatures in folk art shows in Salt Lake City and in statewide traveling shows. In 1991, his work was among a collection of ten artists from around the country whose works were featured at the Arts Festival in Atlanta, which drew some 2.5 million visitors.35

The exterior of the Church/School created by Ralphael Plescia, on 1324 South State Street in Salt Lake City. Plescia began this massive work around 1970, after inheriting the building from his father. Roger Roper, photographer. Courtesy of the author.

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delve into the details of Plescia’s beliefs and the physical expressions of those beliefs that he has created.37 Plescia himself gives tours of the place on occasion, providing insights and explanations along with commentary that is as organic and intriguing as his creations.38 The plaque on the front of the building may serve as the best summary of what this is all about: “Ralphael’s Church School Dedicated to Teach about the Heavenly Mother and God, Creator and Jesus.”

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The building consists of a three-level labyrinth of rooms jammed with sculptures, writings, art, and a number of features, materials, half-finished projects, and stored items that reflect Plescia’s multiple interests and priorities (including some vintage automobiles). The main floor features a rich array of pieces, the most captivating of which is the sculpture of a larger-than-life Eve reaching up for forbidden fruit from a deep nether-region cutout in the floor with a threatening dragon in pursuit. This emergence of a dynamic sculpture from an unexpected main-floor void is arresting and difficult to turn away from. It seems easy to view the basement level as a sort of hell, the main floor as our world, and the upper floor as heaven. But nothing in this visually compelling worldview lends itself to such a convenient interpretation.

Images from the interior of Ralphael’s Church/School that depict Eve trying to escape a dragon, as she reaches for fruit. Roger Roper, photographer. Courtesy of the author.

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Whether this property survives and meets the criteria for historic site designation (such as through the National Register of Historic Places) remains to be seen. After all, under National Register rules, there is a fifty-year cooling-off period before long-term cultural “significance”

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For more than 130 years and counting, Utah’s architectural and cultural landscape has been enriched by outsider art. Though some of this “folk art” is unique to Utah in terms of subject matter, it reflects themes and trends that transcend local culture. The creators and their work reflect tendencies that have played out elsewhere—both nationally and internationally—by other visionary artists. A muse has always stirred within some of us to create privately envisioned expressions of aspirations, memories, and convictions.

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In recent years, Plescia has expressed an interest in seeing that his work lives on. He would like to have someone take over the studio after him.39 But he is skeptical. “The reason I don’t think it will survive is because what I am doing here is not something you can make money on. I’m not trying to seek anything other than knowledge. . . . There’s a 98 percent chance that one day none of this will be here.”40 Others have also expressed concerns about its long-term fate. Our office, the State Historic Preservation Office, and other government and nonprofit cultural institutions have received numerous inquiries in recent years about what can be done to preserve this cultural treasure. Unfortunately, none of us have the answer. Our programs and funding are structured in such a way that they don’t easily accommodate outlier installations such as this. Such has been the dilemma of many of Utah’s outsider-art properties over the years. Their uniqueness often works against them. They are multifaceted and a bit quirky, not readily suited to standard solutions. But perhaps through a coordinated effort and a little creativity we can find a way to embrace them, such as was done with Gilgal Garden.

can be properly assessed, though there is some flexibility in that rule for properties of “exceptional significance.”41 But, contrary to popular belief, National Register designation provides no real protection. Salt Lake City could perhaps squeeze this onto its landmark list, which would provide some degree of protection. A preservation easement could also be helpful, but that requires a qualified organization to agree to take on that responsibility. Tools such as these, however, are far from what is needed to assure long-term survival of outsider-art installations. They need day-to-day caretakers for maintenance, champions for securing financial and community support, and visionaries equal to the task of carrying forward the cultural messages of their creators.

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Plescia’s hand-excavated, basement-level caverns and passageways include pools of natural ground water, limited lighting, be-careful bridges and steps, and skirting pathways. This somber and sometimes claustrophobic underworld is filled with figures and references from the Bible and elsewhere, some readily decipherable and some not. The upper floors are decorated with various architectural and symbolic elements in various degrees of completion, including a ten-foot high banner of Christ’s anguished face. These upper spaces include pop-up skylights that extend above the roofline, bringing in added, perhaps heavenly, illumination. A peaceful rear courtyard offers an open-air, natural counterpoint to all of the interior creations, but even this area has various features that follow some of the same themes and designs from the inside.

We cannot always describe or interpret these creations in straightforward ways. Yet more important than fully understanding or interpreting these cultural artifacts today is the need to preserve them for tomorrow. What seems eccentric to one generation may be highly valued and culturally significant to the next. We should be careful stewards of our predecessors’ works. Outsider art just might reveal something important about the human condition that we are blind to in our focus on the practicalities of daily life. Notes 1

Roger Cardinal, “Outsider Art and the Autistic Creator,” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1522 (2009): 1459; Daniel Wojcik, “Outsider Art, Vernacular Traditions, Trauma, and Creativity,” Western Folklore 67, no. 2/3 (2008): 179–81. The titles of books on this subject also shed light on the various perspectives from which scholars have studies

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these creative works. Key background sources include the following: John Beardsley, Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995); Michael D. Hall and Eugene W. Metcalf, Jr., eds., with Roger Cardinal, The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Barbara Brackman and Cathy Dwigans, eds., Backyard Visionaries: Grassroots Art in the Midwest (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999); Lisa Stone and Jim Zanzi, Sacred Spaces and Other Places: A Guide to Grottos and Sculptural Environments in the Upper Midwest (Chicago: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Press, 1993); John Maizels, Raw Creation: Outsider Art and Beyond (London: Phaidon, 1996); Lucienne Peiry, Art Brut: The Origins of Outsider Art (New York: Random House, 2001); Anthony Petullo, Self-taught and Outsider Art: The Anthony Petullo Collection (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001). Various newspaper articles and city directory listings also referred to Anders John Miller as Andrew Julius Miller, Andrew J. Miller, Andrew G. Miller, and Andres J. Miller. The terms “the Old Curiosity Shop” and “Crazy House” are used in the captions and descriptions of the only known photographs of his house, along with other sources cited in this article. See “Misc. Residences—The Crazy House,” Utah State Historical Society photograph collection. The four images are undated, but they are most likely from the early 1890s and appear to be from about the same time, within a few years at least, based on the size of the trees in front. Two of the photographs, taken at different times based on photo details, are credited to Sainsbury and Johnson, Photographers, who were partners between approximately1889 and 1893. See Daniel Davis, “‘Appreciating a Pretty Shoulder’: The Risqué Photographs of Charles Ellis Johnson,” Utah Historical Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2006): 134. According to the city directories, Miller was still living at 277 S. 800 East in 1893, so these photos are apparently of Miller’s first house. “Aged Recluse Goes to Join Lost Lover,” Deseret News, February 5, 1913, 12; “Funeral of Andres Miller,” Deseret News, February 7, 1913, 9. “Funeral of Andres Miller,” Deseret News, February 7, 1913, 9; Francis W. Kirkham, Harold Lundstrom, Daughters of Utah Pioneers, Salt Lake Company, Tales of a Triumphant People: A History of Salt Lake County, Utah, 1847–1900 (Salt Lake City: International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1995), 295–96. Another account describes Miller as wearing “heavy black gloves, even in tropical weather, because he believes the righteous must be clothed in black,” (Salt Lake Tribune, July 28, 1904, 9). Salt Lake Tribune, July 28, 1904, 9. Deseret News, February 5, 1913, 12. “Court Notes,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 28, 1904, 9; “Miller’s Tender Vigil Is Ended,” Salt Lake Herald Republican, July 29, 1904; “May Be Cured of Mania,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 28, 1904. “Miller Is Released; Friends May Act,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 1, 1904; “City and Neighborhood,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 3, 1904. See especially Wojcik, “Outsider Art.” See primarily Deseret News, February 5, 1913, 12; and Kirkham, et al, Tales of a Triumphant People, 295–96. “Died,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 5, 1913, 12.

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13 Kirkham, et al, Tales of a Triumphant People, 295. 14 There is a gap in the city directory coverage between 1893, when Miller was last listed at 277 S. 800 East, and 1898, when he first shows up at 343 S. 1100 East. 15 Kirkham, et al, Tales of a Triumphant People, 295. 16 Kirkham, et al, Tales of a Triumphant People, 296. 17 Deseret News, February 5, 1913, 12. 18 Robert Dudek, “The King of the World: The True Story Behind the Curious Sandstone Carving and the Man Who Created It,” Stinking Desert Gazette, November 1986, 67. 19 “Police Free King, Goats and Horses,” Ogden StandardExaminer, November 14, 1935, 24; “‘King of America’ Arrested at Ogden,” Moab Times-Independent, November 21, 1935, 1; “‘King’ Taken to Hospital,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, December 24, 1935, 12; P. F. McFarland, “A King Was My Guest,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, May 17, 1936, 19; “Patient Wields Knife; Attendant Severely Injured,” Provo Evening Herald, October 5, 1937, 1; Utah, Death and Military Death Certificates, 1904–1961, s.v. “Harlan Andrew,” Certificate of Death, accessed October 15, 2019, ancestry.com. 20 1940 United States Federal Census, Millard County, Utah, roll m-t0627–04214, page 1A, William Van de Vanter; and U.S., World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917–1918, s.v. “William Edward Vandevanter,” both accessed October 15, 2019, ancestry.com. 21 “Delta’s Newest Pleasure Palace Opens,” Millard County (Utah) Chronicle, May 6, 1926, 1. 22 “Temple Replica Exhibited,” Millard County (Utah) Chronicle, April 2, 1936, 1. 23 A thorough history of Van’s Hall is documented in the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the building that was prepared in 1994 to 1995. NPGallery Digital Asset Management System, s.v. “Van’s Hall,” accessed September 16, 2019, npgallery.nps.gov /GetAsset/84fec927-f3b7-4966-b8ff-256b3d9e8b52. 24 “About,” Gilgal Sculpture Garden, accessed September 23, 2019, gilgalgarden.org/about-gilgal-sculpture-garden/; Ursula M. Brinkmann Pimentel, Gilgal: A Sculpture Garden in Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City: Associated Art Historians, 1996). 25 Pimental, Gilgal. 26 Pimental, Gilgal, 2. 27 Richard W. Jackson (1915–2010), interview by Roger Roper, August 8, 2002; Earl Gilmore, interview by Roger Roper, July 9, 2002. Gilmore was the Tenth Ward historian in 2002. He confirmed that the garden tours were scripted, used as a tool for teaching (especially the youth), and included phonograph musical accompaniments. He also observed that “Bishop Child was a doer,” and that he was “someone who believed in things strongly.” He further recalled that Bishop Child intervened with firemen in order to save the signature stained glass windows in his beloved Tenth Ward Chapel when it caught fire. The firemen wanted to break out the windows in order to fight the fire inside, but Child rushed up with an axe and told them in no uncertain terms that he would cut their firehoses with his axe if they attempted it. The windows were spared. The Tenth Ward Chapel is located on the same block as both Gilgal Garden and Thomas Child’s home. 28 Jackson, interview. Jackson’s family moved into the Tenth Ward in 1933, and the garden was directly behind their house at 763 East 500 South. He noted that although some neighbors thought Thomas Child was

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36 Plescia’s home exhibits similar features and design motifs that he has added over the years on the exterior and in the yard. 37 Recent media coverage of Plescia includes The Gospel According to Ralphael, produced by VideoWest, September 7, 2016, accessed September 26, 2019, radiowest .kuer.org/term/videowest; Stephen Dark, “The Fixer,” City Weekly, August 17, 2016; Glen Warchol, “Compelled to Create—Ralphael Plescia’s Biblical Inspirations,” Salt Lake Magazine, February 8, 2017; Torben Bernhard and Travis Low, “This Obsessive Utah Artist Spent a Half-Century Building a Personal Shrine,” Narratively, December 6, 2016, accessed September 28, 2019, narratively.com. 38 The author was part of two-hour tour with Ralphael Plescia on May 5, 2017, sponsored by Atlas Obscura. 39 Dark, “The Fixer.” 40 Bernhard and Low, “This Obsessive Utah Artist.” 41 U.S. Department of the Interior, National Register Bulletin, How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation (1990; rev. 1995), accessed October 25, 2019, nps.gov/nr/publications/bulletins/pdfs/nrb15.pdf.

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“nutty” because of the Gilgal project, most had no real problem with him. Jackson described Child as a “delightful individual” who was “community-minded” and “very knowledgeable on religious matters.” “The Family Portrait,” Tenth Ward Newsletter, March 1950; Tenth Ward Manuscript History and Historical Reports, 1849–1983, LR 9051 2, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah. NPGallery Digital Asset Management System, s.v. “Salt Lake City Eastside Historic District (Boundary Increase), accessed October 9, 2019, npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset /7c5214ea-5246–4d62-a2eb-40c3623f7308. Gail Smith, “Artistry of the Ages,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 12, 1958, H3. Kenneth Williams, personal communication with the author, September 20, 2019.The Williams were friends and neighbors with Nelson during her years in Teasdale. Smith, “Artistry of the Ages,” H3. “M. J. ‘Piz,’” Salt Lake Tribune, May 13, 2001, A14. “Art Notes: Utah Folk Artist’s Nuts-and-Bolts Creations Going to Atlanta,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 8, 1991; Utah State of the Arts (Ogden: Meridian International, 1993), 140–41.

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CELEBRATING THE WORK THAT WOMEN DID AND DO TO SECURE EQUAL VOTING RIGHTS

100 Years of Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Suffrage CompilEd By DAWN DURANTE Introduction By NANCY A. HEWITT

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A University of Illinois Press Anthology

266 pp. 6 x 9 in. 18 black & white photographs, 3 charts, 12 tables Paper $26.00; E-book UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

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www.press.uillinois.edu

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Gathering a Community’s History: The Utah Queer Historical Society

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The Utah Queer Historical Society (UQHS) is an official program of the Utah Pride Center, formally organized in January 2019. The mission of the UQHS is to objectively compile, organize, and safeguard the history of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer, “plus” (LGBTIQ+) community of Utah, and to share this history with both the LGBTIQ+ community and the general public. We currently have several working committees staffed by both professional and nonprofessional volunteers. The society has eight committees, all run by volunteers, including writing, publications, Pride Festival participation, education, archives, oral history, exhibitions, and landmarks.

Our writing committee meets monthly at the Salt Lake City Public Library to teach folks how to write their autobiographies. Once enough written stories have been collected, they will be edited and published by the publications committee in our forthcoming journal, tentatively named The Spectrum. The Pride Festival participation committee provides informational and hands-on booths at the annual Queer Pride Festivals in Logan, Ogden, Salt Lake, Provo, St. George, and Moab. The education committee sponsors lectures, films, and other events, especially the Oratories Project. At an oratory, an experienced Queer community leader delivers their oral history in front of a live audience; the history is videotaped, transcribed, and posted online in both visual and written formats. These events are quite well attended, drawing an average of thirty-five people a month. The archives committee is creating physical and digital archives that contain stories, photographs, videos, physical artifacts and ephemera, and other items of historical importance. Our oral history project meets privately with LGBTIQ+ folks to record and transcribe their histories. The exhibitions committee sponsors a rotating exhibit of Queer historical memorabilia (such as t-shirts,

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buttons, programs, photos, posters, and protest signs), using the three display cases we own at the Pride Center. We also have a landmarks committee that has created a virtual tour of Queer Salt Lake City history. We hope to turn this into a phone app and, working with city officials, to place historical plaques at significant sites. We also plan to run educational programs, including guest speakers and the screening of educational videos.

We actively seek donations of items relating specifically to Utah’s Queer history, as there are several other national projects that gather items from all over the United States. Anyone wishing to donate items can simply drop them off at the front desk of Utah Pride Center. The staff who work there then pass it on to us. We intend to archive our physical materials at the University of Utah’s Special Collections and our digital materials at archive.org. In addition, Comcast NBCUniversal recently donated $150,000 for the development of a national, open-source digital platform to host the LGBTQ Digital Archive Hub, so we hope to plug into that resource. Lastly, we intend to publish a journal, featuring personal histories, academic research, and other educational and informational items.

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Our Facebook group has almost 150 members to date. We also have a digital exhibit of Queer Utah Ancestors, featuring people significant to our movement and community who were born prior to 1940 and have a solid Utah connection. The online exhibit consists of seventeen profiles, including William/Eva McCleery (1850–1932), a transgender pioneer in Salt Lake City who came out in the Salt Lake Tribune in 1911, and the famous bisexual playwright and author Wallace Thurman (1902–1934), who left Salt Lake City to join the Harlem Renaissance in 1925. The exhibit is at utahpridecenter.org/programs/queer-utah -ancestors/. We also have a popular, high-quality physical exhibit featuring eleven of these profiles at the Utah Pride Center, in the Marquardt Room. The online and physical exhibits give us all a deeper sense of belonging, knowing that “we” have always been here, beginning with the Indigenous populations who honored and acknowledged the “Two-Spirit” people in their tribes. The board, composed of all the committee heads, meets every month; all are welcome to attend! For more information on the UQHS, please contact Connell O’Donovan, odonovan@ ucsc.edu or email queerhistory@utahpride center.org.

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I knew Baldridge’s excellent work through his original 1970 dissertation. As a contracting archaeologist in Utah, I recorded and photographed a number of CCC-constructed structures in the state. As part of my research, I would regularly pull out Baldridge’s dissertation to refer to what he may have written about a particular camp or project. However, this was not a widely available resource. With the publication of this book, that has changed.

The book is well structured, clearly listing tables and figures, and has a useful, detailed index. Its appendices present good information concerning the camps’ locations and duration (or at least such information can be inferred from the tables). The maps give an adequate sense of where each camp was located. However, a larger, pull-out map with some additional detail would have enhanced the information.

Shortly after taking office, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the CCC and signed a bill passed by Congress that established it. It became one of the most popular and successful of the New Deal agencies. It surely helped with the unemployment situation during the depths of the Depression, especially for young people, but it also supplied much-needed labor for a wide variety of federal and state agency projects. In Utah, as in much of the country, virtually every federal land management agency benefited from the corps. Baldridge’s book provides an excellent introduction to the subject, and always with an eye to how it all played out in Utah.

One of the most interesting aspects of the CCC that the author points out is how popular and enduring the legacy of the agency has been. It lasted only nine years, yet the memory endures; as he states, “It isn’t just the bridges, campgrounds, stock trails, and emergency work done by the CCC that have provided ways for the nation and the state of Utah to recall the tremendous impact” of the corps. “Organizations have been created to perpetuate its legacy; signs have been erected to identify the location of CCC camps and projects, and many corps groups have been set up to carry on the actual work carried out by the enrollees in the 1930s” (359).

The book furnishes information about operations within the CCC, describing each federal and state agency’s particular project needs, who the corps workers were, and where they came from. Those men who were accepted

As was the case throughout the nation, life was hard in Utah during the 1930s. Joblessness was prevalent, wages were low, and most people just tried to get by. The creation of the CCC and allied New Deal agencies lent a much-needed

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Writing a history of a short-lived agency program, especially one as unique as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), is no small feat. Kenneth Baldridge has done this. His original work on the subject was a doctoral dissertation in history at Brigham Young University. He carried out his research in the late 1960s, when many of the CCC participants were still alive, giving us up-close insights into the lives of some of these men.

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By Kenneth W. Baldridge

into the corps in Utah often came from other states, sometimes from as far as the East Coast. Baldridge includes chapters on the type of projects the CCC carried out and what camp life was like for participants. Of particular interest, he details the Utah camps, when and where they operated, and with which agencies they were affiliated. Baldridge also chronicles the types of projects undertaken by particular agencies and the specific camps where that work was carried out. While not all projects are listed (that would be a quite daunting task), he gives many examples and lays out, in general, the types of projects and locations that the CCC worked on for each agency. In my own previous research, I often had a hard time finding this information and was forced to depend on other available sources, such as surviving camp newsletters.

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The Civilian Conservation Corps in Utah: Remembering Nine Years of Achievement, 1933–1942

BOOK REVIEWS

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boost to the economy and morale of the nation. Baldridge’s book gives a good look at how one agency in Utah provided this boost in a time of need. —Michael R. Polk

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Aspen Ridge Consultants

The Mormon Handcart Migration: “Tounge nor pen can never tell the sorrow.” By Candy Moulton. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. xv + 172 pp. Cloth, $29.95

For many decades, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have put a great emphasis on their history of migration. At the heart of that collective memory is the tale of the handcart pioneers. As the author of this fine version of that story puts it, “Although only about 3,000 people traveled the Mormon Trail from Iowa City and Florence to Great Salt Lake City by handcart from 1856 to 1860, the handcart story has become an icon of great faith for millions of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (188). An inevitable side effect of this overemphasis is monumental mythmaking, as church leaders use pioneer heritage as a tool for bolstering the faith and for keeping the rising generation in line. Witness the Trek phenomenon, which takes thousands of youngsters to the wilderness to reenact the scenes of the suffering handcart pioneers. As legends become facts during the enterprise, the greatest casualty is the actual history of the handcart migration. This brings us to the urgent need for such a detailed, comprehensive, and carefully researched study as the work here under review. An accomplished Trails enthusiast whose spouse has a familial connection to the handcart pioneers, the author came to her task determined to tell the story exhaustively and accurately. Her challenge was to write a balanced account that would land somewhere on the spectrum between the documentary and celebratory work of LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, Handcarts to Zion, 1856–1860 (1960), and the gothic polemic of David Roberts, Devil’s

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Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy (2008). There can be little doubt that she has succeeded on all levels and with room to spare. The book showcases the author’s skill as a storyteller and as an expert at the craft of producing compelling narrative history. That said, the book is hard to read: not through any fault of hers but rather because the story contains so much pain, at some points relentlessly so, that the book becomes the opposite of a page-turner. You have to put it down occasionally to escape the gloom that inevitably descends on the reader. Without doubt, the greatest accomplishments of the volume come within the first four chapters, which discuss the origins of the handcart idea, the recruitment and organization of the first companies, and their journeys across sea and land to the starting points on the edge of the Plains. Beginning with chapter four, while covering the experiences of the first three handcart parties in 1856, the author quickly makes evident the strengths and weaknesses of the handcart concept. She argues persuasively that the key shortcoming of the handcart idea was that there was no way these companies could carry enough food to sustain themselves, which explains why hunger was so commonly part of the stories of all ten companies, even the most successful ones. Brigham Young and a few other Mormon leaders get due respect (Young for insisting that no more than three companies come per year), despite the abundance of evidence that they and not a few others also made disastrously poor decisions. Before turning the page to chapter five to begin reading in six chapters the harrowing account of the Martin and Willie companies, the reader has learned that the judgment of history might be more positive relative to the handcart idea, despite its weaknesses, had it not been for the terrible events that haunted the fourth and fifth companies. The bulk of the volume, more than 40 percent of its text, involves a painstaking rehearsal of the disturbing tragedy that overtook the fourth and fifth companies as they staggered into an early winter snowstorm in Wyoming. Their misfortune—that they left too late and that every other conceivable mishap seems to have befallen them—becomes agonizingly plain as

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—Gene A. Sessions

In the aggregate, it is very easy to label Candy Moulton’s book as the best work yet on the intriguing handcart story. Indeed, given her fine writing and the depth of her research, it is difficult to imagine a better account of this often-painful chapter in the wide history of Mormon migration.

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small amount of space noting the foibles and weaknesses of some of the leaders, from top to bottom. As far as merely blaming Brigham Young, she adroitly avoids falling into the Devil’s Gate trap, but she nevertheless concludes two final chapters with embittered John Chislett’s haunting call for “a day of reckoning” for the man at the top (185, 196).

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the reader slogs ahead, with death and unimaginable suffering on virtually every side once things begin to come apart. In this regard, the author’s overemphasis on the Martin and Willie tragedy helps perpetuate the pioneer myth, inasmuch as readers of her book would hardly notice that four times as many handcart emigrants made it through with general success.

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NOTICES

My Life in Carbon County in the 1950s

Westward with Fremont: The Story of Solomon Carvalho

By Ronald G. Watt

By Sophie Greenspan

Provo: Scrivner Books, 2018. xvi + 210 pp. Paper, $13.95

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. 164 pp. Paper, $17.95

In My Life in Carbon County in the 1950s, the historian Ronald Watt takes readers on a road trip through Carbon County. Watt, who wrote the 1997 centennial history of Carbon County, uses a personal approach in this volume, which he describes as a geographical tour of the county with snippets from his life mixed in. The communities surveyed in My Life include Castle Gate, Spring Canyon, Standardville, Helper, Kenilworth, Spring Glen, Carbonville, Price, Hiawatha, Wellington, Sunnyside, and Dragerton. Several aspects of this volume will be valuable to researchers: contemporary photographs, an extensive appendix of county businesses, and maps of Carbon County, Emery County, Price, and the western, eastern, and southern portions of Carbon County.

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Solomon Nunes Carvalho was the Jewish photographer and artist who accompanied John C. Frémont on his fifth expedition through the Rocky Mountains in 1853. This reprint of the late Sophie Greenspan’s biography of Carvalho, originally published in 1969, explains the role that he played in the Frémont expedition and recounts his later publishing of a best-selling book meant to help promote Frémont’s candidacy for the presidency. Carvalho was an important figure in American Jewish history, as well as an interesting focal point for the history of western exploration.

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2 0 1 9 AWA R D W I N N E R S Utah State Historical Society Fellows

Dale L. Morgan Award

Edward Leo Lyman

Best scholarly article in UHQ

Gregory C. Thompson

Allan Kent Powell, “Utah and World War I” (Summer 2018)

Spike 150 Commission’s Executive Committee—Spencer Stokes, Douglas Foxley, Aimee McConkie, Max Chang, and Christopher Robinson—for leading the statewide celebration of the sesquicentennial of the transcontinental railroad. Chinese Railroad Workers Descendants Association, for educating, preserving, and promoting the contributions of Chinese, Chinese American, and Asian Pacific Americans to the United States and the transcontinental railroad. William P. MacKinnon Award Melissa Coy, Digitization Program Specialist Sponsored by William P. MacKinnon Utah State Historical Society Best Book in Utah History Award James R. Swensen, In a Rugged Land: Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and the Three Mormon Towns Collaboration, 1953–1954 (University of Utah Press, 2018) Sponsored by the Utah State Historical Society Smith-Pettit Foundation Best Documentary Book in Utah History Award Gary James Bergera, ed., Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington (Signature Books, 2018)

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Best general-interest article in UHQ Scott K. Thomas, “Reexamining the Radical: Stephen Holbrook and the Utah Strategy for Protesting the Vietnam War” (Winter 2018) Sponsored by the BYU Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Nick Yengich Memorial Editors’ Choice Award Cullen Battle, “Ghosts of Mountain Dell: Transportation and Technological Change in the Wasatch Mountains,” UHQ (Winter 2018)

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Max Chang, for educating Utah students on the Chinese contributions to the building of the transcontinental railroad.

Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Award

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Outstanding Achievement Awards

Kenneth L. Alford

Sponsored by Allan and Thalia Smart and Zeese Papanikolas

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Sponsored by Ron Yengich LeRoy S. Axland History Article Award Best Utah history article or chapter in a publication other than UHQ Brian Q. Cannon, “’To Buy Up the Lamanite Children as Fast as They Could: ‘Indentured Servitude and Its Legacy in Mormon Society,” Journal of Mormon History (Spring 2018) Sponsored by Michael W. Homer Helen Papanikolas Student Paper Award Maya L. Brimhall, Brigham Young University, “The Nineteenth Century Club of Provo, Utah: A Powerful Force in the Formation of Women’s Clubs in Utah” Sponsored by Patricia Lyn Scott and Linda Thatcher

Sponsored by the Smith-Pettit Foundation

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CONTRIBUTORS

CHRISTINE COOPER-ROMPATO is an Associate Professor of English at Utah State University, where she teaches medieval literature. Her medieval research focuses on fourteenthand fifteenth-century English devotional and visionary texts, as well as vernacular and Latin sermons. She is also deeply interested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history in areas including religion, gender, science, and technology. Cooper-Rompato has written several essays, both published and forthcoming, about early African American mathematicians. MADISON S. HARRIS is a Kane Scholar and member of the Chancellor’s Leadership Class at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, where she double majors in history and biology. Her paper “A Cloud of Controversy: George Washington and Smallpox Inoculation during the American Revolution” won the best paper award at the annual Phi Alpha Theta Conference in Colorado and was subsequently published in a peer-reviewed journal. She has presented her research at the John Whitmer Historical Association Conference, as well as local and regional conferences. She plans to attend medical school in 2021. MATTHEW L. HARRIS is Professor of History at Colorado State University-Pueblo, where he teaches and writes on religion and politics, American religious history, and civil rights. He received a BA and an MA from Brigham Young University and an MPhil and PhD from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of numerous works, including The Mormon Church and Blacks (2015), Thunder from the Right (2019), and “Watchman on the Tower” (2020). He is currently working

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on a book-length manuscript entitled “The Long-Awaited Day: Blacks, Mormons, and the Lifting of the Priesthood and Temple Ban, 1907–2019.” JESSICA MARIE NELSON received a BA in American studies from Brigham Young University and an MS in history from Utah State University. As a graduate student at USU, she held the Milner/Butler editorial fellowship for Western Historical Quarterly. Her master’s thesis, “‘The Mississippi of the West’: Religion, Conservatism, and Racial Politics in Utah, 1960–1978,” was awarded the best master’s thesis by the Mormon History Association in 2018. CONNELL O’DONOVAN is a historian, biographer, and professional genealogist. In 1988, he gave his first presentation on Gay and Lesbian Mormon history at Affirmation’s conference in Los Angeles. A year later, he became the founding director of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Utah. He has also taught courses on Queer history at the Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco. He currently serves as chair of the education committee of the Utah Queer Historical Society, a project of the Utah Pride Center. GREGORY E. SMOAK is director of the American West Center and Associate Professor of History at University of Utah, where he specializes in American Indian, American western, environmental, and public history. His association with the American West Center spans three decades and has included projects with Native peoples in Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and California. He currently serves as vice president of the National Council on Public History.

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The Utah and western history communities lost one of their most influential, generous, and colorful figures when Dr. Floyd A. O’Neil passed away at his Salt Lake City home on April 18, 2018. In his nearly ninety-one years of life, and in a career that spanned over half a century at the University of Utah’s American West Center, Floyd taught Utah and Native American history, mentored generations of graduate students, and helped shape the practice of public history in the West. At the time of his death, he was director emeritus of the American West Center, professor emeritus of history at the University of Utah, and a fellow of the Utah State Historical Society. His many honors included the Award of

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Floyd A. O’Neil, 1927–2018

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Merit and an Honorary Lifetime Membership in the Western History Association. In 2001, the Native Scholars group of that same organization honored him with a lifetime achievement award for his mentorship. Even more important to Floyd were the numerous awards and recognitions he received from Native peoples, including the Ute Indian Tribe, the Pueblo of Zuni, and the Intertribal Council of Nevada.

Born in the Uinta Basin on July 14, 1927, Floyd spent his childhood on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. His earliest playmates and oldest friends were his Ute schoolmates. He sustained many of those friendships through the course of his life, and his early experiences engendered a deep interest in the history of Native peoples and of the Utes in particular. In Floyd’s early teens, the O’Neil family moved to Carbon County where his father and brothers worked in the coal mines. Serious health issues kept Floyd from following them into the mines and instead he turned to a life in education. After taking a degree (he always insisted that degrees were earned or “taken,” not granted or received!) at the University of Utah in 1957, he taught high school for a time before returning to the university for graduate studies in the mid-1960s. It was there that he found his life’s work. In 1967, due to his lifelong association with the Ute people and his knowledge of Native history, Floyd was recruited to work at the American West Center on the Doris Duke American Indian Oral History Project. He would remain central to the life of the center, building and sustaining it for the next fifty-one years. He completed his PhD in 1973 and went on to serve as the center’s director from 1986 until his nominal “retirement” in 1996. In truth, Floyd could never retire. As director emeritus he remained vital to the center and to the university’s relationship with Utah’s Native peoples. Floyd devoted his career to putting history to work for the benefit of the West’s diverse communities. The Duke Oral History Project led to work with dozens of tribal nations across the American West. Floyd oversaw the collection of thousands of oral histories, coordinated the creation of tribal archives, facilitated the preparation of major land claims cases, and co-authored or directed the writing of twenty-six tribal histories. In these projects Floyd

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pioneered an innovative approach. Working directly with tribal members as authors, he essentially mobilized the resources of a research university to help Native peoples tell their own histories. He also ensured that tribes would hold the copyright to their published histories. Patricia Albers, the noted anthropologist who succeeded Floyd as the center’s director, recalls his “unswerving dedication to Native American history and the importance of doing it through oral history.” She also remembers him as “one of the kindest and most generous people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing in my lifetime.” Native history was just one part of Floyd’s work. Under his care and attention, the American West Center led the way in documenting and interpreting the histories of Utah’s ethnic and minority communities, including its Japanese American and Latinx communities. Indeed, in the words of Will Bagley, “Floyd was the most public of public historians.” Along the way he also published influential articles and co-edited important collections of essays, including 1985’s Churchmen and the Western Indians. His final publication, co-authored with his wife Shauna, “The Park City to Fort Thornburgh Road,” appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly. In addition to scholarship, Floyd was a beloved and respected teacher. Although he never held a regular appointment in the university’s history department, his Utah and American Indian history courses were consistently among the department’s most heavily subscribed and highly rated courses. His enthusiasm, humor, and often blunt-spoken ways resonated with students. That talent in the classroom was apparent even is his early days teaching high school in Price and Salt Lake City. Floyd’s passion for history and generous nature stuck with his students, so much so that in the summer of 2017 “Mr. O’Neil” was the guest of honor at a reunion of the Carbon High School Class of 1962. I was one of many whose lives were shaped by Floyd’s friendship and mentorship. In 1987, I came to the University of Utah to study under the tutelage of Richard White. At one of our first meetings Richard told me to go up to the American West Center and introduce myself to Floyd. It was a life-changing event. For the

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American West Center University of Utah

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—Gregory E. Smoak

Put simply, those who met Floyd could never forget him. He was a unique combination of homespun aphorisms and sophisticated interests. He regularly reminded graduate students with grand, amorphous theories that they should never try to “stretch a rat’s ass over a rain barrel,” and he devoted his life to studying the history of his home state and region. Yet he was

equally well read in world history and literature. He cherished trips to Europe with Shauna and the French cuisine he first enjoyed in his mother’s kitchen. Once as a young man he rode the train and hitchhiked from Price to Salt Lake City to see the 1948 film adaptation of Hamlet starring Lawrence Olivier. Richard White, one of the most honored and respected historians of his generation, sums up Floyd best: “There are only two people I have met in my life whom I could not describe by comparing them to someone else. One was Floyd. He was sui generis. He came from a West that is nearly gone now, but he was never a relict. He was as shrewd an observer and as incisive and hilarious a recorder of the world around him as anyone I knew. He taught me much of what I know about the West. I will miss him until the day I die, but I also cannot think of him without smiling.”

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next thirty-one years Floyd was a constant in my life. He hired me to work at the center, first during summers and then year-round, and he offered advice and countless lunches, unwavering friendship and support during hard times, and endless “encouragement” (“dissertate damn you!” or “get your damned union card!”) while I struggled to write my dissertation. But I was not alone. Floyd impacted the lives of so many who went on to interpret Utah and the West’s history, including Richard White, Patty Limerick, Greg Thompson, Pat Albers, Kathryn MacKay, David Rich Lewis, Laura Bayer, Will Bagley, and Phil Notarianni, to name but a few.

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U TA H I N F O C U S

A ringside shot from a boxing benefit sponsored by Salt Lake City newspapers for the relief of polio, January 1945. The poliovirus is highly contagious and, before the development of polio vaccines in the mid-1950s, parents lived in fear of the disease that could permanently disable

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or kill their children. The worst documented epidemic occurred in the summer of 1916, with 27,000 cases and 6,000 deaths nationwide. Today, almost all children who receive vaccinations are protected from the disease. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 1308.

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Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 88, Number 1, 2020

Articles inside

In Memoriam

Contributors

2019 Award Winners

Notices

Book Reviews

In This Issue

Private Visions: Outsider Art on Utah's Cultural Landscape

Utah in the Green Book: Segregation and the Hospitality in the Beehive State

Race, Latter-Day Saint Doctrine, and Athletics at Utah State University, 1960-1961

The Last State to Honor MLK: Utah and the Quest for Racial Justice