Amy's Husband

When I was Twelve the girls of my ward had a Beehive Teacher who we adored whose husband was at one time an athiest . He returned to the Church to marry Amy and have a family with her. He taught Mathmatics at the College of Holy Names inOakland and may have worked atHanford--it was not uncommon for physicists to losetheir religion in the face of how precipitously we have used our knowledge
of the Atom.

In my late grade school and teenage years each age group had an name which was used to express a goal. I guess they gave up
on the 12 year olds, though the Beehive
was a symbol of cooperation in early
Mormonism. Since Kent was married to Amy, we all wanted to marry a man just like him.

A very disturbing thing happened when I was 16. This was at the height of the Civil Rights movement and we had numerous student teachers from Santa Cruz and UC Berkley.
Kent substituted for our Sunday School Teacher and gave a lesson that angered me so much that I spoke my mind.

During the Pre Vietnam Era, the belief was very common that the seed of Ham were dark, and that this justified somehow, their hard lot in life. Generally Bay Area Segregation was defacto, segregation was common in White Bedroom communities--so common that our Homes Association Charter, which all
residents had to sign, a charter which clearly implied that blacks were to be excluded when homes were resold.

The Navy owned an enormous block of homes on the condition that both black and white Seaman would receive Navy rentals on an equal basis. There was an attempt to delete this language from the Charter.

Meetings were held, and there was even
some violence at these meetings, called
by supporters of the Black Civil Rights Movement.

Well, Kent got chalk and blackboard and gave the lineage and posterity of Ham.
He didn't need to do this, and that he
did shocked me to the core. The Biblical
account of Ham to justify everything from
slavery to Jim Crow discrimination, did
not originate with some statements by Brigham Young. It was the dark side of
Southern beleif.

What happened when Joseph Smith was turned to bloody pulp by 40 bullets was that Mormon doctrine froze, for the most part,
in place, and successive prophets, having
a some of Joseph Smith's genius, but not
it's fullness, like Brigham Young, occasionally just ran off at the mouth.the
speculated.

I don't think the huge exodus and the settlement of the intermountain West could have been accomplished by any other man, but that doesn't mean that everything he said was true--including the mythology built up around the story of Ham. And, not having Joseph's intimate relationship with the Lord, Brigham and successive Prophets did not feel that they could change it.

Some of the embellishments by later Presidents of the Church and rascist popular writers troubled me deeply. But
no one was in control of Revelations of that magnitude but the Prophet and he was
not even in control.

I had read these statements from the pulpit by Brigham Young from the Newly minted Journal of Discourses for which my father had horse traded a first edition of the Doctrine of Covenants that he'd gotten from Sam Weiler, who had a sort of following immediatly after WWII. My father was in Salt Lake courting the secretaries who lived in the Beehive House--a former dwelling of Brigham Young's wives and children--and working at Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution. There were 3 young
men in the ward and only one had a car.

I rarely was as angry as Kent did that Sunday. My father had traded Sam Weiler
for that 21-7 book set exactly because he thought if I was going to hear it, I
should hear it at home. Actually, my father moved to Oakland's German Town at 3 or four when the Blacks who had flooded in
to do war work began to move out of barrack style military family housing into homes.
The exodus from the Cities outward was called white flight. It was also called redlining.

I turned red at Kent's lesson, steam emitted from my ears and finally, after a fierce argument with him I walked out. He might have skirted the issue, as everyone
did--repeating bigotry that was at root just pious folklore, to me, was inexcusable. No, I didn't leave the Church, and I would have put it off as idiocy if the teacher had been different.


The Genisis Group

It was a small branch of Black members in Salt Lake who put successful pressure on the First Presidency and Quorum of
the Twelve to allow Temple marriages between American Blacks and other members.

The Mormon Church plays the same role for Mormon Polynesians as the Black Church does for Blacks (Pacific Asian Express, KPFA, Berkeley).

Since Polynesians resemble American Blacks and are, if anything darker with "worse hair," there were families Associated with
the Genesis Group in Salt Lake.

These asked various General Authorities to administer the bread and little cups of water normally passed to the
Ward by 12 year old Deacons and blessed by Sixteen year old Priests. The purpose was to make the Brethren as uncomfortable as Black Members were--and they were embarrassed and humble, and they went down and did performed these ordinances.

I heard the first account of the Brethren's prayer in the Temple, asking the Lord if there wasn't something He could do, and an account of President Kimbel's yes vote
from the Lord, on--guess where. Mormonism Exposed. You can find it on Google.

Mormonism Exposed is distorted History, but if your Mormonism is embedded firmly in 5 or more generations of the Great Basin Church and you were reared on the Coastal and Lumber Milling Wards of the Baby Boom Coast it is not hard to sort the
understandable from the absurd. I would recommend this site only to collectors
and Historians. I will comment on anti-
Mormon materials as I come across it and
am able. I was born one day after the Paperclippers' Flash Blindness Test at
NTS, and was heavily exposed to ionizing radiation as a newborn. These were doctors
who took orders from the Mengeles of the Concentration Camps, and some of the MIA-POW's who never came home.