Chapter 7
Children of the Same God
In early October 1963, Salt Lake City’s local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) prepared to stage a peaceful protest outside Temple Square during general conference. As the upcoming protest made headlines across the United States, the organizers hoped the demonstration would persuade Church leaders to clarify their stance on civil rights.
Although the Church-owned Deseret News had endorsed gradual racial desegregation in 1956, Utah still lagged behind other nearby states in passing civil rights legislation. The NAACP hoped a strong statement from the Church would influence lawmakers to ensure equal protections and opportunities for all people in the state.
The protest was to be one of many that season in the United States. Earlier in the year, U.S. president John F. Kennedy had proposed a civil rights law to protect African Americans and other people of color against discrimination. A few months later, the NAACP helped organize a massive march in Washington, DC, to protest social and economic inequality in the United States. The march ended with a stirring speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a prominent civil rights leader, which inspired many people to stand against racial injustice.
After learning about the planned Temple Square protest, Sterling McMurrin, a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, arranged for leaders of the Salt Lake City NAACP to meet with Hugh B. Brown of the First Presidency.
On the evening of October 3, President Brown welcomed Albert Fritz, the president of the local NAACP chapter, and other protest organizers to the Church Administration Building. N. Eldon Tanner, who had been called earlier that day to replace Henry D. Moyle in the First Presidency, also joined them.
At the meeting, the organizers asked if the Church intended to speak out in support of civil rights.
“As you know,” President Brown said, “the Church doesn’t get involved in politics.” It had a long-standing position of political neutrality.
The organizers then pointed out that the Church often spoke out on moral issues. And civil rights, they reasoned, was a moral issue.
President Brown agreed with them, but neither he nor President Tanner thought a public protest was necessary. They promised to speak with President McKay about the Church issuing a statement on civil rights.
After the meeting, President Brown and President Tanner asked Sterling McMurrin to help them prepare a statement for President McKay’s approval. Albert Fritz, meanwhile, urged NAACP members to postpone the demonstration and give the Church time to issue the statement. Some of the protestors had already made picket signs, but they agreed to wait at least another week.
On Saturday, October 5, President Brown notified the NAACP that President McKay had approved a statement, which President Brown then read at general conference the next morning.
“There is in this Church no doctrine, belief, or practice that is intended to deny the enjoyment of full civil rights by any person, regardless of race, color, or creed,” it declared. “We believe that all men are the children of the same God, and that it is a moral evil for any person or group of persons to deny any human being the right to gainful employment, to full educational opportunity, and to every privilege of citizenship.”
“We call upon all men everywhere, both within and outside the Church, to commit themselves to the establishment of full civil equality for all of God’s children,” it continued. “Anything less than this defeats our high ideal of the brotherhood of man.”
The statement was front-page news in Salt Lake City and elsewhere. At Albert Fritz’s request, the NAACP did not stage any demonstrations during the conference. He was hopeful that his organization and the Church could be allies.
“If we work in harmony,” he said, “we will have a better state.”
Throughout 1963, Hélio da Rocha Camargo was frequently on the move in Brazil. He had received the Melchizedek Priesthood not long after Elder Spencer W. Kimball’s 1959 South American tour, and now he served as a counselor in the Brazilian Mission presidency. With the Church growing rapidly in many parts of the country, his calling required him to meet with Saints in cities as far away as Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Recife, and Brasília, the newly constructed capital of Brazil.
Over the last four years, more than thirty-five thousand people had joined the Church in Latin America. In 1961, the first Spanish-language stake in the Church was organized in Mexico City. At the same time, the number of missions in South America had more than doubled. There were now two missions in Brazil, two in Argentina, one in Uruguay, one in Chile, and one that encompassed Peru and Bolivia.
In each of these missions, the goal was to spread the gospel widely, help the Saints live faithfully, and establish the first stakes in South America. Organizing these stakes would give members more authority to lead and serve in the Church, eliminating the need for leaders from outside their area.
Wayne Beck, the president of the Brazilian Mission, and his predecessor, Grant Bangerter, both believed that the best way to prepare the Saints for the responsibility of stakes was to build up and train local Church leaders. Hélio’s experience as a Methodist minister made him an ideal candidate for Church leadership, and President Bangerter had quickly called him into positions of responsibility.
One of his first leadership callings was serving as a counselor in a district presidency with two other Brazilian Saints. His new duties had been unfamiliar at first, and after struggling to understand their purpose, he spoke to President Bangerter. “I’m not doing anything of value here,” he said.
“What would you like to do?” the president asked.
“I’d like to go back to my branch and be a teacher,” Hélio replied. “I could be a good teacher.”
President Bangerter then explained that local Saints were crucial to the development of the Church in their country. As a member of the district presidency, Hélio played a key role in calling and training local Church leaders and teachers.
“Now is the time when the Lord is raising up His servants for the establishment of His work in power in South America,” the president said. “Some are to be called to carry the burden, and it has fallen to you.”
Hélio suddenly saw Church leadership in a new light. Within a few weeks, he and the other members of the district presidency were working effectively.
After that, Hélio had trained many local leaders—a responsibility that continued after a call to the mission presidency. As a counselor to both President Bangerter and President Beck, he helped his fellow Saints improve the quality of their sacrament meetings, encouraged participation in Church building projects, and worked to strengthen branches. Now, wherever the Church was well established in the mission, branches and districts functioned essentially as wards and stakes. If a baptism or confirmation was needed, a Brazilian priesthood holder performed it.
Hélio’s wife, Nair, served as a counselor in the mission’s Primary organization, where she did her part to prepare the Saints for stake leadership. Following a Churchwide pattern in the stakes, the presidency held a conference every year for Primary leaders and teachers. In her lessons to the women, Nair offered suggestions for teaching young children, improving Primary attendance, and using available curriculum and visual aids.
“We ask God to bless all the work you have done for the children,” she told Primary workers at the conference of 1963, “and that He increase our faith and our desire to live according to the principles of the gospel, dedicating ourselves with enthusiasm and sincerity in the work He has entrusted to us.”
In his work in the mission presidency, Hélio magnified his calling with the same fervor he’d had as a minister. He once told President Bangerter that true discipleship required total devotion and dedication to the cause of Christ.
“Any good Methodist knows this,” Hélio said. And he believed that Latter-day Saints should understand it as well.
Near the end of 1963, forty-four-year-old Walt Macey was restless. As the co-owner of three grocery stores in Salt Lake City, he was unsure if he should keep his stores open on Sundays. He had been taught growing up that the Sabbath was a sacred day of rest. But recently, he had noticed that many Latter-day Saints were shopping on the Sabbath just as other people did.
Everywhere he looked, he saw restaurants, gas stations, and shops open on Sunday. And his longtime business partner, Dale Jones, thought their grocery stores should stay open as well. They did a brisk business on Sundays, and Walt accepted the argument that staying open helped families who needed to shop on the weekends. Few households had two cars, and since husbands typically took the car to work on weekdays, Sunday was an important shopping day.
Walt had never felt entirely comfortable operating the stores on the Sabbath. He was distressed by the thought that he was keeping the young people he employed from attending their religious meetings. Some years before, he had told Dale that their business would be blessed if they closed on Sundays. Dale disagreed. “We are not about to close,” he said, settling the matter.
Recently, however, a conversation with Joseph Fielding Smith, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, had troubled Walt. President Smith and his wife, Jessie, were regular customers at their store on the west side of Salt Lake City. One day, President Smith walked over to the meat counter where Walt was working.
“Brother Macey,” he said, “I want you to remove that sign from the window.” There were many signs on the window, so Walt asked which one he meant.
“The ‘Open Sunday’ sign,” President Smith said. He told Walt that he preferred to shop at stores that honored the Sabbath by closing on Sundays. He then turned and walked out. Walt had not seen him in the store since.
President Smith had been an apostle for over half a century. During that time, he had seen respect for the Sabbath day diminish among Christians around the world. While recognizing that there were understandable reasons for working on the Sabbath, he and other Church leaders worried about Sunday simply becoming another day of recreation and commerce. Time and time again, they had raised their voice against using the Sabbath for sporting events, moviegoing, shopping, and other activities that could be done on other days. More than any other apostle of his time, Joseph Fielding Smith pleaded with the Saints to keep the Lord’s day holy.
“We must stop violating the Sabbath day,” he had declared at the April 1957 general conference. “I promise you that if you will observe the Sabbath day, you who are opening your stores on the Sabbath day, if you will close them and tend to the duties that the Lord has given to you, and keep His commandments, that you will prosper.”
Two years later, the First Presidency taught the same principle, calling on the Saints to cease shopping on Sundays.
After his conversation with President Smith, Walt resolved to change. The impression came to him that he was falling short of what he knew was right.
Once again, he approached Dale about closing the stores on Sunday, and Dale refused to consider it. “Well,” Walt said, “because this means so much to me, you better buy me out or I will buy you out.”
A month later, Dale agreed to dissolve the partnership. He would take two of the stores and Walt the other. Walt decided to reopen his store under a new name: Macey’s.
Not long after, the Deseret News announced that Macey’s would be closed on Sundays. That night at 11:15, Walt received a call at his home. It was Sister Smith. “The president wishes to speak with you,” she said.
President Smith then came on the line. “Brother Macey,” he said, “I see by tonight’s paper that you have closed your store on the Sabbath. I’ll be back.”
A short time later, Walt noticed President Smith shopping at the store.
At the beginning of 1964, Belle Spafford was in her nineteenth year as Relief Society general president. The organization had a worldwide membership of 262,002, with women in more than six thousand ward and branch Relief Societies meeting regularly to learn from one another and provide compassionate service. The Relief Society raised and managed its own funds to run many programs, activities, and initiatives, including the Relief Society Magazine, which would soon celebrate fifty years in print.
President Spafford was immensely proud of her Relief Society sisters. “In a day when women engage themselves in many activities and when a high number of them are employed, it is encouraging that average attendance at regular meetings of the society increased,” she had recently observed at the organization’s annual conference. “We are thankful for your devotion to Relief Society and the righteousness of your lives.”
As the new year began, President Spafford and her counselors, Marianne Sharp and Louise Madsen, had several months of travel ahead of them.
Under the new correlation program, the Relief Society general presidency and board were visiting stake conferences during the first half of the year to train local Relief Society leaders and speak to stake presidencies, high councils, bishoprics, and other stake and ward leaders. Attending these conferences gave them new opportunities to educate priesthood leaders about the work of Relief Society.
As the Church organized more and more stakes outside the United States, the presidency also found themselves traveling internationally more often. They had recently trained stakes in Australia, New Zealand, and Samoa, and they visited the Saints in Europe in the spring.
While visiting stake conferences around the world, President Spafford and her board members presented The Awakening, a filmstrip highlighting the importance of Relief Society. Filmstrips were becoming a popular educational tool in and out of the Church, largely because they were affordable and simple to use. Through a series of images projected on a screen, The Awakening told the fictional story of Mary Smith, a member of the Church whose waning faith was rekindled through Relief Society and personal visits from ward members. In the final images of the filmstrip, Mary and her family had returned to church and were preparing to be sealed in the temple.
For years, President Spafford and her counselors had typically approved Relief Society instructional materials. The Awakening, for instance, had been written and produced by Relief Society members of Salt Lake’s Butler Stake before it was adopted by the Relief Society general presidency as part of their presentation to stakes.
Recently, though, the responsibility for developing curriculum for Church organizations had been given to Elder Harold B. Lee and the newly created All-Church Coordinating Council. While the Relief Society was not yet using correlated lesson plans, the committee had begun requesting that all Church organizations submit outlines for lessons and other materials for approval. President Spafford supported this change, and as a member of the coordinating council, she participated in the process of correlating Church lessons.
On June 24, 1964, President Spafford’s travels took her to the eastern United States for “Relief Society Day” at the New York World’s Fair. As with the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the Church saw the fair as an opportunity to share its message on a global stage. It built a massive exhibition hall designed to look like the Salt Lake Temple and provided various presentations about the Savior and His gospel, including a popular fifteen-minute film called Man’s Search for Happiness, which taught visitors about the plan of salvation.
Relief Society Day was organized to showcase the achievements of Latter-day Saint women. The highlight of the day was a choir of “singing mothers” from stake Relief Societies in New York and other cities. Their performances drew good-sized crowds, and President Spafford thought that each concert improved on the one before it. The fair was a noisy place, but as the women blended their voices together in hymns and other sacred music, all the commotion seemed to fade away. To President Spafford, it was as if angels were singing along.
Afterward, a reporter asked her why there was no choir of “singing fathers.”
“Well,” she replied, “we are a woman’s organization.”
Around this time, Giuseppa Oliva took a seat in a partially finished meetinghouse in Quilmes, Argentina. It was the first chapel in the country constructed by missionaries in the Church’s building program, and the Saints attending district conference that morning were looking forward to its completion. Like so many meetinghouses around the world, it represented years of devoted service and sacrifice by the Saints who met there.
Giuseppa and her husband, Renato, were from the Italian island of Sicily. Like many Italians, they had moved their family to Argentina after World War II to find better work. Although adapting to a new country, culture, and language had been difficult, they had made a home for their five children in South America. Seven years after leaving Sicily, Giuseppa met some Latter-day Saint missionaries, and she and her two daughters soon embraced their message. Since then, both daughters had married young men from the Church.
Yet Giuseppa was troubled as she sat through the conference. An economic crisis was squeezing the nation. The cost of living in Argentina was rising 20 percent a year, and many people were losing their jobs as businesses struggled to pay employees. In the face of so much economic uncertainty, Renato, a basket maker, had moved back to Sicily, and he wanted his family to join him.
Giuseppa was reluctant to go, however. In the five years since Elder Spencer W. Kimball’s visit to Argentina, Church membership in the country had risen to more than eight thousand. Its branches were strong, and the tithes of faithful Saints had made the Argentine Mission financially self-sufficient for the first time in its history. The number of convert baptisms was on the rise, strengthening congregations like the one Giuseppa attended.
Italy, on the other hand, did not have a single branch of the Church. If Giuseppa chose to join Renato there, she would have to give up the blessings of regular Church attendance. And since Renato was not a member of the Church, he could not administer the sacrament or other priesthood ordinances to her.
When the morning session of district conference ended, Giuseppa approached Arthur Strong, the president of the Argentine Mission, and told him of her dilemma. She said she wanted to stay with her daughters in Argentina, but she also felt she needed to be with her husband in Europe.
President Strong listened and then recommended that she return to Italy. “That is the place you belong,” he said.
“What should I do about the Church?” Giuseppa asked.
“The Church will grow in your own city,” he promised. “You will not have to worry about it.”
Giuseppa was skeptical. Could such a thing really be possible? But she decided to trust in the Lord and return to Italy. Her faith, after all, had yet to lead her astray.
In June 1964, eighteen-year-old Darius Gray saw that a new family had moved into his neighborhood. As he walked past their house, he noticed a bunch of kids playing outside.
“We’re the Felixes,” one of them announced. “We’re Mormons!”
Darius, an African American, had grown up attending a variety of churches with his parents, including some predominantly Black churches. His interest in religion had ultimately led him to study Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, and the Baha’i Faith. But even though he lived in Colorado, a state that bordered Utah, he knew very little about the Latter-day Saints. And he was sure he had never met one.
Over the next few months, he got to know the new family. John Felix was a ham radio operator and taught Morse code to Darius. Barbara, John’s wife, was more interested in sharing her religion. She and her children gave him a copy of the Book of Mormon. He was hesitant to take it, but he enjoyed books and eventually started reading it.
The words of the Book of Mormon spoke to his soul, and he invited the missionaries to visit him. His father had passed away some years ago, so it was just him and his mother, Elsie, at home. She was a strong Christian who was always open to talking with people of other religions. Darius did not think she would mind if the missionaries came over.
During the visit, however, she stayed in her bedroom. And when the young men left, she called Darius to her.
“I don’t want those two young men back here,” she said.
“Why not?” Darius asked.
“This is my house,” she said, “and I don’t want them here.”
Darius knew not to question her, but it was hard to let the subject go. When he finally asked her again why she was opposed to the missionaries, she explained that two Latter-day Saint missionaries had once visited her home. They had been inside for only a moment when one of the missionaries asked if she was Black.
“Yes, of course,” she had replied.
The two missionaries then left with no explanation, and ever since, she’d had a negative feeling about the Church.
The story bothered Darius. He believed his mother, but he also wondered if her negative experience was somehow unique.
Darius continued to study with the missionaries, and it wasn’t long before he decided to join the Church. On the day before his baptism, however, he asked the missionaries about the Church’s teachings on race. He wondered how they applied to him.
For a moment, no one spoke. One of the missionaries then stood and walked slowly to the corner of the room, his back turned to Darius. The other missionary said, “Well, Brother Gray, the primary implication is that you won’t be able to hold the priesthood.”
Darius suddenly felt foolish. “Mom was right,” he thought. How could he join the Church now? He knew what it felt like to be treated differently because he was Black, and he refused to see himself as less than anyone else.
That night, Darius climbed into bed and wrapped himself in a quilt. He believed in God and in salvation through Jesus Christ. And, until today, he had believed in everything the missionaries had taught him. Now he did not know what to do. How could he reconcile his faith with what he’d learned about the Church’s priesthood restriction?
Sliding open a nearby window, he leaned his head against the sill. The night air filled his lungs, and he offered a prayer. When he finished, he closed the window and tried to sleep. But he tossed and turned until finally he felt he should pray one more time. Once again, he slid open the window and began to pray.
This time, a clear, audible voice spoke to him. “This is the restored gospel,” it said, “and you are to join.”
All at once, Darius knew what he had to do. The next day, he entered the waters of baptism and became a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.