{"id":8512,"date":"2026-06-13T14:53:54","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T21:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/?p=8512"},"modified":"2026-06-13T15:02:06","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T22:02:06","slug":"a-faithful-black-saint-an-unprecedented-temple-ordinance-and-the-unhealed-wound-of-mormonisms-racial-theology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/2026\/06\/13\/a-faithful-black-saint-an-unprecedented-temple-ordinance-and-the-unhealed-wound-of-mormonisms-racial-theology\/","title":{"rendered":"A Faithful Black Saint, an Unprecedented Temple Ordinance, and the Unhealed Wound of Mormonism\u2019s Racial Theology"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 1894 \u201cServitor\u201d Sealing of Jane Manning James: A Theological and Historical Examination<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Introduction: A Question Echoing Across the Centuries<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

On a December day in 1884, an aging Black widow in Salt Lake City dictated a letter to the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She had walked 800 miles on bleeding feet to gather with the Saints in Nauvoo forty-one years earlier. She had lived in the home of Joseph and Emma Smith, washed their floors, handled (so she said) the Urim and Thummim, crossed the plains with Brigham Young\u2019s pioneer companies, donated to the building of three temples she would never be permitted to enter, and outlived all but two of her eight children. Her name was Jane Elizabeth Manning James. Her plea, set down on paper for President John Taylor, was as plaintive as it was theologically sophisticated:<\/p>\n

I realize my race & color & can\u2019t expect my Endowments as others who are white. My race was handed down through the flood & God promised Abraham that in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blest & as this is the fullness of all dispensations is there no blessing for me?<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jane Manning James to John Taylor, December 27, 1884<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That sentence \u2014 \u201cIs there no blessing for me?\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>\u2014 has haunted Latter-day Saint historians, theologians, and ordinary believers for well over a century. Jane petitioned the First Presidency at least five times. She wrote letters; she had others write on her behalf; she traveled in person to plead her case before church leaders. She asked to receive her endowment. She asked to be sealed by adoption to Joseph and Emma Smith, an offer she said Emma had extended to her in Nauvoo and which she now bitterly regretted having declined. She asked to be sealed to Q. Walker Lewis, a free Black Mormon elder ordained under Joseph Smith. None of these requests was granted in her lifetime.<\/p>\n

In May 1894, after a decade of unrelenting petitions, the Church\u2019s First Presidency arrived at what one scholar has aptly called \u201can unsatisfactory compromise.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> They authorized a temple ordinance that had never been performed before and would never be performed again. Jane, who was not permitted into the temple to witness it, was sealed by proxy not as a daughter, not as a sister, not as a wife, but as an eternal \u201cServitor\u201d<\/strong> <\/span>\u2014 a servant \u2014 to the prophet Joseph Smith and his household. The sealing record from the Salt Lake Temple\u2019s Adoption Record Book A is preserved in the Church History Library and reads as follows:<\/p>\n

Jane Elizabeth Manning James (a Negro): Do you wish to be attached as a Servitor for eternity to the prophet Josep[h] Smith and in this capacity be connected with his family and be obedient to him in all things in the Lord as a faithful Servitor? (Yes.)<\/i><\/p>\n

President Joseph F. Smith acting for and in behalf of the Prophet Joseph Smith: Do you wish to receive Jane James as a Servitor to yourself and family? (Yes.)<\/i><\/p>\n

By the authority given me of the Lord I pronounce you, Jane James, a Servitor to the Prophet Joseph Smith \u2026 and to his household for all eternity, through your faithfulness in the new and everlasting covenant, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Salt Lake Temple Adoption Record, Book A, p. 26 (May 18, 1894)<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From a traditional Christian perspective \u2014 indeed, from any humane perspective \u2014 the document is staggering. A faithful, baptized, lifelong professing believer in Jesus Christ, a woman whom Latter-day Saint apostles would later eulogize as a hallmark of pioneer faith, was solemnly bound \u201cfor all eternity\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> to a posture of obedient servitude to a deceased man and his household. She would not be the bride of Christ. She would not be a daughter of God in the fullest sense her religion offered. She would be, in the new and everlasting covenant, a celestial domestic. And this was done not because Jane had failed any test of righteousness, but solely because her ancestry traced through Africa rather than through the lineages of Western Europe.<\/p>\n

This essay examines the 1894 sealing of Jane Manning James in its full historical and theological context. It is written from the conviction of historic, biblical Christianity, but it intends throughout to be careful, evidence-based, and respectful toward Latter-day Saints, whose own scholars and historians have done much of the patient archival work upon which the present account rests. The thesis is not that nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints were uniquely wicked; many of their contemporaries in mainline American Protestantism shared comparable racial assumptions. The thesis, rather, is that the \u201cServitor\u201d<\/strong><\/span> sealing is a uniquely revealing window onto a particular theological architecture \u2014 one that fused biological lineage to priesthood authority, made temple ordinances necessary to exaltation, and then excluded an entire race of human beings from those ordinances based on skin color and supposed ancestral curse. It is a window that modern Latter-day Saint apologists have struggled, with limited success, to close.<\/p>\n

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Setting the Scene: Race, Restoration, and the Antebellum Mind<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

To understand what happened to Jane Manning James, one must first reckon with the unusual theological landscape in which her story unfolded. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith Jr., distinguished itself from the dominant Protestantism of its day by several radical doctrinal innovations. Among the most consequential were these: first, an insistence that authentic priesthood authority had been lost from the earth after the death of the apostles and required a literal restoration through divine messengers; second, the introduction of sacred temple ordinances \u2014 baptisms for the dead, washings and anointings, the endowment, and sealings of husbands to wives and children to parents \u2014 understood as necessary for the highest degree of salvation in the celestial kingdom; and third, an elaborate doctrine of cosmic lineage in which converts were quite literally \u201cadopted\u201d<\/strong> <\/span>into the house of Israel through priesthood ritual, sometimes (according to early teachers such as Brigham Young and Orson Pratt) producing a physical change in the convert\u2019s blood and body.<\/p>\n

Onto this framework, nineteenth-century Mormon leaders \u2014 like the great majority of their fellow Americans \u2014 imported the racial categories of antebellum culture. The dominant assumption among white Christians in both the slaveholding South and the segregating North was that the dark-skinned descendants of Africa carried some form of biblical curse. The two most commonly cited proof-texts were Genesis 4 (the mark placed upon Cain after his murder of Abel) and Genesis 9 (Noah\u2019s curse upon his grandson Canaan after Ham\u2019s offense). Reputable Christian scholarship has long since recognized that neither passage actually identifies the descendants of Cain or Canaan with sub-Saharan Africans, and neither describes a skin-color change as the divine mark or curse. But the misreading was pervasive, and it provided the theological cover under which American slavery operated for two centuries.<\/p>\n

Where the Latter-day Saint movement diverged from its Protestant neighbors was not in inventing the curse-of-Cain theory \u2014 it inherited that folklore from broader Christendom \u2014 but in welding the theory to its distinctive priesthood and temple system. If Black people were the cursed seed of Cain (or Ham, or Canaan, in various formulations), and if priesthood ordination and temple ordinances were now indispensable to exaltation, the conclusion drew itself: Black members could be baptized, but they could not be ordained, could not be endowed, and could not be sealed as members of the eternal celestial family. The very rites that defined Mormon salvation became the rites from which Black saints were systematically excluded. Christian historian Matthew Bowman, writing for The Conversation, observes that under Brigham Young and his successors, the policies hardened into a categorical exclusion, with various justifications offered \u2014 descent from Cain, less valiant conduct in a premortal life, danger of racial intermarriage \u2014 across the decades.<\/p>\n

It is critical to note, however, that the picture under Joseph Smith himself was less consistent. Smith ordained at least one Black man, Elijah Abel, to the office of Elder and later Seventy in the Melchizedek Priesthood; Abel continued to exercise that priesthood until he died in 1884. Walker Lewis, a free Black man in Massachusetts, was likewise ordained an elder under Smith\u2019s authority through the missionary work of Parley P. Pratt. Joseph Smith\u2019s 1844 presidential platform proposed compensated emancipation of American slaves through the sale of public lands. These data points form the genuine ambiguity at the heart of early Mormon racial history \u2014 and they are precisely what made Jane\u2019s situation so theologically untenable. If Black men could be ordained under Joseph, why not after? If Walker Lewis was a sealed elder, why could Jane not be sealed to him? The contradictions were not the inventions of later critics; they were noted, frequently, by Jane herself.<\/p>\n

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From Connecticut to Nauvoo: Conversion and Pilgrimage<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Jane Elizabeth Manning was born around 1822 in Wilton, Connecticut, to Isaac Manning and Eliza (Phyllis) Mead. Her mother had been enslaved but was freed by Connecticut\u2019s gradual-emancipation law before Jane\u2019s birth; the official Church History Topics essay notes that \u201cJane was born free, but slavery was legal in the state until after Jane left.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>From the age of six, she lived and worked as a domestic servant in the home of Joseph and Hannah Fitch, a prosperous white family in New Canaan. There she absorbed a serious, devout Christianity; about age fourteen, she was baptized into the Presbyterian Church. In March 1835, when she was approximately thirteen, she gave birth to her first son, Sylvester; the father is unknown.<\/p>\n

In the fall of 1842, Latter-day Saint missionaries (one of whom was Charles Wesley Wandell) preached in the New Canaan area. Jane\u2019s Presbyterian minister forbade her to attend, but she went anyway and was \u201cfully convinced that it was the true Gospel.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>She was baptized the following Sunday and proceeded to win her mother and several siblings to the new faith. In the winter of 1842\u201343, the Manning family resolved to emigrate to Nauvoo, Illinois, to gather with the body of the Saints. They sold their home in Wilton and set out as a group of nine, joining a larger interracial party of converts under Wandell\u2019s direction.<\/p>\n

They traveled by ordinary means as far as Buffalo, New York. There, the journey turned. In one of the most pointed indictments of antebellum racial prejudice preserved in the early Mormon record, the Manning party was either refused passage on the lake steamboat because of their race or was unable to afford a fare suddenly demanded only of the Black travelers \u2014 the historical record permits both readings. The white converts continued by water to Ohio. The Mannings walked the remaining 800 miles. In Peoria, Illinois, local authorities accosted them and demanded paperwork to prove they were not fugitive slaves. Jane\u2019s recollection, dictated nearly fifty years later to Elizabeth Roundy, is among the most powerful passages of nineteenth-century African-American autobiography:<\/p>\n

We walked until our shoes were worn out, and our feet became sore and cracked open and bled until you could see the whole print of our feet with blood on the ground.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jane Manning James, autobiography, c. 1902<\/i><\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They reached Nauvoo in late fall 1843. The contrast with Buffalo and Peoria could hardly have been sharper. Joseph and Emma Smith welcomed the exhausted Black travelers personally and told them they were \u201camong friends.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Jane\u2019s siblings dispersed into homes of their own in the city; Jane remained in the Mansion House as a domestic servant. For the next year, she lived alongside Emma Smith, Lucy Mack Smith, and the Smith children, doing laundry and cleaning, conversing with the Prophet and his mother about the Book of Mormon, the Urim and Thummim, and the temple ordinances under preparation. Her testimony of Joseph Smith, given in old age, was unequivocal: \u201cHe was the finest man I ever saw on earth\u2026. I was certain he was a prophet because I knew it.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

It was during this period that Emma Smith made the offer that would shape the rest of Jane\u2019s spiritual life. As Jane recounted it to John Taylor decades later:<\/p>\n

Sister Emma came to me & asked me how I would like to be adopted to them as a Child. I did not comprehend her & she came again. I was so green I did not give her a decided answer & Joseph died & I remain as I am. If I could be adopted to him as a child my Soul would be satisfied.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jane Manning James to John Taylor, December 27, 1884<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The exact nature of what Emma was proposing is debated by historians of Mormon temple ritual. The \u201claw of adoption\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>as it was understood in 1840s Nauvoo involved a sealing by priesthood authority of one adult to another adult or family, creating an eternal kinship bond independent of biological descent. Jane plainly did not understand the doctrine at the time of the offer; once she did, she spent the rest of her life trying to accept it. The window had closed: Joseph Smith was murdered at Carthage Jail in June 1844.<\/p>\n

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The Pioneer Trek and Life in Utah<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

After Joseph Smith\u2019s death, Jane lived briefly in Brigham Young\u2019s household. There she met and married Isaac James, another free Black convert from New Jersey. When the main body of Saints fled Nauvoo in 1846, Jane and Isaac \u2014 unlike the rest of the Manning family \u2014 went with them. Jane was pregnant with her son Silas at the time of departure; he was born in Iowa in June 1846. The young family wintered at Winter Quarters in Nebraska and entered the Salt Lake Valley in September 1847, part of the first pioneer company. At settlement, the James family constituted roughly one-third of the entire Black population of Utah and was the only free Black residents.<\/p>\n

For the next several decades, Jane lived a life of remarkable industry and faithfulness. She bore six more children, only two of whom would outlive her. She spun cloth, made clothing, did laundry, raised vegetables, made soap, and \u2014 a detail recorded in the diary of her neighbor Eliza Partridge Lyman \u2014 shared half of her own meager flour supply when Eliza\u2019s husband was away on a mission to California in 1849. By the mid-1860s, the James family had built a modest home, acquired farmland, oxen, horses, and sheep. Jane participated actively in the Eighth Ward Relief Society and the Young Ladies\u2019 Retrenchment Society. She donated her own scarce funds to the construction of the St. George, Logan, and Manti temples \u2014 temples she would not be permitted to enter for the saving ordinances those temples were built to administer.<\/p>\n

The marriage to Isaac James ended in divorce in 1870. Jane briefly married a former slave named Frank Perkins; that union also ended in divorce within two years. She returned to using the name James. When Isaac returned to Utah in 1890 after a twenty-year absence, ill and impoverished, Jane took him in and cared for him until his death the following year; his funeral was held in her home. Her later years were marked by progressive blindness, the death of most of her children and grandchildren, and the steady, undiminished intensity of her faith. She received reserved seating at the front of the Salt Lake Tabernacle. She gave her tithes and offerings. She kept the Word of Wisdom. And she kept asking.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIs There No Blessing for Me?\u201d \u2014 The Decades of Petitions<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The Church\u2019s official Topics essay on Jane Manning James notes, with characteristic understatement, that \u201cbetween 1884 and 1904, Jane periodically contacted Church leaders \u2014 John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, Zina D. H. Young, and Joseph F. Smith \u2014 and sought permission to receive her temple endowment and to be sealed.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> What that sentence does not capture is the cumulative weight of more than two decades of unanswered prayer. The letters that survive in the Church History Library and have now been published by historians Quincy Newell, Tonya Reiter, Matthew Harris, and Newell Bringhurst form an extraordinary spiritual archive.<\/p>\n

The first surviving letter, to President John Taylor, dated December 27, 1884, has already been quoted in part. Its theological argument is striking. Jane does not deny the prevailing racial doctrine; she works within it. She acknowledges that her \u201crace was handed down through the flood\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>\u2014 the standard antebellum reading of Genesis 9 \u2014 yet she appeals to a higher promise, the covenant with Abraham that \u201cin his seed all the nations of the earth should be blest.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>She invokes the dispensationalist self-understanding of the Latter-day Saints (\u201cas this is the fullness of all dispensations\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/span>) and then poses her question. The question presupposes orthodox Restorationist categories. It cannot be dismissed as the protest of an outsider. It is the cry of a woman fluent in the very theology that excluded her.<\/p>\n

A second surviving letter, sent to Joseph F. Smith on February 7, 1890, reveals the depth of Jane\u2019s theological sophistication. By this date, she had absorbed the doctrine of celestial sealing in considerable detail. She makes three distinct requests in a single carefully ordered paragraph:<\/p>\n

First, Brother James has left me 21 years. And a Coloured Brother, Brother Lewis wished me to be sealed to Him. He has been dead 35 or 36 years. Can I be sealed to him? Parley P. Pratt ordained Him an Elder. When or (how?) can I ever be sealed to Him?<\/i><\/p>\n

Second, can I obtain my endowments for my dead? Also I had the privilege of being baptized for my dead, in October last.<\/i><\/p>\n

Third, can I also be adopted in Brother Joseph Smiths the prophets family. I think you are somewhat acquainted with me. I lived in the prophets family with Emma and others, about a year, and Emma said Joseph told her to tell me I could be adopted in their family.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jane Elizabeth James to Joseph F. Smith, February 7, 1890<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reasoning is precise. If Walker Lewis was an ordained elder under Joseph Smith \u2014 a fact that no one denied \u2014 then Walker Lewis must logically be eligible for celestial marriage; and if so, Jane could properly be sealed to him. She had identified the lethal contradiction in nineteenth-century Mormon racial policy: ordinations performed by Joseph Smith himself stood as ongoing witnesses against the categorical exclusions imposed by Brigham Young and his successors. She received no satisfactory reply.<\/p>\n

A final surviving letter, brief and almost weary in tone, was sent to President Joseph F. Smith on August 31, 1903. Jane was now nearly eighty years old and almost blind. She wrote:<\/p>\n

I take this opportunity of writing to ask you if I can get my endowments and also finish the work I have begun for my dead. Dear Brother, I would like to see and talk with you about it. Will you please write to me and tell me how soon \u2014 when and where. I shall come and I will be there.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jane E. James to Joseph F. Smith, August 31, 1903<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She included a stamped envelope for the reply. There is no record that she received one.<\/p>\n

Between these letters lay the documented refusals. The journal of President Wilford Woodruff for October 16, 1894 \u2014 five months after the \u201cServitor\u201d<\/strong><\/span> sealing had been performed \u2014 records that Jane visited him in person, still pressing for her endowment, and that he turned her away with explicit theological reasoning rooted in the curse-of-Cain doctrine:<\/p>\n

Black Jane wanted to know if I would not let her have her Endowments in the Temple. This I could not do as it was against the Law of God. As Cain killed Abel, all the seed of Cain would have to wait for Redemption until all the seed that Abel would have had that may come through other men can be redeemed.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Wilford Woodruff, journal entry, October 16, 1894<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the doctrine in its bluntest form, on the lips of the man holding the keys of the priesthood. It is not the theory of an obscure General Authority or a marginal local leader. It is the President of the Church, ruling that Jane Manning James cannot receive the saving ordinances of the temple because she descends from Cain. That assertion would later be officially \u201cdisavowed\u201d<\/strong><\/span> by the Church in its 2013 Gospel Topics essay on race. In 1894, however, it was the operative theology, and it was offered to Jane as the reason her petitions were rejected.<\/p>\n

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The 1894 \u201cServitor\u201d Sealing: An Ordinance Without Precedent or Sequel<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

By the early 1890s, Church leaders evidently recognized that something had to be offered to Jane. The Council of the Twelve and the First Presidency under Wilford Woodruff (assisted by counselors George Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith) developed a compromise. According to the minutes of a January 2, 1902, council meeting, \u201cPresident Woodruff, Cannon, and Smith decided that she might be adopted into the family of Joseph Smith as a servant, which was done.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>The ceremony itself had been performed on May 18, 1894, in the Salt Lake Temple.<\/p>\n

Jane was not permitted to attend the sealing of her own eternal status. Bathsheba W. Smith (in some sources Zina D. H. Young) stood as proxy for Jane. Joseph F. Smith stood as proxy for the deceased Joseph Smith. The exchange, preserved verbatim in the Salt Lake Temple Adoption Record Book A, page 26, has been quoted above. It is worth re-reading at this point in the narrative, with the full weight of Jane\u2019s decades of petitions now in view: the woman who had asked to be sealed as a daughter to Joseph and Emma; who had asked to be sealed as a wife to Walker Lewis; who had asked simply to receive her own endowment \u2014 this woman was bound \u201cfor all eternity\u201d<\/strong> <\/span>as a \u201cServitor\u201d<\/strong><\/span> to the man whose mother had taught her to handle the Urim and Thummim.<\/p>\n

Several features of this ordinance deserve careful theological notice. First, the language is not metaphorical. The sealing pronounces Jane a servant \u201cfor all eternity\u201d<\/strong> <\/span><\/em>and binds her to be \u201cobedient to him in all things in the Lord.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>In Latter-day Saint doctrine, sealings \u201cbind forever,\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> as Apostle James E. Faust would later put it. Second, the ordinance was performed in the temple, the holiest space in Mormon practice, by the highest priesthood authority then living. It was not an informal arrangement or a local accommodation; it was, in every formal sense, an exercise of binding apostolic authority on behalf of the Church. Third, no comparable ordinance was performed for any other person in the history of the Church before or after. Jane Manning James is the only person known to have been sealed as an eternal \u201cServitor\u201d<\/strong><\/span>. The Quorum of the Twelve appears to have recognized that the ritual was unsatisfactory: Jane continued to petition for adoption as a daughter rather than as a servant, and the ceremony was never repeated.<\/p>\n

Fourth, and most striking, the ordinance was performed only weeks after President Woodruff received what he described as a revelation reorganizing the practice of sealings. Woodruff announced at the April 1894 general conference that Saints should no longer be adopted into the families of prominent leaders but should instead be sealed to their own biological parents and ancestors. Historian Jonathan Stapley has observed that \u201cit is no coincidence that Manning\u2019s extraordinary sealing occurred mere weeks after Woodruff\u2019s announcement.”<\/strong><\/em><\/span> The new revelation directed all Saints to be sealed to their own parents, with the apparent exception of Jane Manning James, who was sealed instead, in a manner without precedent, as a servant to a man not of her family at all.<\/p>\n

Alice Faulkner Burch, longtime president of the Relief Society of the Genesis Group (an LDS auxiliary organization for Black members and their families), spoke for many faithful Black Latter-day Saints when she addressed the Mormon Women\u2019s History Initiative in 2016. Her assessment of the 1894 sealing has never been answered:<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, neither righteousness, taking the name of Jesus upon her by baptism, nor her great faith in the Lord qualified Jane to enter the holy temple for herself.<\/i><\/p>\n

In May 1894, while Jane was still alive, with Joseph F. Smith as proxy for Joseph Smith and Bathsheba Smith as proxy for Jane, Jane was sealed to Joseph & Emma Smith. NOT as one of their children as they had offered and Jane requested. Not as one of Joseph\u2019s wives. But as their eternal servant. \u2026<\/i><\/p>\n

An eternal servant. A slave. A relationship that in the eternal law of God doesn\u2019t exist and that is even today a spit in the face to all black women.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Alice Faulkner Burch, Genesis Group Relief Society President, 2016<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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A Traditional Christian Theological Examination<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Historic Christianity \u2014 the faith of the apostles, the ecumenical creeds, and the Reformation \u2014 stands in clear and irreconcilable opposition to the theology that produced the \u201cServitor\u201d<\/strong><\/span> sealing. Five observations may be made from the biblical text.<\/p>\n

1. The New Covenant Erases Race as a Salvific Category<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

The apostle Paul, writing in approximately A.D. 49 to churches that included both Jewish and Gentile believers, settled the question that Latter-day Saint racial theology would later reopen. \u201cThere is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (Galatians 3:28, KJV). In Romans 10 he writes, \u201cFor there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>(Romans 10:12\u201313). Peter, after his vision at the house of Cornelius, declares: \u201cOf a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (Acts 10:34\u201335).<\/p>\n

The Book of Mormon itself, in passages that early Saints quoted but later teachings effectively contradicted, makes the same affirmation: the Lord \u201cinviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; \u2026 and all are alike unto God\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (2 Nephi 26:33). The 1894 sealing is impossible to reconcile with this verse. Jane was emphatically not treated as \u201calike unto God\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span>; she was sealed in a posture of permanent inferiority precisely because she was Black.<\/p>\n

2. The Curse of Cain and the Curse of Canaan Do Not Apply<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

Genesis 4 records that God placed a \u201cmark\u201d<\/strong><\/span> upon Cain \u2014 not for the purpose of cursing his descendants, but for the protection of Cain\u2019s own life from those who would slay him in revenge for Abel. The text does not describe a skin-color change, nor a hereditary curse upon his offspring, nor any link between Cain\u2019s line and the peoples of Africa. The entire line of Cain perished in the Flood, leaving no descendants among any living people. Genesis 9 records Noah\u2019s curse upon his grandson Canaan after Ham\u2019s offense; the curse is explicitly upon Canaan (the ancestor of the Canaanite peoples of the eastern Mediterranean), not upon Ham or his other descendants. No biblical text identifies any cursed lineage with sub-Saharan Africa, and no New Testament text invokes either curse as a basis for excluding anyone from gospel privileges.<\/p>\n

Conservative biblical scholars across Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions have repudiated the \u201ccurse of Ham\u201d<\/strong> <\/span>reading of African ancestry for more than a century, treating it as a tragic and exegetically unsupportable misuse of scripture. The Latter-day Saint Church\u2019s 2013 Gospel Topics essay on \u201cRace and the Priesthood\u201d<\/em> similarly disavowed the curse-of-Cain explanation as a justification for the priesthood and temple restrictions. The disavowal is welcome. It also raises a question: if the theological justification offered by Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, and others was wrong, and if the policy built on it was wrong, what is the eternal status of the 1894 ordinance that was performed in obedience to it?<\/p>\n

3. Salvation Is by Grace Through Faith \u2014 Not by Lineage or Sealed Hierarchy<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

The biblical gospel offers Jane Manning James everything that the Latter-day Saint temple system denied her. \u201cFor by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (Ephesians 2:8\u20139). Salvation in Christ is not a graduated hierarchy of celestial castes \u2014 prophets at the top, servants at the bottom, with sealing rituals determining one\u2019s rank for eternity. Jesus himself rebuked any such notion in Matthew 20:25\u201328: \u201cYe know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them \u2026 But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> In Christ\u2019s kingdom, hierarchy of office does not translate into hierarchy of eternal worth.<\/p>\n

If Jane Manning James trusted in Jesus Christ for her salvation \u2014 and her own testimony, repeated again and again across sixty years, is that she did \u2014 then according to the gospel of grace, she is now in the presence of the Lord, glorified, and made joint-heir with Christ (Romans 8:17). No earthly ordinance, however solemn, can demote her from that inheritance. The biblical Christian, therefore, reads the 1894 record not as the moment of Jane\u2019s eternal subordination but as the moment of the human institution\u2019s self-indictment.<\/p>\n

4. The Imago Dei Is Not Mediated by Priesthood Lineage<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

Genesis 1:27 grounds human dignity in the image of God borne by every human being, male and female, of every nation. The Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) confessed Christ as fully God and fully man, taking to himself a complete human nature to redeem human beings of every tribe and tongue (Revelation 5:9). The traditional Christian doctrine of the image of God does not require sealing ordinances to confer eternal worth; the image is intrinsic to humanity at creation and is restored, not earned, through union with the resurrected Christ. The Mormon framework, by contrast, makes the highest blessings of eternity dependent on access to temple ordinances controlled by an ecclesiastical hierarchy. When that hierarchy excludes certain races from those ordinances, the framework itself produces theological injustice as a structural feature, not an accidental abuse.<\/p>\n

5. The Servant Christology Inverts the Hierarchy<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

Perhaps the deepest theological irony of the 1894 sealing is that it sealed Jane Manning James as a \u201cServitor\u201d<\/strong><\/span> when the New Testament identifies the Lord himself as the supreme Servant. Philippians 2:6\u20138 confesses that Christ, \u201cbeing in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>In the kingdom Jesus inaugurated, the Servant is exalted; the one who washes feet is Lord. To bind a believer to permanent celestial servitude based on skin color is to invert this gospel \u2014 to consign to subordinate eternity the very posture that Christ himself took up freely and that he calls all his disciples to embrace voluntarily. The biblical pattern is exactly reversed: in Christ, the servant becomes a son; in 1894, the daughter was made an eternal servant.<\/p>\n

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The Modern Apologetic Dilemma<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Contemporary Latter-day Saint apologists face a uniquely difficult set of problems when they engage with the 1894 sealing. The official Church position, articulated in the 2013 Gospel Topics essay on \u201cRace and the Priesthood,\u201d<\/em> is that the priesthood and temple restriction was a product of the cultural context of nineteenth-century America rather than a doctrine revealed by God. The essay states that the Church \u201cdisavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>That language is unambiguous. The historical theories were wrong. The premortal-valor explanation was wrong. The curse-of-Cain explanation was wrong.<\/p>\n

This disavowal, while welcome, creates serious internal pressure on the doctrine of prophetic authority. If Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, Lorenzo Snow, and Joseph F. Smith all taught and enforced a racial doctrine that the modern Church now identifies as false, then on what basis does the believer know that current teachings are reliable? As an ex-Mormon Reddit commenter (writing in plain terms that capture the difficulty) put it:<\/p>\n

If this sealing ordinance is false, then that means that Prophets and Apostles created a false priesthood ordinance based on false doctrine, performed in the temple by the prophets themselves. It is the exact definition of prophets leading people astray.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Discussion thread on the 1894 sealing<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sharon Lindbloom of Mormonism Research Ministry, a Christian apologetic organization, presses the question further. According to Latter-day Saint doctrine, sealings performed by proper priesthood authority are eternally binding unless explicitly cancelled by the President of the Church. There is no record of any President of the Church cancelling Jane\u2019s 1894 \u201cServitor\u201d<\/strong><\/span> sealing. The 1979 proxy ordinances performed on her behalf in the Salt Lake Temple \u2014 her endowment and sealing to her parents and family \u2014 added new ordinances but did not formally void the earlier ones. The question, therefore, remains on internal Mormon grounds: what is Jane\u2019s eternal status today? If the 1894 sealing was valid, she is an eternal servant. If it were invalid, the chain of authority by which it was performed is in question. The dilemma is not the invention of hostile critics; it follows from the Latter-day Saint doctrine of sealing itself.<\/p>\n

A second apologetic difficulty concerns Joseph F. Smith\u2019s 1908 funeral address for Jane. At Jane\u2019s funeral, attended by many Saints and presided over by the President of the Church, Joseph F. Smith reportedly declared that Jane would receive all her temple blessings in the eternities and would become, in his words, \u201ca white and beautiful person\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>\u2014 a statement that drew on the same racial theology embedded in the curse-of-Cain doctrine and in 2 Nephi 30:6 (which, until the First Presidency revised the verse in 1981, promised that the Lamanites would become \u201cwhite and delightsome\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span>). This funeral remark is preserved in Matthias Cowley\u2019s biography of Wilford Woodruff. The Church\u2019s modern disavowal of the theology that produced the \u201cwhite and beautiful\u201d promise does nothing to retract the words spoken at the funeral; they remain, in their original context, a public confirmation by a sitting prophet of the racial categories the modern Church now rejects.<\/p>\n

A third difficulty concerns the so-called \u201cGladwell\u2013Jensen\u201d<\/em> affair of 1998. As historians Matthew Harris and Newell Bringhurst document in their volume The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History<\/em>, a process was underway during the Hinckley administration to issue an official statement repudiating the past racial theology. The proposed declaration was effectively quashed after the Los Angeles Times broke the story prematurely, and a Church spokesman declared that the matter \u201chas not been discussed by the First Presidency.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>The Bott affair of 2012, in which BYU professor Randy Bott repeated the pre-1978 racial rationale to the Washington Post, finally forced the Church to issue the 2013 Gospel Topics essay. Even that essay, however, was published online without formal canonization, and many Latter-day Saint members \u2014 by the testimony of multiple sources, including former ward bishops \u2014 remain unaware of its existence. The disavowal that took the Church 35 years to issue still travels slowly through the body of the membership.<\/p>\n

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Dignifying Jane While Sidestepping the Theology<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Modern Latter-day Saint sources have done something genuinely admirable: they have rescued Jane Manning James from historical obscurity and honored her as a pioneer of remarkable faith. The Church History Topics essay devotes a thoughtful page to her life. The Ensign published a substantial Newell and Avery feature on her in August 1979. LDS Living published Margaret Blair Young\u2019s lengthy treatment of her temple petitions in 2019. The 2018 feature film Jane and Emma dramatized her friendship with Emma Smith for a wide LDS audience. Apostle M. Russell Ballard invoked her name in the October 2017 general conference, comparing his own \u201cpioneer forefathers and mothers\u201d<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>to \u201cSister Jane Manning James,\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>who had \u201cdeep faith in every one of their footsteps as they made their own trek.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

These tributes are sincere. They are also, when read with care, structurally evasive. The pattern across modern LDS sources is consistent: the biographical narrative of Jane\u2019s faith is dignified and amplified; the theological problem posed by her treatment is minimized or omitted. The Church History Topics page mentions in a single, hurried sentence that \u201cChurch leaders eventually allowed her to be sealed by proxy into the Joseph Smith family as a servant in 1894, a unique occurrence.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>That is the whole of the official discussion. The phrase \u201ca unique occurrence\u201d<\/strong><\/span> is doing remarkable theological work: it acknowledges, in passing, that this ordinance is sui generis (in a class by itself)<\/em> in Church history while declining to engage either the theological substance of the ordinance or the racial doctrine that produced it. The Wilford Woodruff journal entry, with its blunt invocation of the curse of Cain, is not mentioned. The text of the sealing itself is not quoted. Jane\u2019s decades of refusals are summarized as a process by which she eventually \u201creceived\u201d<\/strong> <\/span>something, rather than as a sustained denial.<\/p>\n

The Ballard general conference reference is a particularly clean example. Sister Jane Manning James is praised for the depth of her faith in every footstep of her pioneer trek. The praise is true and entirely warranted. The conference talk does not mention that Jane\u2019s temple blessings were withheld during her lifetime, that she was sealed as an eternal servant, that the doctrine which excluded her has been disavowed, or that the doctrine and policy were enforced by sitting prophets and apostles for over a century after her death. The omission is the theological move. By citing Jane\u2019s faith without engaging the reason her faith was tested in the particular way it was tested, the conference talk allows the contemporary audience to admire her without being forced to confront the institutional failure that occasioned the admiration.<\/p>\n

Historian Benjamin Park has observed the same pattern in academic settings. In a thoughtful 2019 reflection on Quincy Newell\u2019s biography of Jane, Park writes that<\/p>\n

She began cropping up in many popular places, like the 2005 movie about Joseph Smith that played in LDS visitors centers, often in service of highlighting the founding prophet\u2019s \u201cprogressive\u201d racial views, given her insistence that she was treated like family in Nauvoo. \u2026 Her poignant appeals for temple blessings also became a common feature of her contemporary image. In short, Jane Manning James has become part of the modern Mormon psyche, even if she is typically found on the peripheries of traditional narratives, rarely challenging their typical themes and lessons.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Benjamin E. Park, June 25, 2019<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Park\u2019s diagnosis is precise. Jane is welcomed into the modern narrative as a witness to Joseph Smith\u2019s comparative liberality on race; her own decades of denial under Brigham Young, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, Lorenzo Snow, and Joseph F. Smith are recharacterized as an unfortunate context for her admirable faith rather than as a falsification of the policy itself. The temples she funded but could not enter become symbols of her sacrifice rather than monuments to her exclusion. The 1894 ordinance becomes a unique occurrence rather than the logical endpoint of a coherent racial theology.<\/p>\n

From a traditional Christian perspective, the move is recognizable. It is the perennial temptation of every religious institution facing its own historical sins: to commemorate the victim while refusing to repudiate the system that produced the victim. The biblical pattern, by contrast, is one of plain confession: \u201cIf we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>(1 John 1:9). The book of Lamentations does not soften the destruction of Jerusalem; the Gospel of Mark does not soften Peter\u2019s denial; the apostle Paul does not soften his own complicity in the death of Stephen. Honest confession is the prerequisite of authentic healing. The honoring of Jane Manning James in modern LDS sources, however genuine, is incomplete so long as the racial doctrine that excluded her is treated as an embarrassment to be sidestepped rather than as a sin to be publicly and specifically repented.<\/p>\n

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Jane\u2019s Story and the Messy History of Mormon Racism<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The 1894 sealing did not happen in a vacuum. It was the institutional product of a developed body of doctrine and practice, articulated over half a century by sitting presidents, counselors, apostles, and lesser leaders. Tracing that body of teaching reveals just how messy \u2014 and how deeply embedded \u2014 the racial theology was within nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Mormonism.<\/p>\n

Brigham Young, the second President of the Church, repeatedly taught that Black people descended from Cain through Ham and were forbidden the priesthood. In an 1852 address to the territorial legislature in Utah, Young declared: \u201cAny man having one drop of the seed of [Cain] \u2026 in him cannot hold the Priesthood, and if no other Prophet ever spake it before I will say it now.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>In the same period, Young pressed the Utah legislature to legalize the holding of Black people in \u201cservitude\u201d<\/strong><\/span> \u2014 a euphemism for slavery \u2014 making Utah the only Western territory to do so. He linked the priesthood ban to fears of racial intermarriage and threatened severe penalties for such mixing. None of this was secret; it was published in the Deseret News and discussed openly in the Journal of Discourses.<\/p>\n

In 1879, more than a decade after Young\u2019s death, Zebedee Coltrin testified that Joseph Smith had instructed him as early as 1834 that Black men were not to be ordained. Joseph F. Smith \u2014 then a member of the First Presidency \u2014 raised the obvious contradiction: Coltrin himself had washed and anointed Elijah Abel in the Kirtland Temple, and Abel had subsequently been ordained an Elder and Seventy with Joseph Smith\u2019s knowledge. The Quorum of the Twelve, unable to resolve the contradiction in Coltrin\u2019s favor, settled on the awkward conclusion that Abel had been \u201cordained before the word of the Lord was fully understood.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> This phrasing was, in effect, an admission that the priesthood ban could not be securely traced to revelation from Joseph Smith; the ban had to be reconciled with conflicting historical evidence by later qualifying claims.<\/p>\n

In 1908, the year of Jane\u2019s death, the Liahona: The Elders\u2019 Journal published an article titled \u201cThe Negro and the Priesthood\u201d<\/em> systematizing the curse-of-Cain doctrine. In 1931, Joseph Fielding Smith\u2019s The Way to Perfection gave the doctrine its mature twentieth-century shape, incorporating the premortal-valor explanation favored by some leaders since the late nineteenth century. In 1949, the First Presidency of George Albert Smith issued an official statement explaining that the priesthood ban was \u201cbecause of the pre-mortal actions of the Negroes who were not valiant.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Mark E. Petersen of the Quorum of the Twelve elaborated the doctrine in a 1954 address at BYU. Bruce R. McConkie\u2019s widely-circulated Mormon Doctrine (first edition 1958, second edition 1966) codified the teaching for a popular Latter-day Saint readership, complete with the assertion that \u201cthe present status of the Negro rests purely and simply on the foundation of the pre-existence.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This is the body of doctrine to which the 1894 sealing belongs. It is not an isolated incident or an embarrassing exception. It is a coherent system, taught by sustained prophetic and apostolic authority across more than a century, and operationalized in actual temple ordinances. The system was abandoned only on June 8, 1978, when President Spencer W. Kimball announced what is now Official Declaration 2, the revelation extending the priesthood and temple ordinances to all worthy male members regardless of race.<\/p>\n

Even McConkie\u2019s remarkable August 1978 retraction, addressed to LDS Seminary and Institute teachers, is worth quoting at length, both for its candor and for the way it has been largely buried by the institutional Church:<\/p>\n

There are statements in our literature by the early brethren which we have interpreted to mean that the Negroes would not receive the priesthood in mortality. I have said the same things\u2026.<\/i><\/p>\n

Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world\u2026.<\/i><\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before. \u2026 It is a new day and a new arrangement, and the Lord has now given the revelation that sheds light out into the world on this subject. As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014 Elder Bruce R. McConkie, address to CES teachers, August 18, 1978<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cForget everything that I have said,\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>from the apostle whose Mormon Doctrine had taught millions of Latter-day Saints that Black people were the cursed seed of Cain and the less valiant souls of the preexistence \u2014 this is an extraordinary act of self-disavowal. Yet, as Dialogue contributor Keith Norman observed, the retraction \u201cseems to have died with him\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span>; later printings of Mormon Doctrine continued in circulation as late as 2010 with the racial entries unchanged.<\/p>\n

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Is Mormonism\u2019s Racist Past Still a Concern of Modern Church Members?<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

This is, in many ways, the most important question raised by Jane\u2019s story for the year 2026. The honest answer must be: yes, and to varying degrees, in identifiable forms.<\/p>\n

First, at the level of institutional posture, the Church has made meaningful efforts. The 2013 Gospel Topics essay on \u201cRace and the Priesthood\u201d,<\/em> the 2018 NAACP alliance under President Russell M. Nelson, and the 2020 joint statement of the First Presidency and NAACP leadership condemning racism all represent real institutional movement. President Nelson\u2019s repeated explicit condemnation of \u201cprejudice of any kind, including racism\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> in general conference addresses is genuine and welcome. These are not cosmetic gestures.<\/p>\n

Second, however, at the level of theological coherence, the work remains incomplete. The Church has disavowed the historical justifications for the ban but has never canonized that disavowal or formally apologized for the ban itself. The 2013 essay does not specifically address the 1894 sealing of Jane Manning James. The Bott incident of 2012 demonstrated that the rationales McConkie codified remained operative in the mind of at least one faculty member at the Church\u2019s flagship university \u2014 and the news reports made plain that he was not alone among ordinary members.<\/p>\n

Third, at the level of demographic representation, the legacy is visible. Statistical surveys (Pew Research Center) consistently report that African-Americans constitute only one to three percent of Latter-day Saints in the United States, even though approximately one in ten contemporary American converts to the Church is Black. The leadership of the global Church remains overwhelmingly white at the highest levels of the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency. Black Latter-day Saint members have repeatedly reported, in published interviews and academic studies, ongoing experiences of microaggression and cultural insensitivity within local congregations \u2014 not necessarily reflecting the official institutional position, but reflecting the long shadow of the disavowed doctrine in the lived experience of contemporary members.<\/p>\n

Fourth, at the level of scripture and liturgy, certain elements continue to invite the older theology. Book of Mormon passages such as 2 Nephi 5:21, Alma 3:6\u20139, and the original wording of 2 Nephi 30:6 link dark skin to divine cursing and white skin to favor. The 1981 First Presidency revision of \u201cwhite\u201d<\/strong><\/span> to \u201cpure\u201d<\/strong><\/span> in 2 Nephi 30:6 addressed one verse but not the broader pattern. The Book of Abraham 1:21\u201327 continues to be read by some Saints as ratifying a priesthood disability rooted in lineage from Ham. These passages remain in the canon and are read aloud in Sunday school. The 2013 essay\u2019s disavowal does not extend to a revision of the texts themselves.<\/p>\n

From a traditional Christian perspective, the question is not whether the modern Church has made progress. It plainly has. The question is whether the underlying theological architecture \u2014 lineage-based priesthood authority, temple ordinances as essential to exaltation, and a racially restrictive history operationalized through sealed eternal status \u2014 has been sufficiently dismantled to prevent a future iteration. So long as 2 Nephi 30:6 is read as referring to skin color, so long as the 1894 \u201cServitor\u201d<\/strong> <\/span>ordinance remains uncancelled, so long as the disavowal of the past doctrine has not been canonized, the unfinished work of repentance remains.<\/p>\n

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Conclusion: The Gospel That Has a Blessing for Jane<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Jane Manning James asked, \u201cIs there no blessing for me?\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> The institution she served and trusted answered her, in 1894, with an ordinance that bound her as an eternal servant. The gospel of Jesus Christ answers her with the apostolic word: \u201cAs many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (Galatians 3:27\u201328).<\/p>\n

There is a blessing for Jane. The blessing is not a celestial servitude assigned by proxy in a temple she could not enter. The blessing is the inheritance of every believer who trusts in the finished work of Christ: adoption as a daughter of God (Galatians 4:5\u20137), joint-heirship with Christ (Romans 8:17), a name written in the Lamb\u2019s book of life (Revelation 21:27), and a seat at the marriage supper of the Lamb where the redeemed of every tribe and tongue and people stand before the throne in equal robes of white that were never the color of their skin (Revelation 7:9\u201310).<\/p>\n

The Christian historian, examining the documentary record, mourns with Jane and rejoices for her. He mourns that she lived and died in a religious system that denied her the equality of standing the gospel of Christ purchased for her. He rejoices because no human ordinance can finally separate any believer from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38\u201339). And he prays that the body of believers who still keep Jane\u2019s name on their pioneer rolls will one day complete the repentance their disavowals have begun \u2014 not by erasing her from the record, and not by softening her story, but by speaking plainly the verdict of scripture upon the system that produced the 1894 sealing, and by inviting all the daughters and sons of Jane Manning James, of every race and every land, into the freedom of the gospel of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

She walked eight hundred miles on bleeding feet to find what she believed was the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God she sought is real. It is open. It is offered freely, without lineage and without a sealing fee, to every soul who calls upon the name of the Lord. And in that kingdom, there are no Servitors \u2014 only sons and daughters, and the King who washed their feet.<\/p>\n

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Primary Sources and Documentation<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

\u2022 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cJane Elizabeth Manning James,\u201d Church History Topics. https:\/\/www.churchofjesuschrist.org\/study\/history\/topics\/jane-elizabeth-manning-james?lang=eng
\n\u2022 Wikipedia, \u201cJane Manning James.\u201d<\/strong><\/span> https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jane_Manning_James
\n\u2022 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cJane Manning James,\u201d For the Strength of Youth (December 2021). https:\/\/www.churchofjesuschrist.org\/study\/ftsoy\/2021\/12\/16_jane-manning-james?lang=eng
\n\u2022 Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cJane Manning James: Black Saint, 1847 Pioneer,\u201d Ensign (August 1979). https:\/\/www.churchofjesuschrist.org\/study\/ensign\/1979\/08\/jane-manning-james-black-saint-1847-pioneer?lang=eng
\n\u2022 Margaret Blair Young,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201c\u2018Is there no blessing for me?\u2019: Jane Manning James\u2019s pleas to receive her endowment,\u201d LDS Living (March 23, 2019). https:\/\/www.ldsliving.com\/is-there-no-blessing-for-me-jane-manning-jamess-pleas-to-receive-her-endowment-her-powerful-testimony-of-the-temple\/s\/90394
\n\u2022 Benjamin E. Park,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cJane Manning James, and the Narratives of Mormon\/Religious\/American History\u201d (June 25, 2019). https:\/\/benjaminepark.com\/2019\/06\/25\/jane-manning-james-and-the-narratives-of-mormon-religious-american-history\/
\n\u2022 Evan Mullins,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cJane Manning James: Faithful Servant, Denied Sisterhood, Sealed into Slavery,\u201d wasmormon.org (May 21, 2025). https:\/\/wasmormon.org\/jane-manning-james-faithful-servant-denied-sisterhood-sealed-into-slavery\/
\n\u2022 Reddit, r\/exmormon<\/strong><\/span> discussion of Jane Manning James (June 2025). https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/exmormon\/comments\/1l10foz\/jane_manning_james_faithful_servant_denied\/
\n\u2022 Recovery from Mormonism forum thread,<\/strong> <\/span>Jane Manning James. https:\/\/www.exmormon.org\/phorum\/read.php?2,2537585,2537608,quote=1
\n\u2022 Wikipedia, \u201cBlack people and Mormonism.\u201d<\/strong><\/span> https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Black_people_and_Mormonism
\n\u2022 Mormon Stories, \u201cRace and Skin Color.\u201d<\/strong> <\/span>https:\/\/www.mormonstories.org\/home\/truth-claims\/race-skin-color\/
\n\u2022 Exponent II,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cAn Open Letter to the LDS Church Addressing Our History of Structural and Cultural Violence.\u201d https:\/\/exponentii.org\/blog\/an-open-letter-to-the-lds-church-addressing-our-history-of-structural-and-cultural-violence\/
\n\u2022 Matthew Bowman,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cMormons confront a history of Church racism,\u201d Institute of the Black World 21st Century (May 29, 2018). https:\/\/ibw21.org\/commentary\/mormons-confront-a-history-of-church-racism\/
\n\u2022 Mormon Heretic,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cThe Mormon Church & Blacks\u201d (February 7, 2016). https:\/\/mormonheretic.org\/2016\/02\/07\/the-mormon-church-blacks\/
\n\u2022 Gospel Tangents,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201c1978 Revelation Affected Black Women\u201d (March 2023). https:\/\/gospeltangents.com\/2023\/03\/1978-revelation-affected-black-women\/
\n\u2022 Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cRoundtable: The Black Cain in White Garments.\u201d https:\/\/www.dialoguejournal.com\/articles\/roundtable-the-black-cain-in-white-garments\/
\n\u2022 The Righteous Cause,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cMormon Racism\u201d (June 2026). https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Mormon-racism.pdf
\n\u2022 Sharon Lindbloom,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cJane Manning James: \u2018Is There No Blessing for Me?\u2019,\u201d Mormonism Research Ministry (June 24, 2019). https:\/\/mrm.org\/jane-manning-james-is-there-no-blessing-for-me
\n\u2022 The Philadelphia Tribune,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cLatter-day Saints under racial scrutiny.\u201d https:\/\/www.phillytrib.com\/news\/latter-day-saints-under-racial-scrutiny\/article_109fd2fe-e456-51e8-a110-681a71be15a2.html
\n\u2022 The Salt Lake Tribune,<\/strong><\/span> archive article on Jane Manning James and the priesthood ban. https:\/\/archive.sltrib.com\/article.php?id=56418444&itype=CMSID
\n\u2022 The Salt Lake Tribune,<\/strong><\/span> archive article on race and the LDS Church. https:\/\/archive.sltrib.com\/article.php?id=5371962&itype=CMSID
\n\u2022 Keith E. Norman,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cThe Mark of the Curse: Lingering Racism in Mormon Doctrine,\u201d Dialogue 32, no. 1 (Spring 1999). https:\/\/www.dialoguejournal.com\/articles\/the-mark-of-the-curse-lingering-racism-in-mormon-doctrine\/
\n\u2022 Reddit, r\/AskHistorians,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cHow did the Mormon Church\u2019s racially charged \u2026\u201d. https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/AskHistorians\/comments\/29w9of\/how_did_the_mormon_churchs_racially_charged\/
\n\u2022 Wikipedia,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cMormon teachings on skin color.\u201d https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mormon_teachings_on_skin_color
\n\u2022 Reddit, r\/mormon,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cThe church disavowed the racist theories, not the \u2026\u201d. https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/mormon\/comments\/1r5tu89\/the_church_disavowed_the_racist_theories_not_the\/<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

A Note on Research Methods and Accuracy<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

In recent years, some have voiced concern that artificial intelligence may distort facts or introduce inaccuracies into serious research. That criticism deserves acknowledgment. However, AI has now evolved into the most powerful research instrument available to any dedicated scholar\u2014capable of analyzing vast datasets, cross\u2011referencing historical records, and surfacing overlooked connections across sources. This work represents a collaboration between the author\u2019s investigative inquiry, verified primary documentation, and the advanced analytic capabilities of AI research tools. Here, AI was not used as a ghostwriter or a shortcut for scholarship, but as a disciplined research partner devoted to rigor, accuracy, and transparency.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Every factual claim in this work has been subjected to active verification. Where AI\u2011generated content was used as a starting point, it was tested against primary sources, peer\u2011reviewed scholarship, official institutional documentation, and established historical records. Where discrepancies were found\u2014and they were found\u2014corrections were made. The author has made every reasonable effort to ensure that quotations are accurately attributed, historical details are precisely rendered, and theological claims fairly represent the positions they describe or critique.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

That said, no work of this scope is immune to error, and the author has no interest in perpetuating inaccuracies in the service of an argument. If you are a reader\u2014whether sympathetic, skeptical, or hostile to the conclusions drawn here\u2014and you identify a factual error, a misattributed source, a misrepresented teaching, or a claim that cannot be substantiated, you are warmly and genuinely invited to say so. Reach out. The goal of this work is not to win a debate but to get the history right. Corrections offered in good faith will be received in the same spirit, and verified corrections will be incorporated into future editions without hesitation.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Truth, after all, has nothing to fear from scrutiny\u2014and neither does this work.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 1894 \u201cServitor\u201d Sealing of Jane Manning James: A Theological and Historical Examination \u2766 \u2766 \u2766 Introduction: A Question Echoing Across the Centuries On a December day in 1884, an aging Black widow in Salt Lake City dictated a letter to the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She had walked…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8513,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[47,44,165],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-of-mormon","category-latter-day-saints","category-racism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Jane-Manning-James-header.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8512"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8519,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8512\/revisions\/8519"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}