Can you imagine being inside the room for 1978 revelation? The journals of Marion D Hanks take us there when the 1978 revelation was announced to the Quorum of 70.

We will also discuss the 1969 statement by the Apostles and most of the First Presidency affirming the ban. Dr Matt Harris takes us behind the scenes to discuss the statement affirms a ban from temple & priesthood for black members and claiming the reasons were known only to God.  Check out our conversation...

https://youtu.be/MY9DQdG-lA4

Don't miss our other conversations with Matt: https://gospeltangents.com/people/matt-harris/

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Marion D. Hanks

GT  00:41  So another surprise. I felt like, because of our previous interview, I knew a lot of what you were going to say, but there were still surprises. I was [surprised by] the amount of correspondence that you got with Marion D. Hanks--now he's a former Seventy, former General Authority.[1] He's passed away, and I had heard from Margaret Young and some others that he was very instrumental and very progressive, for lack of a better word with regards to race. But I was shocked at how much correspondence you got from Marion D. Hanks. So could you introduce them and also say, how  you got your hands on so much materia?

Matt  01:36  Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. I get asked this a lot, and let me answer the broader question, which is, how I got access to this material. Then I'll tell you some great things about Elder Hanks. So as a historian, I only want to write on things where I can get access to the best records. I always liken it to a Thanksgiving metaphor that the turkey would be the First Presidency meeting minutes, Quorum of the Twelve meeting minutes, letters, diaries, that's the turkey. The trimmings, the Thanksgiving trimmings would be Ensign articles or Improvement Era articles, or maybe something in the Deseret News, or maybe a General Conference sermon or a BYU devotional or a published writing. Those are all important. And I utilize the trimmings in my book a lot. But make no mistake, this book is grounded in the turkey. And so how do I get the turkey? And there's a there's a couple of answers. One is that the Church archivist granted me stuff that I never thought I would be granted. For example, I got access to the Joseph Fielding Smith papers.

GT  02:49  Oh, I didn't know that.

Matt  02:50  Yeah, which is rich, and I've said this before to different people, that it gave me a different perspective on him, that when people read his writings from the mid-20th century, you just see him as some hardliner with race and all of this. But when I was going through his diaries, I saw a person who was funny. I would just start laughing spontaneously in the Church Archives Reading Room. I'm sure the senior missionaries are like, "Who is this guy? What's he doing? He's just laughing." And I'm reading his diaries. I'll give you one example. Every year when I got to, I think, April 1, Joseph Fielding writes in his diary. He wasn't a full diarist. He wouldn't write 10 paragraphs, usually they were maybe two. He wrote them in a little--we would, today, call it a Franklin day planner or something. They didn't have that in those days, but it was something similar. And so he would write a couple of paragraphs. So he wasn't really a rich diarist, but he would say stuff like, "I was at the church building today," or at the office, as he puts it, "and I met with this committee and that committee, and I interviewed these people for missions. Then I got home, so it was a good day," he says paragraph one. Paragraph two. "Then I got home and I did my taxes. Oh, I hate giving my money to the government! Exclamation point." It seems like every year, on April 1, I read the same thing. I’m laughing. I thought this guy is really funny, and he was a prankster. He would tell jokes, and you would never get that side of him publicly.

Matt  04:25  it was the same with his son-in-law, Bruce McConkie. They were very stern over the pulpit. They thought that, I think, God wanted them to be this Old Testament fire breather, you know, call the Saints to repentance, pound your fist on the podium four times, and hold up the Scriptures with your finger pointed. But, Smith was delightful in private. I got to see that side of him, it was great. I saw him as a person. So, I got to see the Joseph Fielding Smith papers. I got to see a whole bunch of other collections that are in this book at the Church archives. I found collections from CES people who, back in the day, would have access to the apostles and to the Church President. That's not the case today. If you work for the Church today and you want to call President Nelson's secretary and say, "Hey, can I come over on Tuesday?" They would say, probably, "No. Talk to your bishop or talk to somebody else. He's busy." But in those days, you could call the president's office and, when's his next available opening? And the Secretary would say, "Oh well, Tuesday at four."  "Okay."  "What's this about?" "Yeah, you know, Joseph Fielding Smith wrote this stupid manual on evolution. I want to talk to him about that."

Matt  05:43  And so, I determined that he was anti-evolution. He was not progressive on evolution, whereas some of the brethren were, just to be clear, I want to put context in that statement, too, for your listeners. Elder Widtsoe, Elder Talmage, among the two trained, Ph.D.-trained apostles. They had PhDs in science.

GT  06:03  Elder Bennion.

Matt  06:04  Elder Bennion did, yeah. So, they didn't share Joseph Fielding Smith's anti-evolution views. He was a very literalist.

GT  06:13  President Nelson, seems to, though.

Matt  06:15  Boy, that's a rabbit hole that I don't want to get into it. Anyway, the institute people would call him up, and that was one in particular in the mid 1950s, when Elder Smith was trying to push his anti-evolution views on the Church. He wanted them, the seminaries and institutes, to talk about his anti-evolution views in this book he had written. He wanted BYU students in the history department to read it. I mean, it was just nuts. The institute people pushed back hard. And David O. McKay, President McKay, would entertain all this, and he would have these people in and with not just the evolution issue, but other issues. So when these CES people died, they would donate their papers, either to BYU or to the U,[2] or Utah State. I'm telling you, when I discovered in those papers what was there, it was rich. Because they would oftentimes talk about the meeting with the President or an apostle, and they would write about in their diaries at length. Or they would have letters that they would write beforehand about the issue, or a follow up letter that the apostle would write. "You know, we talked about X, Y and Z. Did it ever get resolved? And here are my feelings on the subject." So that was a rich way to get their voice, was through these CES papers. And finally, the other sources that I got was--I had to work for it. I had to interview with the children of General Authorities. So when their father died, of course, the papers would fall to the care of the children, and the children would sometimes donate them to the Church archives, in which case they would be restricted. Other times they wouldn't donate them, and they would retain possession of the diaries, or if they did donate, then they would retain copies. So, I can't tell you how many times I've called up the children. I say, children, you know, these are people in their, what, 60s and 70s, but I would call up the children of the General Authorities, or the kids of the General Authorities, and I would say, "My name is Matt Harris. I'm doing a book on blacks in the priesthood, black people in the priesthood. I want to see your father's diaries." I wasn't that jarring, but I had to build relationships of trust. I can talk about President Kimball's diaries that I got access to in a minute. But you asked about Elder Hanks. My late friend, the late, great Curt Bench, who runs a wonderful bookstore at Benchmark Books-- if any of you buy LDS books, go to Benchmark Books.

GT  08:55  Except for they're out of yours.

Matt  08:57  Of my book, they're out. They're out.

GT  09:00  They'll get them soon.

Matt  09:00  They're getting them soon. Yeah, there's going to be a very small delay. In fact, by the time this goes live, the books will be back in print. But anyway, my friend Curt Bench, who passed away a couple of years ago, his son and another friend of mine, Bryan Buchanan, they run the store, and they're wonderful. Buy your LDS books from them. But Curt told me, or introduced me to Rich Hanks, the son of Marion Hanks. And he said, "Matt." I remember I was at the store one day, and Curt was appraising the Marion Hanks diaries, that collection. He wasn't just a bookseller, he was an appraiser. He told me one day, he said, "Matt, you're going to want to see this." I want to just pause the story here for a quick moment. I had found in many archives letters from Elder Hanks. I had always admired him for a lot of reasons, not just because he opposed the ban and had racially progressive views, believed in civil rights so passionately. That was a lot of large part of it. Those would be my values. But I really, really admired him, because when the Saints had written him letters about the race issue, they were struggling with it. Some of the Saints, they would write a handful of General Authorities, and some of the General Authorities, including Hartman Rector Jr, would write them back, these nasty notes: "Fall into line and repent, brother." I'm just thinking, you've got to be kidding me.  This brother just bore his soul. The letter that the brother wrote to the handful of General Authorities was,