Seeing Mormonism in Color: African American and American Indian Visionaries in the Nineteenth-Century Mormon Movement

Seeing Mormonism in Color: African American and American Indian Visionaries in the Nineteenth-Century Mormon Movement

What can we learn by attending to the visions of Black and American Indian members of the majority-white Mormon movement (and later the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS Church) about how they made space for themselves in the religious community? I focus on the visions of two men: Peter, an African American man active in the movement in Kirtland, Ohio in the early 1830s; and Arapene, a Ute Indian leader baptized in the LDS Church in 1850.

Quincy D. Newell is a specialist in the religious history of the American West. A native of Oregon, she attended Amherst College and did her graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Newell taught at the University of Wyoming for eleven years before joining the faculty at Hamilton College in 2015, where she now holds the Walcott-Bartlett Chair of Humanistic Studies. She has published numerous books and articles on topics related to religion in the American West. Her article “What Jane James Saw” won both the 2017 Best Article in Mormon Women’s History from the Mormon History Association and the 2018 Jane Dempsey Douglass Prize from the American Society of Church History. The subject of that article, Jane James, is also the focus of Newell’s most recent book, Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon (Oxford University Press, 2019), which won the “Best Biography” award from the Mormon History Association in 2020. Newell’s scholarship has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals, including Church History, Religion and American Culture, Journal of Africana Religions, and American Indian Quarterly.