A $3 Million Check and a Genealogy Center: The Church Comes to the Juneteenth Museum

On October 7, 2026, Dr. Opal Lee turned 100. The woman known as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” who campaigned for decades until Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021, celebrated with a crowd in Fort Worth, a ceremonial demolition on the future site of the National Juneteenth Museum, and a gift. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced a $3 million commitment toward construction. According to the church’s newsroom, plans for the museum “include a genealogy center intended to help visitors discover and preserve family histories through experiences powered by FamilySearch.”

The church’s donation will finance a FamilySearch-powered center inside the museum.

Deseret News: ‘Act of healing’: Church’s donation to help Grandmother of Juneteenth amplify Black voices, Why President Dallin H. Oaks approved a major Latter-day Saint donation to a new museum, Oct 9, 2026
https://www.deseret.com/faith/2026/10/09/latter-day-saint-opal-lee-juneteenth-museum-3-million-donation/

Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when news of emancipation finally reached enslaved Black Americans in Texas, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. It is a day about freedom delayed, and about who was slow to deliver it.

That is worth keeping in mind, because the donor here has its own history of delaying freedom, and it has yet to apologize for it.

What Was Announced

The facts are not in dispute. Church News, the Deseret News, and Axios Dallas all report the same outline. The planned 50,000-square-foot museum is a $70 million project that still has about $15 million left to raise, with an opening targeted for 2029. The church’s money helps pay for construction and funds a genealogy center that will include oral history recording booths. Elder Michael A. Dunn, who presides over the church’s U.S. Southwest Area, said the center will help “African American families and all who visit to discover and share the stories of their ancestors.” The church also delivered 38,000 pounds of food to local food banks the same day, amid a flurry of press releases.

Fairness matters here, so let’s say it plainly. The museum needs money. Its leaders and Opal Lee welcomed this gift. FamilySearch holds real records that matter to Black families trying to trace ancestors through the gaps slavery left behind. None of that is imaginary.

What Was Not Announced

What none of the coverage describes is the fine print. Who will be staffing the FamilySearch center? Who owns the oral histories recorded in those booths? What does the agreement say about branding, content, and the museum’s freedom to walk away? Will this center be a place where the proselytizing church is free to proselytize? A press release is not a contract, and the museum’s visitors deserve to know what they are walking into.

A Genealogy Center Is Not a Neutral Gift

FamilySearch is a nonprofit run by the church, and genealogy is not a hobby in Mormonism. It is the supply line for temple work. Names found in family trees are taken to temples, where members perform baptisms for the dead, endowments, and sealings by proxy. The church teaches that the dead remain free to accept or reject these ordinances. Critics have long pointed out that nobody asks the dead, or their living descendants.

The church knows this practice can wound people, because it has had to back away from it before. In 1995 it agreed with Jewish leaders to stop proxy baptisms for Holocaust victims and to remove roughly 380,000 names from its index. The agreement was reaffirmed in 2005 and again in 2010. Still, in 2012 the parents of Simon Wiesenthal were baptized by proxy, leading the church to apologize.

Notice the pattern. The church has apologized for baptizing the dead parents of a Nazi hunter. But it has never apologized for barring living Black members from the temple.

The History the Center Won’t Display

For 126 years, Black members of the church could not receive the full ordinances the church teaches are essential for exaltation. The church’s own Gospel Topics essay says that after Brigham Young’s death, “subsequent Church presidents restricted blacks from receiving the temple endowment or being married in the temple.”

Consider Jane Manning James. She walked from Connecticut to Nauvoo, lived in Joseph and Emma Smith’s household, and spent two decades writing to church leaders (John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, Zina Young, Joseph F. Smith) asking for her endowment and a family sealing. Her request for an endowment was refused every time. In 1894 leaders offered a concession, a one-of-a-kind alternative. She was “attached as a Servitor for eternity” to Joseph Smith, with Joseph F. Smith standing in as his proxy. Jane herself wasn’t allowed in the room.

By one account of an 1902 apostles’ meeting, Joseph F. Smith compared the rule to “stockmen engaged in the improvement of breeds,” insisting that wherever “the blood of Cain showed itself, however slight, the line should be drawn there” (Harvard Divinity Bulletin, citing the quorum minutes). Her endowment was not performed, by proxy, until 1979, 71 years after she died.

A servant for eternity. That is what the church offered its most persistent Black pioneer in place of the sacred family relationship she pleaded for. This was in 1894, nearly 30 years after the first Juneteenth.

The Ban Outlasted the First Juneteenth by 113 Years

The priesthood restriction was announced by Brigham Young (yes, the namesake of BYU) in speeches to the Utah territorial legislature in 1852, the same year Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published. (For what else he said in those speeches, see Brigham Young’s Racist Remarks on Slaves, Seed, and Priesthood Doctrines.) Here is what the church kept doing while the country changed around it:

• 1865: Texas learns of emancipation. The Civil War ends and the Thirteenth Amendment is ratified. The ban stays.
• 1947-1949: The First Presidency tells a faithful member that the restriction is “the doctrine of the Church, never questioned,” and in 1949 writes that it “is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord.” (Details below.)
• 1954: Brown v. Board of Education declares separate educational facilities “inherently unequal.” The same year, David O. McKay, after visiting South Africa, stops requiring men to prove they have no African ancestry before receiving the priesthood. He shifts the burden of proof to local leaders, partly because, in his words, the church otherwise would not “have sufficient men to carry on the work of the branches.” Black men with known African ancestry remain barred. Mormonism had a staffing problem, and the policy softened at the edges to fix it.
• 1955-1968: The Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The ban stays.
• 1969-1970: Black athletes and universities protest over the church’s policy. Fourteen Black players at the University of Wyoming are dismissed for wearing armbands before a BYU game, and Stanford stops scheduling new competition with BYU. The ban stays.
• June 1978: President Spencer W. Kimball announces a “revelation” ending the restriction, more than a century after it began and only after years of outside pressure, including a planned NAACP parade float honoring Elijah Abel, and the church’s global growth made it untenable (Official Declaration 2).

Look at that list again from the other direction. The ban was still in force 113 years after the first Juneteenth.

The church’s position, for most of that time, was that the ban came from God. Retreating would have meant admitting that prophets like Brigham Young had taught falsehoods in God’s name. So the church waited until it could not afford to wait. The “men of their times” excuse also fails for leaders who claimed to speak for God.

In Their Own Words: “Doctrine,” Not “Policy”

Today the church’s essay calls the ban it started in 1852 a mere “policy.” But the leaders who enforced it since then, in writing, said otherwise.

1947. Lowry Nelson, a Utah-born sociologist and lifelong member, was asked by a mission president whether Cuba had “groups of pure white blood” and whether they were “maintaining segregation from the Negroes.” Nelson answered, “I do not believe that God is a racist,” and sent a copy to the First Presidency. Their reply, signed by George Albert Smith, J. Reuben Clark Jr. and David O. McKay on July 17, 1947, read:

From the days of the Prophet Joseph even until now, it has been the doctrine of the Church, never questioned by any of the Church leaders, that the Negroes are not entitled to the full blessings of the Gospel.

The same letter called intermarriage of Black and white people “contrary to Church doctrine” (see Mormons and Interracial Marriage). When Nelson wrote back at length, the First Presidency told him he was “too fine a man to permit yourself to be led off from the principles of the Gospel by worldly learning” and hoped he could “reorient your thinking and bring it in line with the revealed word of God.” In 1952 Nelson went public in The Nation, calling the policy “a source of embarrassment and humiliation to thousands of its members.” He also observed that the church had a way to change it, through new revelation. It did, twenty-six years later. (Full exchange: The Lowry Nelson Letters and Racist Mormon Doctrine.)

1949. The First Presidency’s statement used the same language: “It is not a matter of the declaration of a policy but of direct commandment from the Lord.” For accuracy, the church historian’s office has said this text was never issued publicly and was used as “standard language in private correspondence” beginning in 1949 (August 2020 communication, as reproduced by a third party). It is still the First Presidency’s own wording. More: Authoritative Statement by the LDS Church on the Doctrine of Blacks in 1949.

1969. This one went to every bishop. A December 15, 1969 letter from the First Presidency to general authorities, stake presidents, mission presidents and bishops, reproduced in the Improvement Era, restated the position “in view of confusion that has arisen.” It said:

The seeming discrimination by the Church toward the Negro is not something which originated with man; but goes back into the beginning with God.

The 1969 letter also assured readers, “We have no racially-segregated congregations.” That is true of the wards. It is a strange boast from a church whose temples were closed to Black members. See 1969 Official First Presidency Statement on the Doctrines of Banning Blacks from the Priesthood.

That 1969 letter also claimed that “Joseph Smith and all succeeding presidents of the Church have taught” the restriction. The church’s own 2013 essay says there is “no reliable evidence that any black men were denied the priesthood during Joseph Smith’s lifetime,” and that Elijah Abel was ordained. So the First Presidency’s letter got its own history wrong, in an official letter to every bishop.

Put these side by side. For decades the leadership said it was doctrine, never questioned, a direct commandment from God. Today the essay says it was a policy and its explanations “are not accepted today as the official doctrine.” Nobody has ever said which version was the mistake, or who made it. At the 40th anniversary of the 1978 revelation, Dallin H. Oaks, now the church’s president and one of the leaders who approved this $3 million gift, said that “the Lord rarely gives reasons for the commandments and directions He gives to His servants.” In the same speech he said the old explanations were “promptly and publicly disavowed” after 1978, though the church’s detailed disavowal didn’t appear until the 2013 essay. The church has not formally apologized.

What the Church Says Now

In 2013 the church published the essay “Race and the Priesthood.” It deserves credit for what it does say. It ties the restriction to Brigham Young, states that its justifications “echoed the widespread ideas about racial inferiority,” and declares that “Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.” It also disavows the old theories that Black skin was a curse or a sign of premortal unworthiness, and church leaders now dismiss those teachings as folklore. For what the essay leaves out, see Mormon Church Whitewashes Racist History in Essay.

What it doesn’t do is apologize. And it leaves a contradiction hanging in the air. The 1949 First Presidency said the ban was a “direct commandment from the Lord.” Official Declaration 2 now says “Church records offer no clear insights into the origins of this practice.” Either the prophets knew what God wanted, or they didn’t. The church has never told its members which one it is, or whether it could happen again. (More on that bind: Painted into a Corner.)

The church’s public line, repeated for decades, is that it has always opposed racism. In a September 2000 Ensign article, “No More Strangers,” Elder Alexander B. Morrison of the Seventy wrote:

How grateful I am that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has from its beginnings stood strongly against racism in any of its malignant manifestations. President Spencer W. Kimball stated the Church’s position well: “We do wish that there would be no racial prejudice. … Racial prejudice is of the devil. … There is no place for it in the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The same article calls racism “an offense against God and a tool in the devil’s hands,” and says members “regret the actions and statements of individuals who have been insensitive to the pain suffered by the victims of racism and ask God’s forgiveness for those guilty of this grievous sin.”

Give that its due. It is a real expression of regret. But read it closely. The regret is for “individuals,” not for the institution. It never mentions the priesthood and temple ban. And the church’s “beginnings” include the 126-year restriction, which Spencer W. Kimball himself presided over as president from 1973 until he announced its end in 1978. “Racial prejudice is of the devil” is a fine sentence from the man who led a church that excluded Black members from its temples. The claim that the church has “always” stood against racism doesn’t survive contact with the church’s own 2013 essay. (We dug into that article in Standing Against Racism?.)

We’ve Seen This Movie Before

In October 2021 the church announced a $2 million gift for a FamilySearch center at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City. By November it was off. The museum said it would “return the grant funds and will suspend plans to develop the center until further notice,” and its CEO later said the project was “beyond the scope of the museum’s mission.” The Oklahoman reported that some tribal citizens had raised concerns about partnering with the church. A local church spokeswoman said, “we understand why the announcement was met with some hesitation or concerns.”

We covered it here: Native American Museum Returns Church’s $2 Million Donation Due to Strings Attached. The concerns raised in Oklahoma were about who would control the center, whether it would proselytize, and whether the dead would be baptized by proxy. They are the same questions this museum should be asking.

It also wasn’t the first. In 2019 the church gave $2 million to build a Center for Family History inside the International African American Museum in Charleston. The playbook is consistent. The church finds a respected institution with a mission around a marginalized community’s history, pays for a family history center inside it, and announces it loudly. The same pattern shows up in the church’s recent NAACP partnership and its presence at Morehouse College’s MLK Chapel. “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them,” goes the Sermon on the Mount, which the Book of Mormon helpfully repeats in 3 Nephi 13.

Questions Worth Asking Before the Ink Dries

Directors and board members of the National Juneteenth Museum, here are questions the coverage hasn’t answered:

• Is there a written agreement, and does it give the museum the unilateral right to end the genealogy partnership and keep or return funds?
• Who will staff the center? Will volunteers be church members or missionaries, and what will they be allowed to discuss with visitors?
• Where do the oral histories recorded in those booths live, who owns them, and can they be removed on request?
• Will visitors and participants be told that names and records can end up in LDS temple ordinances? Will they be able to opt out?
• Will the museum’s exhibits tell the story of Black Latter-day Saints, including the 1852-1978 priesthood ban, or only the part the church wants told?
• Will the museum mention early Black Mormon pioneers like Jane Manning James, Elijah Abel, or Biddy Mason?
• Will it mention people the church excommunicated for opposing its racial doctrines, policies, and practices, like Byron Marchant?

The Book of Mormon Problem

The church points to 2 Nephi 26:33, which says God “denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free,” as evidence that the book is racially unifying. They don’t like to mention that it also contains passages like these:

• 2 Nephi 5:21: The Lord caused “a skin of blackness” to come upon the Lamanites for their iniquity so they would not be “enticing” to the Nephites.
• 1 Nephi 12:23: Lamanite descendants become “a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.”
• 1 Nephi 13:15: Gentile settlers are “white, and exceedingly fair and beautiful.”
• Jacob 3:8-9: Nephites are warned not to revile the Lamanites “because of the darkness of their skins,” and told that Lamanites’ skins will be whiter than theirs if they repent.
• 3 Nephi 2:14-15: The curse is lifted from converted Lamanites, and “their skin became white like unto the Nephites.”
• 1 Nephi 11:13: Mary is “exceedingly fair and white.”

The church now disavows the idea that dark skin is a divine curse, but the passages remain canon. “By their fruits ye shall know them” cuts both ways.

What You Can Do

A donation that arrived with a sincere apology and a plan for reparations would be a gift. A donation that arrives with a press release, a genealogy center, and who knows what strings looks like strategic placement and a publicity stunt.

This post from wasmormon.org has already been shared with the museum. If you agree with its concerns, consider these steps:

• Contact the museum. Phone, email and mailing address are at nationaljuneteenthmuseum.org/join-the-movement. Be respectful. The people there are working hard on a $70 million project, and a $15 million gap is real pressure.
• Donate. The museum is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The more it raises elsewhere, the freer it is to say no to any strings.
• Share your story. If you are a current or former member, or a Black Latter-day Saint, tell us about your experience.

More reading

• Native American Museum Returns Church’s $2 Million Donation Due to Strings Attached
• Jane Manning James: Faithful Servant Denied Sisterhood, Sealed Into Slavery
• The Lowry Nelson Letters and Racist Mormon Doctrine
• Authoritative Statement by the LDS Church on the Doctrine of Blacks in 1949
• 1969 Official First Presidency Statement on the Doctrines of Banning Blacks from the Priesthood
• Standing Against Racism
• MLK Chapel of Morehouse College Honors Founder of Racist Church
• How the Church Is Supporting the National Juneteenth Museum (Church Newsroom)
• Church donates $3 million to Juneteenth museum (Church News)
• Church of Jesus Christ gives $3 million to Juneteenth Museum (Deseret News)
• National Juneteenth Museum project moves forward (Axios Dallas)
• Why the First Americans Museum quietly returned a $2 million donation (The Oklahoman)
• Race and the Priesthood (churchofjesuschrist.org)
• Jane Elizabeth Manning James (churchofjesuschrist.org)
• Century of Black Mormons: Jane Elizabeth Manning James (University of Utah Marriott Library)
• The Fading of the Pharaoh’s Curse (Dialogue)