Back in 2008 – Keepa’s first year of publication – we posted one of our first Latter-day Saint Images posts, a collection of photographs of Latter-day Saints around the world, this group dating to 1903. One of the pictures in that post was of the branch in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. If you’re a longtime Keepa’ninny, you may have seen it then:

.

.

Certainly I saw it then … but did I really? Do you?

Justin Bray, of BYU’s Religious Studies Center oral history coordinator at the Church History Library, [see comment 13] saw it more recently, and brought it to the attention of Keepa’s longtime friend Paul Reeve of the University of Utah last year. When he did, Justin and Paul and later I took a closer look at it. Here’s a closeup – do you see what we finally saw? The black man standing there in the second row from the back, near the lady whose hat makes a good landmark?

Last year, Paul was named the University of Utah’s first Mormon Studies professor, holding a professorship created by the David E. and Melinda K. Simmons Foundation. His first project in that position is building a digital resource, “A Century of Black Mormons,” a database of black converts in the Church’s first hundred years. The database will be formally opened this coming June, in an observance of the 40th anniversary of the revelation extending priesthood to all worthy male members of the Church – lifting the longstanding prohibition against ordaining black men – like this man pictured with the Minneapolis branch – to the priesthood.

Nobody has ever before attempted to find these courageous and mostly forgotten converts. It hasn’t been very many years, after all, since most of us first became aware of Elijah Abel and Jane Manning James – but there were so many more. A handful of researchers has been combing the records, looking for these early black Saints and working to bring their lives into focus. And here, suddenly, due to the keen eye of Justin, Paul had another man to identify.

Justin’s initial work took him to a history of the Minneapolis branch which suggested that our man in the photograph was named Earnest Banks. After cranking through microfilm at the Church History Library, looking at records of members named “Banks” in the Church census for 1914 and 1920, Paul found listings that corrected that name to Elijah Banks. A few more searches in the early 20th century federal censuses confirmed his name as Elijah and told us that Elijah’s wife was named Caroline – and that theirs was a mixed-race marriage, as Caroline (and her mother, who lived with the couple for a time) was white.

With a name to look for, I searched my fast-growing database of Latter-day Saint historical correspondence – letters written by and to and about Latter-day Saints from every source I can find – and came up with two pertinent references.

Asahel H. Woodruff, a son of Wilford Woodruff, was president of the Northern States Mission in 1904. A man with southern roots was then investigating the Church, apparently in Minneapolis, and objected to conditions he found there. While the letter that brought the situation to President Woodruff’s attention does not survive, President Woodruff’s reply tells us significant details both about Elijah Banks and about the social conditions he and his wife had to face in that era:

I am personally acquainted with the Sister Bank[s] you spoke of and have visited and dined at her home and am also quite well acquainted with her husband. They have always been regarded both by Elders and members of our church in Minneapolis as exemplary people in their lives and conduct. While it is true that Mr. Bank[s] is a colored man and his wife is a white woman yet we of the north do not consider this any bar to their being proper candidates for admittance into the fold of Christ. God is no respecter of persons and is as anxious to save the souls of our black brethren as he is of the white.

We feel that Mr. [C]’s southern sentiment on the negro question has led him to form wrong conclusions as to the character of Sister Bank[s] against which we have never heard a breath of suspicion. We presume that the marriage of a white woman to a colored man of the south would ostracize her from the associates of her white brothers and sisters, but here in the north it is different.

This letter, by the way, is the earliest use known to me – perhaps Paul or other specialists have seen earlier – of the scriptural phrase “God is no respecter of persons” used in this context of race as a factor in Church membership.

I  found another letter written a few years later – one where the mission president was not nearly as concerned about “the souls of our black brethren” as President Woodruff had been. From 1909:

Just a word concerning the negro families … We have three families of colored people, all of whom have been in the church eight or ten years, – one family in Minneapolis, Minn; one in [Wisconsin], and one in [Indiana]. They have been good faithful people but so much in evidence in our meetings, that investigators have been kept away from our services, so with this lesson before us we have done no work among the colored people for at least seven years.

Elijah and Caroline Banks were baptized on 4 January 1899 – did the Church have the use of some club’s indoor swimming pool? Or did the Bankses brave the frigid Minnesota winter to be baptized in some outdoor body of water? I don’t know – but I see that Elijah’s 1899 baptism puts him at the head of those who had “been in the church eight or ten years” by 1909. And I don’t suppose he could have been ignorant of the fact that no further proselyting had been done among men and women who looked like him.

With these basic facts established, researching Elijah has become a project very like researching any member of my own family: Paul and I have taken the available records, one after another, picking up a fact here and a line there, to bring Elijah’s life into a little greater focus.

There’s this advertisement in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune from the year before their baptism, suggesting Elijah’s lowly status as a man-of-all-work, and the difficulty of earning a living.

.

.

More important, perhaps, for purposes of understanding Elijah’s life as a Latter-day Saint, are these clips from the minutes of the Sunday School there, showing Elijah’s constant participation and his acceptance among the other Saints in Minnesota. (He no doubt continued to take part beyond the dates of these bits – but a new clerk assumed the duty of taking minutes, and ceased to record any local Saints by name, focusing instead on the missionary elders):

16 February 1902

… The exercises consisted in short discourses rendered by members as follows. Brother Banks on our first parents in Eden. … Sister Carrie Banks on the Tree of Life …

9 March 1902

… The class exercises consisted in short speeches by … Brother Banks on the nature of Atonement …

6 April 1902

… Brother Elijah Banks and Brother John Fiocati each spoke on the foundation of faith … Benediction offered by Brother Elijah Banks.

13 April 1902

… Brother Elijah Banks showed that faith is a gift of God. …

27 April 1902

… Brother Elijah Banks read on Repentance essential to salvation. …

We’ve found other records, too, all of which are being combined into a short life story – the best we can do at this point – of Elijah Banks, a faithful, contributing black member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of those to be featured in the database “A Century of Black Mormons.”

Your contributions to this database are very welcome, whether you have only a name or a fully researched biography. Beginning in June, this database will be available for projects involving race in the Church; it will be a memorial to a too-long overlooked subset of pioneering members; and it will, I hope, be a source of pride to black Latter-day Saints today, a step toward correcting the gaps in our history and our awareness of who the Latter-day Saints really were and are.