when lester bush published his 1973 article “Mormonism's Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” he laid out a new historiography on the Latter-day Saint racial restriction by identifying the problems with scholars assuming that Joseph Smith, rather than his successor Brigham Young, established his church's racial policies and doctrines.1
Since Bush's monumental 1973 work, scholars have published over two hundred peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and monographs on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ racial restriction. The article's fiftieth anniversary is an ideal time to reflect on how historians and scholars from other disciplines have written about the place of Black people in the LDS Church since “Mormonism's Negro Doctrine” first appeared. In doing so, I examine Bush's contributions to the historiography and consider how it has shaped studies of the racial restriction in books produced for non-Mormon audiences, in scholarship on global and local Mormonism, in gendered histories...
