page_title: Black people and Mormonism
section_title: Curses of Cain and Ham
hierarchical_section_title: Black people and Mormonism / Teachings about black people / Curses of Cain and Ham
caption_attribution_description: English: Noah damning Ham Русский: Ной проклинает Хама
context_page_description: Over the past two centuries, the relationship between black people and Mormonism has a history that includes both official and unofficial discrimination, but more recently it has become one of increased outreach and involvement. Since the earliest decade of the church, Black Mormons have been members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While at least two black men held the priesthood in the early church, from the mid-1800s until 1978, the LDS Church had a policy which prevented most men of black African descent from being ordained to the church's lay priesthood and barred black men and women from participating in the ordinances of its temples.
  All men and boys who reach the age of 12 in the LDS Church are required to receive the priesthood ordination in order to hold leadership roles, perform baptisms, bless the sacrament, and give other blessings. Since black men of African descent could not receive the priesthood, they were excluded from holding leadership roles and performing these rituals. Temple ordinances such as the endowment and marriage sealings are necessary for exaltation, and most black members could not enjoy these privileges during their lifetimes.
context_section_description: According to the Bible, after Cain killed Abel, God cursed him and put a mark on him, although the Bible does not state what the nature of the mark was. The Pearl of Great Price, another Mormon book of scripture, describes the descendants of Cain as dark-skinned. In another biblical account, Ham discovered his father Noah drunk and naked in his tent. Because of this, Noah cursed Ham's son, Canaan to be "servants of servants". Although the scriptures do not mention Ham's skin color, a common Judeo-Christian interpretation of these verses, which pre-dates Mormonism, associated the curse with black people and used it to justify slavery.
  Both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young referred to the curse as a justification for slavery. In addition, Brigham Young used the curse to bar blacks from the priesthood, ban interracial marriages, and oppose black suffrage. He stated that the curse would one day be lifted and that black people would be able to receive the priesthood post-mortally.
  Young once taught that the devil was black, and his successor as church president, John Taylor, taught on multiple occasions that the reason that black people (those with the curse of Cain) were allowed to survive the flood was so that the devil could be properly represented on the earth through the children of Ham and his wife Egyptus. The next president, Wilford Woodruff also affirmed that millions of people have Cain's mark of blackness drawing a parallel to modern Native American's "curse of redness".
  In a 1908 Liahona article for missionaries, an anonymous but church-sanctioned author reviewed the scriptures about blackness in the Pearl of Great Price. The author postulated that Ham married a descendant of Cain. Therefore Canaan received two curses, one from Noah, and one from being a descendant of Cain. The article states that Canaan was the "sole ancestor of the Negro race" and explicitly linked his curse to be "servant of servants" to black priesthood denial. To support this idea, the article also discussed how Pharaoh, a descendant of Canaan according to LDS scripture, could not have the priesthood, because Noah "cursed him as pertaining to the Priesthood".
  In 1931, apostle Joseph Fielding Smith wrote on the same topic in The Way to Perfection: Short Discourses on Gospel Themes, generating controversy within and without Mormonism. For evidence that modern blacks were descended from Cain, Smith wrote that "it is generally believed that" Cain's curse was continued through his descendants and through Ham's wife. Smith states that "some of the brethren who were associate with Joseph Smith have declared that he taught this doctrine."  In 1978, when the church ended the ban on the priesthood, apostle Bruce R. McConkie taught that the ancient curse of Cain and Ham was no longer in effect.
  General authorities in the LDS Church favored Smith's explanation until 2013, when a Church-published online essay disavowed the idea that black skin is the sign of a curse. The Old Testament student manual, which is published by the church and is the manual currently used to teach the Old Testament in LDS institutes, teaches that Canaan could not hold the priesthood because of the cursing of Ham his father, but makes no reference to race.
caption: Joseph Smith and Brigham Young taught that blacks were under the Curse of Ham.
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