Quincy D. Newell, "Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon" (Oxford UP, 2019)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · May 21, 2019 · 54m

"Dear Brother," Jane Manning James wrote to Joseph F. Smith in 1903, "I take this opportunity of writing to ask you if I can get my endowments and also finish the work I have begun for my dead .... Your sister in the Gospel, Jane E. James." A faithful Latter-day Saint since her conversion sixty years earlier, James had made this request several times before, to no avail, and this time she would be just as unsuccessful, even though most Latter-day Saints were allowed to participate in the endowment ritual in the temple as a matter of course. James, unlike most Mormons, was black. For that…