Reissued: W. Paul Reeve, "Century of Black Mormons" (S1 E3 - Part 1)

**Brad Westwood** (0:05)
Hi, this is Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian at the Department of Heritage and Arts. You're listening to Speak Your Piece. That's P-I-E-C-E as well as P-E-A-C-E. Today's speaker is Dr. W. Paul Reeve from the University of Utah.
This podcast, Speak Your Piece, is a podcast where writers, historians, and contributors to Utah's history share their insights and discoveries about Utah history. It's also a place where if you do nothing else, here's where you can get your history fix.
The purpose also is to make you aware of history that not only is useful, but also something important or entertaining or something that's worthwhile. So we're grateful that you're listening today. My speaker who's joining us, Dr. Paul Reeve, was raised in Southern Utah, I believe it in Hurricane Utah, Washington County. Paul has taught at the University of Utah since 2008, American Western Mormon and Utah history. He is the first ever Simmons Professor of Mormon Studies, and he's written the following books. Making Space on the Western Frontier Mormon Minors and Southern Paiutes in 2007 by the University of Illinois.
Mormonism, a historical encyclopedia with an amazing deep researcher, artist Parcel, published in 2010 There are a number of other books, but the one I most particularly want to reference, or actually two, is his 2018 very thoughtful postscript to Newell Bring Her Second Edition Saints, Slaves and Blacks, The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism in 2018 That's the second edition. I thought after all the research you've done in ethnic studies and African-American, Paul, I thought that was very interesting. Do you remember the postscript that you wrote?

**W. Paul Reeve** (2:08)
At least vaguely. You're reminding me of it right now.

**Brad Westwood** (2:15)
What I thought was just so wonderful is just this idea that there's something more to be said about ethnic studies and understanding the black experience in Mormonism. Something that's been rather popular of late, and I think one of the reasons it's so popular is your 2015 book, published by Oxford University Press, Religion of a Different Color, Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. BYU studies reviewed this and they called it a tour de force required reading for anyone interested in the Mormon past. Then the reviewer also went on to say, if you're interested in the impact of religion on America, on the general national discourse, this is a book to read.
This was an award-winner, Paul, and I just want to say as the former director of state history, I was very proud that you received the Francis Armstrong Madsen Best History Book Award, I think in 2016

**W. Paul Reeve** (3:19)
Yeah, that's right.

**Brad Westwood** (3:20)
But you also received the same award from the Mormon History Association and the John Whitmer Association. Now, Utah history and race is what we'll be talking about today with Paul, but particularly we want to speak about his public history project, Century of Black Mormons, which Paul serves as the general editor of this digital database.
General Paul, tell us about this database and why is it important to Utah history?

**W. Paul Reeve** (3:49)
Well, I think when I was looking for a new project after a religion of a different color, I'm a social historian at heart. That means trying to understand history from the bottom up instead of the top down. What's the perspective of the average person? I've always just been interested in what history looks like from the vantage point of those who more often than not get erased from our historical narratives. I wanted to do a public history project that engaged the public in a different way.
You obviously can write a monograph, but I wanted to do a digital public history project where the public could have access to sources and just name, number, and identify all known people of Black African descent baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints between 1830 and 1930

**Brad Westwood** (4:56)
So let me ask you about this idea of primary sources. This is one of the big, it's a big deal in public history. It's with the World Wide Web having access to sources.
Just what are primary sources and how do they fit into this project?

**W. Paul Reeve** (5:12)
Primary sources are the sources that are created at the time period.
And for people who leave few written records behind, they're really all that historians have to go on, trying to recover the lives of people who are usually on the margins of society. And so primary sources can be vital records. They can be a birth certificate, a death certificate.
They can be something written by the person themselves, something in their own handwriting versus a secondary source, which is written later by an historian, for example. So that's how we distinguish between a primary and a secondary source. So a primary source is created at the time, something that isn't filtered through an historian's lens, but is actually just a document. And it doesn't mean that there can't be problems with primary sources, because obviously there can. They can also be incorrect, but nonetheless, they are what historians have to go on when they try to reconstruct someone's story.