The church also advocated for segregation laws and enforced segregation in its facilities.
Hotel Utah, a church-run hotel, banned black guests, even when other hotels made exceptions for black celebrities.
[30] Blacks were prohibited from performing in the
Salt Lake Tabernacle, and the
Deseret News did not allow black people to appear in photographs with white people. Church leaders urged white members to join civic groups and opened up LDS chapels "for meetings to prevent Negroes from becoming neighbors", even after a
1948 Supreme Court decision against racial covenants in housing. They counseled members to buy homes so black people wouldn't move next to LDS chapels.
[1]:67 In the 1950s, the San Francisco mission office took legal action to prevent black families from moving into the church neighborhood.
[31] A black man living in Salt Lake City, Daily Oliver, described how, as a boy in the 1910s, he was excluded from an LDS-led boy scout troop because they did not want blacks in their building.
[32][33]
In 1959, the Utah State Advisory Committee to the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights stated that: "the Negro is the minority citizen who experiences the most widespread inequality in Utah. The exact extent of his mistreatment is almost impossible to ascertain", explaining that 'Mormon interpretation attributes birth into any race other than the white race as a result of inferior performance in a pre-earth life and teaches that by righteous living, the dark-skinned races may again become 'white and delightsome."
