'An Axe for the Frozen Sea Within Us':
U Historian W. Paul Reeve Named as Presidential Societal Impact Scholar

Historian W. Paul Reeve spends his days daylighting the stories of Black Mormons erased by time, religious edict and a deep-seated racism—culturally instantiated, yes, as racism is wont to be and do—but also stubbornly secured historically by institutional statute. 

The inaugural Simmons Chair of Mormon Studies at the University of Utah, Reeve is technically considered “mid-career” in the Department of History where the now full professor has recently completed a stint as chair, and his trajectory is decidedly ascendant. That he was recently honored with a Presidential Societal Impact Scholar award at the U speaks, of course, to that upward vector while driving home the extraordinary outreach, bridge-building and communal healing he has done in rehabilitating the history of Black Mormons among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In just the past five years, Reeve has instigated ground-breaking public history databases hosted at the Marriott Library’s digital exhibits site. This commitment to work beyond  the proverbial “ivory tower,” has won awards, particularly Century of Black Mormons, designed to identify all people of Black African ancestry baptized into the LDS Church between 1830 and 1930, the first one hundred years of the faith.

Rightly termed “an unexpected lens into the American racial story,” the database is more than a dry listing of names and dates: primary source materials from census records and church ordination reports, along with birth and death certificates and photos have been uploaded, and powerful filters allow users, many of whom are descendants of over 191 currently in the system, to interact with the database on their own terms, following their own interests. 

The database supported by the research of Reeve and others is proof positive that the now abandoned church policy to exclude anyone with “one drop of negro blood” from the LDS priesthood and top church ordinances was impossible to enforce, and when it was attempted, brokered profound injury to those believers who were singled out as well as their descendants.

Particularly transformative within the Century of Black Mormons project are the biographical narratives written and edited by Reeve which tell the stories of individuals of color, both enslaved and free, who were treated as second-class Latter-day Saints by the faith of their choice for nearly 130 years.

A Continuing Story Narrated through a Database

The story of Black people in the LDS Church, now a global faith with more than seventeen million members, is a tortured one. Forty-eight years after the church lifted the priesthood and temple bans on people of Black African ancestry in 1978 there are still painful reverberations. 

That continuing story about race and slavery, which Reeve and others are researching and writing, is not only being narrated through a database, but also through traditional monographs, books, and articles that have now cascaded to podcasts, lectures, and signature Mormon "firesides" in local congregations across the nation and beyond. The effort is even showing up in commissioned artwork that can be seen in LDS congregations (“wards”) and in galleries in the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City.

Reeve is at the forefront of the breathless acceleration of historical content regarding  Black Latter-day Saint pioneers. His most recent books include Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness and Let’s Talk about Race and the Priesthood, the latter of which published by Deseret Book, owned and operated by the LDS Church, was translated into Portuguese in 2024. 

During a recent visit to his office with its floor-to-ceiling shelved books—loose papers and folders stacked and teetering in corners—Reeve detailed the provenance of that finished book. The book’s release signals a new era of openness and the hope of reconciliation that Reeve, a practicing Latter-day Saint himself, and many others have wished for. A descendant of some of the first settlers of the Utah Territory where the priesthood and temple bans on Black people emerged, Reeve documents the origins, long contested, of those restrictions. 

‘A terrible speech’

Those definitive origins were only recently unearthed while Reeve was working collaboratively with LaJean Purcell Carruth at the LDS Church History Department as she translated from  Pittman shorthand  a folder of documents connected to the 1852 Utah territorial legislature. It turns out that Young, in a shocking exhibition, made it clear (despite rather fierce on-the-record objections by another leading church “apostle,” Orson Pratt) that Black people were marked with dark skin and cursed from holding the lay priesthood.

When Reeve discovered Young’s statement, which he referred to in the Salt Lake Tribune’s “Mormon Land” podcast as the “worst speech in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” he was devastated. “I’m the person that put that speech into sentence form and probably read it more than anyone else on the planet. And I cried. I’ve cried many times over that speech. It’s terrible.” 

The findings also confirmed to Reeve that Young’s bigotry, borne out of a vaulting 19th century fear of race-mixing, was a departure from his predecessor, Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith. As Reeve explained to his editors of the proposed book, designed to be a translation of his academic work for a general LDS audience, “If you need someone to say this was of divine origins, I won't say that, because I don't believe it's true, and I don't think there's evidence to support it.”

Doing Digital History

Others as well have found this new evidence from the February 5, 1852 record a bombshell. But to the LDS Church’s credit, they made no attempt to deny or hide it. With the Church History Department’s cooperation, all of the speeches from the 1852 legislative session are now available at a website, www.ThisAbominableSlavery.org, hosted by the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. Those primary source documents formed the basis for Reeve’s most recent award-winning book, This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah, coauthored with LaJean Purcell Carruth and Christopher Rich, Reeve’s Ph.D. student. 

Reeve is central in a remarkable nexus—a dynamic intersection of New Mormon History 2.0, the formal academic establishment of Mormon studies in the Beehive State and elsewhere and—perhaps most relevant for societal impact—robust digital delivery to the public. In fact, in 2016 Reeve was awarded a Doing Digital History grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities at George Mason University which amounted to two weeks of eight-hour days “drinking digital history from the end of a fire hose.”

The training paid off. And with the expert help of Digital Library Services’s head Anna Neatrour, the Marriott Library now hosts all three of the databases that Reeve oversees. The “Welcome” page of Century of Black Mormons is by far the highest entry page across the library’s digital exhibits site, with over ten thousand unique pageviews in the past two years. In total, five of Reeve’s digital project pages are in the library’s top ten list for unique page views. 

The Mormon Studies community has taken note of the project with collaborating cohorts from undergraduate and graduate students at Brigham Young University, professionals at the LDS Church History Library and Museum, and Reeve’s own team at the U where young scholars and researchers are being mentored and given the opportunity to publish their findings immediately. 

The Beating Heart of a Database

But, for all the excitement of re-visiting the historical record, for Reeve and the community of contemporary Black Mormons the beating heart of the Century of Black Mormons project is the re-emergence of stories about long-lost, sometimes deliberately erased Black individuals. Surprisingly to many Latter-day Saints, a multitude of Black Mormons were, despite the ban, in fact ordained, sealed in the temple and otherwise embedded fully in Mormon worship and practice. 

Take, for example, Captain John Brown, Ogden’s pioneering first settler and “most famously” captain of a company of the Mormon Battalion that arrived in the Salt Lake Valley five days after Brigham Young’s vanguard company. A man of mixed race, he enjoyed temple privileges and married multiple women polygamously, unions that were all sanctioned in Latter-day Saint temples. Today thousands of his descendents are practicing Latter-day Saints countermanding what had by 1907 become in the church the “one-drop rule”—one drop of African blood made a person ineligible for priesthood ordination or temple admission.

Another biography from the 1920s shares a firsthand account of Oakland-based Latter-day Saints William and Marie Graves who found that as they traveled not all LDS congregations were equally welcoming. 

At times a kind of reparation occurs because of the database. It was Reeve who was contacted by the Salt Lake City Cemetery about an unmarked grave for an enslaved man who died in Salt Lake in 1862 known only by his first name of Tom. “They said, Look, we want to put a marker on Tom's gravesite.” While Reeve was aware of Tom (often an enslaved person was indicated on their enslaver’s census record as a simple hashtag) they didn’t have a record of his baptism. “Within a couple of weeks, I was looking for someone else and scrolling through microfilm and found Tom. Tom was baptized in Salt Lake City in 1854 after he was brought here by his enslaver.”

Tangible Outcomes Equal Impact

Grave markers belatedly placed on the final resting place of an enslaved person are not the only tangible outcome of Reeve’s work. The LDS Church History Museum has also commissioned portraits of Black Mormons from the database. One of those, of  William and Marie Graves mentioned above, now hangs in an Oakland California LDS ward house following an event where the pioneering Black members were honored and Reeve delivered the keynote speech. 

In his stuffed office where it is difficult to locate an outlet to recharge one's phone, Reeve has commissioned another portrait by artist Marlena Wilding of Isaac Lewis Manning who worked in the Nauvoo Mansion House as a cook for Joseph Smith and his wife Emma Hale Smith. Isaac was brother to the redoubtable and better known Jane Elizabeth Manning who, once she arrived in Utah, was a tireless petitioner—to no avail—for “endowment” and standard eternal marriage sealings in the temple. That portrait, rolled and ready to ship, is on loan to the celebrated art museum in Springville, Utah. 

“As we're building this database, and all these stories are coming to light, we make them available,” says Reeve, clearly energized, even reinvented by this work. “We have social media accounts where we announce these stories. On Facebook, we’ve got close to 2,500 followers, and we post every week a new biography to draw attention to it.” 

Franz Kafka reportedly said that “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” but it could be easily said today as well of the axe that is Reeve’s Century of Black Mormons database project. 

As Reeve explained to the LDS Church History Museum which has now commissioned their own portraits of Black Mormons, “art is another way that stories get told. Black Latter Day Saints have been completely erased from collective Latter Day Saint memory.”

Not anymore. A history professor at the U may have just been named a Presidential Societal Impact Scholar, but the recipient, Paul Reeve, has exponentially re-ordered, amplified and “multi-pronged” what societal impact can actually mean in real time and real space.  

You can read about all four of the 2026-27 Presidential Societal Impact Scholars here.