While Black women have inherited the worst of racism over the decades and might be characterized as “the least of these my sisters,” Black Mormon women have also had to reconcile their membership in a historically White church that had at one time withdrawn access to spiritually emancipitory temple ordinances. This inquiry into the gendered, racialized conversion of sixteen Black Mormon women from Baltimore seeks to overturn the conceptualization that “the least of these” are somehow deficit and draws on W.E.B. Dubois, “We who are dark can see [spiritual things] in a way that White [Mormons] cannot.”

Laura Rutter Strickling