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News and Views: Brigham Young University and the Racial Doctrines of the Mormon Church
Brigham Young University, founded in 1875 in Provo, Utah, is operated as an adjunct of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, familiarly known as the Mormons. Still bearing strong traditions of racism, the school in percentage terms is almost all white. In 1996, 75 of the 26,553 students at Brigham Young University were black. Fifteen of the black students were football players.
BYU draws much of its student body from Utah and surrounding Rocky Mountain states where the black population is about 1 percent of the total. Yet even this figure in percentage terms is about four times the level of black enrollments at BYU. It should be borne in mind too that BYU enrolls students from all 50 states and more than 100 foreign nations. Only about one third of the student body is from Utah. Clearly it is for reasons other than the remoteness of Utah from black population centers that African-American students are not appearing on the BYU campus.
The token number of black students is also mirrored in the faculty at BYU. In 1996 only 2 of the 1,339 fulltime faculty members at Brigham Young University were black. One African American was a physical education teacher who worked with the football team. The other black faculty member was an instructor in church history.
The racial attitudes within Brigham Young University tend to follow the traditions of the Mormon Church, which has a long history of restricting church rights and privileges to members of the white race. Joseph Smith, Brigham Young,...