Between 1830 and 1842, Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr. produced scripture for the Latter-day Saint movement—his revision of the King James Bible, and the Book of Abraham—that reported a providential history in which the God of Genesis took an active interest in dark skin color as a mark of divinely instituted curses. Accepted as Joseph Smith’s successor among Latter-day Saints headquartered in the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young officially established a policy in the late 1840s of withholding from those of black African ancestry participation in the lay Mormon priesthood otherwise freely extended to all male Church mem-bers. By the opening of the twentieth century, the racial narratives in Smith’s Bible revision and the Book of Abraham became major sources of justification for this policy, which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints discontinued in 1978.