Mama would have been nearly seven months pregnant with me at that time. She already had two little girls — 4-year-old Rosalynde and 2-year-old Gabrielle — and if I’m remembering correctly, they were living in a starter house on Harmony Place, a small cul-de-sac whose idyllic name belied the very large, frightening dog that lived next door. My parents had been married for nearly five years by then, and Daddy was probably working at his first post-law school firm in nearby Los Angeles.

Mama heard about it first. I think there had been a press conference in Salt Lake City, and it had come through on a local radio station. She stopped everything and called Daddy at work — probably a rare occasion, since Los Angeles was a different zip code, so it would have been an expensive long-distance call. Daddy answered, Mama told him, and both of them started weeping. I think I remember hearing that they kneeled down and prayed together, right there on the phone, right there in the office, and thanked God that no worthy man would ever again be denied the opportunity to hold and exercise the holy priesthood.

I didn’t hear this story until a couple of years ago. My parents and some younger siblings had visited me in Washington, D.C. for Thanksgiving, and we took a chilly trip out to Manassas to see the battle site of the first and second battles of Bull Run. There wasn’t much to see — a small visitor center, a commemorative statue, and some trails over the rolling hills and into the nearby woods. Somehow I got to walking by Daddy, and somehow the topic of the Civil War wandered to slavery, the Civil Rights movement, and the Priesthood revelation.

“Where were you when you found out?” I asked him — in the same tenor as “Where were you when you heard that Kennedy was assassinated,” and “Where were you when the first man landed on the moon.” Curiosity about my parents’ involvement in historic events of their time, and a little marveling that they had occurred so recently. I was not prepared for Daddy’s response. His eyes moistened and his voice got a little broken. He told me the story, and he told me that he and Mama used to pray that the revelation would be received. He told me that when he was growing up as a farm boy in central Utah, he had never met a black person, and he didn’t question the received wisdom about the denial of the priesthood to black men. There were evidently persuasive books discussing the policy, and he would have heard much of the folklore in the course of church and community events when the topic came up. In high school, he went to a 4H conference in Chicago (I believe), where he met black people for the first time — kids his own age and their advisors and mentors. This was a watershed experience for him, and he began rethinking everything he’d learned about the reasons why blacks were not permitted to hold the priesthood. It remained an issue of great importance to him all through college and law school — an issue that he and his new wife would pray about together. Even then, 28 years later, as he was telling his grown daughter about it in the middle of northern Virginia, he couldn’t speak about it without crying.

Hearing Daddy’s story was deeply touching to me. While happy to share his opinion on all sorts of issues (all of his children have enjoyed baiting him about evolution at some point over the years), he generally waits for us to ask questions before engaging with us. I’m embarrassed that it took me almost 28 years to find out these deep, poignant feelings — far more important than evolution or school vouchers — about a subject so close to his heart.

Over the past month or so, Daddy has been sending us links to articles about the 30-year commemoration of the Priesthood revelation and the status of blacks in the Church, as well as the occasional monologue on his thoughts about everything. He is delighted that so much attention is being given to this commemoration. I have read the articles and followed the links to http://www.blacklds.org/ and http://www.fairlds.org/ and, of course, http://www.untoldstoryofblackmormons.com/. In some ways I feel a little called to repentance: I’m the young, hip, progressive English MA — shouldn’t I be the one sending links to my father? I sometimes wonder if I — and others in my generation — am actually less progressive in this respect than my parents, who actively prayed for and sought this revelation. Who had to remain faithful during many hard years of intense — and deserved — criticism from post-Civil Rights America. Who still cry when they remember the first June 8th. If I am — and I suspect this to be the case, at least to a degree — then I have work to do:

(1) Remember this day and be grateful for it every year. If December 23rd and June 27th and July 24th and September 22nd and May 15th and April 6th ring little Church History bells in my head, then surely June 8th should as well.

(2) Speak up if I ever hear anyone recycling some of the specious and harmful folklore of the past.

(3) Most of all, work to repent of and forsake any racist or racialist responses and reactions I may have. I would like to think that I don’t have any, that I’m not a respector of persons in any way. Some of the people I most admire don’t and aren’t. But if God can speak to his living prophets, I know that He can speak to my heart and help it become right in all ways.

In the end, though, I don’t want this day (or this post, for that matter — though it may be too late for that :)) to be about me and my story. I want it to be about the black Saints all over the world who patiently, faithfully waited — or even impatiently, doubtfully waited — for this day to come. I want it to be about the inspired prophet of God whose humility was instrumental in uniting the Quorum and receiving the word of God. I want it to be about our Heavenly Father, who loves all of His children, who created them all in His image, and who opened the heavens again in our time.