Utah’s Decade of Slavery (Mauli Bonner 2 of 3)

We're going to dive into Utah's decade of black and Indian slavery, and I'll ask Mauli Bonner some hard questions. Should Mormons think about renaming buildings at BYU who have ties to slavery? Check out our conversation... https://youtu.be/vkZKWN9MAM0 Don’t miss our other conversations with Mauli: https://gospeltangents.com/people/mauli-bonner Copyright © 2024 Gospel Tangents All Rights Reserved Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission Utah’s Slave History GT  00:54  I do wonder, it seems like Margaret Young said this, that New Mexico wanted to come into the union as a free state and California did, as well. Brigham Young's looking at the calculations. Hey, well, if we come in as a slave state, we'll keep the balance of slavery slave states to free states, and it'll be easier to get into the Union. Now, clearly, there was a polygamy problem. Mauli  01:21  Yeah, yeah, there's that. GT  01:25  But, is that your understanding as well? Was this really just a political thing so that Utah could become a slave state to keep the balance of slavery? Mauli  01:35  I think that that's a part of it. If you ask me, there's a whole lot more into this. I feel, just like politics today, there's our politicians who are giving their speeches or running for office. Then there's the people who have the money, who are pushing them to do whatever they need to do. And so, if you have people who are the money people behind making this successful, they have a huge influence on it. So, if you can imagine, a lot of the saints coming through were poor had hardly nothing. They barely had enough to make it into the valley. Then, you have some of the Southern converts that are doing just fine. They've sold everything they owned, which was a lot back in the south. Their money is in their enslaved labor and their wagons and their seed and their furniture. And so they're coming in--and in their tools and their everything. So, now you get into Utah, and you're telling me that I'm going to lose half of my wealth? Then I'm going back. And if they go back... GT  02:37  You're talking about wealth. You're talking about slave wealth. Mauli  02:40  Yes, slave wealth. Well, in my mind, this is what's happening. So, you have these families, these very prominent rich families who are going to threaten to go back, because why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't they? So, they'll go back, take their slave labor with them, all their wagons, all their seed, all their tools. How in the world are the saints going to survive? So, I think that was also weighing in the balance, in my opinion.     Abraham Smoot Building at BYU GT  03:06  This brings up another tough subject. And when I say tough, one of the things I've found it's so easy to talk about race issues with a black person. It's a lot harder to talk about it with a white person. Mauli  03:22  Yeah. There's a lot more landmines. GT  03:27  "We're not racist." Mauli  03:28  Yeah. GT  03:28  Yeah, we are. But Abraham Smoot was one of these southern slaveholders. There's an administration building at BYU that's named after him. He was a great leader in the LDS Church. A few years ago, it seems like there was a question, especially with Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd murder, and everything like that. Mauli  03:59  It just woke us all up. GT  04:01  Yeah. And so should we rename both BYU, because Brigham Young put enough pressure that people passed it. We do want to talk about Orson Pratt, too, but also the Abraham Smoot Building, because he owned a lot of slaves. What's your position on that? Mauli  04:24  Gosh, it's so tough. Unfortunately, for some, this is my position. If it's hurting people, if it's causing people harm to have to walk into a building that reminds them of abuse, and all the worst things that come with slavery, because the worst things that happened in the south, also did happen in Utah,