Review: Quincy D. Newell. Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Authors

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh

Keywords

Jane James, race, gender, Mormonism, African Americans

Abstract

In Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, A Nineteenth Century Black Mormon, Quincy D. Newell explores the earliest years of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints through a biography of Jane James, an African American convert whose devotion to the church situated her amid some of its most pivotal moments. Beginning with Jane’s birth to free parents in Connecticut in the 1820s and ending with her death in Salt Lake City in 1908, Newell documents how race and gender shaped Jane’s experiences of Mormonism, as well as how Jane’s and other Black Mormons’ presences in the religion influenced Latter- day Saint policies on race. In this way the book is as much a history of anti-Black racism in the Latter-day Saint tradition as it is an account of free African Americans’ struggles to carve out their existences in the American West amid the specter of slavery.

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Wells-Oghoghomeh, Alexis (2021) "Review: Quincy D. Newell. Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 8: No. 1, Article 19.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol8/iss1/19