In the 1970s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had a problem. The priesthood—which, as TIME later explained, ” is not a clergy rank but a status achieved by nearly all male members”—was denied to black Mormons. The Church’s rules, which had been codified in the years before the Civil War, seemed increasingly out of step with the rest of America.
Despite increasingly loud calls to change the practice, the Church dug in for most of the decade. Shortly after athletes began to protest games with Brigham Young University, “Mormon elders reaffirmed their belief that blacks cannot be admitted to the priesthood,” TIME reported in 1970. The article went on to explain why that belief was so strongly held:
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