In the late 1960s & early 1970s, there were many protests by colleges over the racial ban on priesthood in the LDS Church. Some schools, such as Stanford, refused to play BYU in athletic competitions over the issue. In our next conversation with Dr. Matt Harris, we’ll find out that these protests were much more widespread than I knew! We’ll also find out how Church leaders reacted to these protests.
Matt: The first protest at UTEP,[1] the track team against BYU and then the said Civil Rights site visit that’s going to come in May of 68, a month later. So Wilkinson is just like freaking out. He’s absolutely panicking. I should say that they’ve already started talk to build this beautiful new basketball arena that will eventually be called the Marriott Center. So, now they’re worried about this. They’re getting pushback from the Western Athletic Conference that they’re going to get kicked out of the conference, because they don’t recruit black kids. Wilkinson’s response was, “Look at our manuals. We welcome all minorities. They just didn’t want to come here because it’s their choice.”
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Matt: I can tell you categorically that there were well over 100 protests from different universities.
GT: Wow. I didn’t know it was that big.
Matt: Yeah, me neither. We think of the big ones, football and basketball. They were protesting BYU band events, wrestling, you name it.
GT: Wow.
Matt: The reason why I know this is because I’ve seen some documents in Wilkinson’s papers and he drafts this lengthy memo cataloging all of the protests.
GT: Really?
Matt: Yeah, dozens and dozens and dozens. I was blown away. Some schools I never even heard of before. They just didn’t get the protest, or the publicity. So anyway, the ones that were the most salient, one would be the UTEP one because it’s the first one. It sort of kick starts everything. I’d say the second one would be in October of 1969 with the Wyoming 14.
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Matt: Here’s the biggest point, I think, in this story is the Wyoming 14 we’re not just protesting the few blacks at BYU or racial discrimination at BYU, they made it abundantly clear they were protesting the Mormon Church’s views on race. This is much different than UTEP and San Jose and some others that were just really focused mostly on BYU and racism there. The Wyoming people are focusing more than just BYU, but the Mormon Church’s policies. So I think that’s a fundamental point. Of all the protests going on, Wyoming, they were very laser focused on the church, not BYU. Ernest Wilkinson is probably the best person to quote on this. He said, “They’re the ones that gave us the most fits because of that.”
The other one, so this is October of 69. The Western Athletic Conference is scheduled to vote in November and the word on the street that they’re going to kick BYU out. Even the University of Utah has sent Wilkinson–the president of the U is a Latter-day Saint. So he’s an orthodox member of the church and he tells Wilkinson, “Yeah, the U is going to vote to kick you guys out.”
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[1] UTEP stands for University of Texas at El Paso. Previously the school was known as Texas Western, and was the first school to start 5 black basketball players. They won the NCAA basketball championship in 1966 by beating heavily favored Kentucky, a team of all-white players.
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