Jane Manning James was a black church member who had lived with Joseph Smith in Nauvoo, emigrated to Salt Lake, and remained faithful. During her life she repeatedly petitioned the First Presidency to participate in the temple liturgy, and in 1894 the First Presidency decided to use an ad hoc temple ritual to seal James as a servant to Joseph Smith. This decision was not because Wilford Woodruff, who followed Young and Taylor as president of the church, or other church leaders viewed black people as eternal servants, but because this relationship was the only way they could conceive to link her to Joseph Smith without integrating her into the priesthood family. (Jonathan A. Stapley, The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology [New York: Oxford University Press, 2018], 21)
Some errant members of the Church who desperately try to defend the propriety of the priesthood restriction have claimed that blacks became worthy to be ordained to the priesthood in 1978. The problem is that such is explicitly contradicted by Official Declaration 2 that states they were already faithful prior to the 1978 revelation:
This, in turn, has inspired us with a desire to extend to every worthy member of the Church all the privileges and blessings which the gospel affords.
. . . our brethren who are worthy may receive the priesthood, and witnessing the faithfulness of those from whom the priesthood has been withheld, we have pleaded along and earnestly in behalf of these, our faithful brethren . . .
He has heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come when every faithful, worthy man in the church may receive the holy priesthood . . .
For those curious, it is my (informed, hopefully) view that the priesthood and temple restriction was not the result of revelation, nor did Joseph Smith teach it, but as a result of the "Mormonisation" of 19th c. American Protestantism, although a revelation did result in its cessation. For further details, see:
Russell W. Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013 (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2014)
Black and Mormon, eds. Newell G. Bringhurst and Darron T. Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004)
Connell O' Donovan, "Brigham Young, African Americans, and Plural Marriage: Schism and the Beginnings of Black Priesthood and Temple Denial" in The Persistence of Polygamy, volume 2: From Joseph Smith's Martyrdom to the First Manifesto, 1844-1890, eds. Newell G. Bringhurst and Craig L. Foster (Independence, Miss.: John Whitmer Books, 2013), pp. 31-86
For a non-LDS discussion of 19th century American views of blacks, see:
Stephen R. Haynes, Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)
