From the article:
https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2026/05 ... up-leader/A number of Utah’s Black Latter-day Saints say they come to Genesis because they don’t feel safe in their assigned congregations.
Last year, the group surveyed its attendees and found that “many do not feel their ward members ‘care about them’ or ‘have their back,’” Hugh reported on social media, “in the current political landscape and divisiveness.”
Thus, they feel “increasingly unsafe,” he wrote, “and that has turned into feeling discomfort in their wards, [regional] stakes and communities.
What Hugh said he experienced is “not at all unexpected,” said Genesis co-founder Darius Gray.
Gray, the senior statesman for many Black members, said he has received phone calls from Latter-day Saints all over the country who describe being verbally harassed, discriminated against and treated as “others.”
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Darius Gray, speaking on 2021, says some Latter-day Saints “have given their allegiance more to their political priorities than to their religious commitments.”
It seems the members “have given their allegiance more to their political priorities,” he said, “than to their religious commitments.”
Thom Reed, who is Hugh’s first counselor at Genesis, echoes Gray’s comment.
“I have lived in the Daybreak community [in South Jordan] for the past 11 years,” Reed said, but recently he and his wife were leaving a movie theater when someone called out a racist slur and told the couple to “go home.”
Reed sees the country “slipping backward” like it was in the 1950s and ’60s, he said, “due to the current [Donald Trump] administration.”
After hearing Hugh’s story, a friend wrote to Reed saying, “We are lucky President Hugh is here. He could have been Emmett Till-ed,” referring to the 1955 lynching of a 14-year-old Black youth in Mississippi.
Escalation of racism “is rampant, hidden behind closed doors and in church halls,” Reed said. “And Genesis members are hurting.” Candy Tolentino is among them.
A community responds
Hearing the Genesis president’s account, said Tolentino, a single mom in Lehi, “was so traumatizing and unsettling.”
What made it worse, she said, was knowing that it happened in Utah, a state dominated by members of her Latter-day Saint faith.
It’s nearly half a century after the end of the church’s priesthood/temple ban on Black members, Tolentino said, “and we are still battling racial hatred.”
She believes it has actually gotten worse in the past decade. “I feel much less safe here than I would have 10 years ago.”
