On Dec. 25, 1964, as Mitt Romney enjoyed his last Christmas break as a high school student in Michigan, two Mormon missionaries visited Darius Gray in Colorado Springs and asked him whether he had any last questions before joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

He had one. A proud African American, Gray expressed wariness over a description in the Book of Mormon of a dark-skinned tribe being out of favor with God and asked, “How, in any way, does that relate to me?” The younger of the two missionaries stood off to the side as his senior companion explained, “Well, Brother Gray, the primary implication is that you won’t be able to hold the priesthood.”

After a tumultuous night of prayer, Gray still felt a call to join the faith and went on to help found the Genesis Group, an official church support group for African American Mormons, which he believes paved the way for the 1978 lifting of the ban on blacks in the priesthood. It was an anguishing period that coincided with Romney’s full embrace of his faith and his rise within it.

The mere mention of Romney and the church’s ban on blacks is fraught. If he gets the nomination, the nation’s first Mormon presidential nominee will challenge the first black president. Romney, the son of former Michigan governor George Romney, who had a strong record of civil rights activism, bears no responsibility for the doctrines of his church. But in the prolonged Mormon debate over whether the ban resulted from divine doctrine or inherited historical racism, Romney appears to have embraced the prevailing view: The ban was the word of God and thus unalterable without divine intervention.

Gray, who still chokes up discussing the day the church lifted the ban, wants to know more about Romney’s perspective on the ban and how he struggled with it.

“It’s a marvelous question,” said Gray. “But there is only one person who can answer it.”

The Romney campaign declined to expound upon the candidate’s thinking at the time.

As the son of George Romney, the Michigan governor and a leading voice for civil rights within the Republican Party, Mitt was well regarded by the few black students at the prestigious Cranbrook School outside Detroit.

“I was the only African American in my class,” said Sidney Barthwell Jr., a Romney classmate and later a classmate of Barack Obama at Harvard Law School. “I knew about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and that they didn’t allow blacks to ascend to the priesthood. I knew that then. But George Romney was a tremendous social liberal and a tremendous supporter of the social rights movement.”

Barthwell, now a magistrate in Michigan, said he never got any sense that Mitt Romney saw African Americans as anything but equals and that the Mormon church’s ban never arose as an issue at school. But the subject became unavoidable as Romney returned from his mission in France and enrolled at Brigham Young University in 1969. The priesthood ban contributed to unprecedented volatility on campus.

In October of that year, 14 black players lost their places on the University of Wyoming’s powerhouse football team for planning to wear black armbands in protest of the ban during their game against BYU. Stanford University, which Romney had previously attended, took the opposite stance, announcing at the end of 1969 that it would boycott athletic competitions with the church-owned university.

“I do remember Mitt being really angry with Stanford,” said Kim Cameron, a friend at the time. “He felt like it was, A, naive, and, B, sort of a bigoted, narrow-minded perspective.”

Mixed messages

It’s not clear whether Joseph Smith, the religion’s founder, who ordained at least one black priest, supported the ban. But his successor, Brigham Young, enforced it enthusiastically as the word of God, supporting slavery in Utah and decreeing that the “mark” on Cain was “the flat nose and black skin.” Young subsequently urged immediate death to any participant in mixing of the races. As recently as 1949, church leaders suggested that the ban on blacks resulted from the consequences of the “conduct of spirits in the pre-mortal existence.” As a result, many Mormons believed that blacks were less valiant in the pre-Earth life, or fence sitters in the war between God and Satan. That view has fallen out of favor in recent decades.

“God has always been discriminatory” when it comes to whom he grants the authority of the priesthood, says Bott, the BYU theologian. He quotes Mormon scripture that states that the Lord gives to people “all that he seeth fit.” Bott compares blacks with a young child prematurely asking for the keys to her father’s car, and explains that similarly until 1978, the Lord determined that blacks were not yet ready for the priesthood.

1978: the ban is lifted

In June 1978, Church President Spencer Kimball announced that God has “heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come” in which “all worthy male members of the Church may be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color.”

The lifting of the ban, which, like the church’s anti-polygamy Manifesto, is now part of church scripture, was an indelible moment that many Mormons consider the most emotional in their lives. Romney has said he pulled his car over to the side of the road to weep with joy upon learning of the lifting of the ban. “Even at this day it’s emotional,” he said in 2007 on “Meet the Press.”

Only five months after his revelation, Kimball dedicated a flagship temple in Brazil, a key gateway for expansion for a growing church. Soon after, the church sought to cleanse the aura of racism from church textbooks and, in 1981, even from a scriptural passage, in which a righteous tribe is described as “pure” rather than “white.”

More than three decades later, the church says it still doesn’t know where the ban came from.