60 years ago today - Dec 2, 1957

[J. Reuben Clark]
Sister Spafford and Sister Helen Anderson came in to see me. Sister Spafford has been invited to go to New York to attend a meeting of the National Council of Women in the United States with representatives of the Council along with the head of the National organization to shape up a program that will control the activities of the Council for the next three years....

However, at that time the question came up regarding color, which they called human relations. The Japanese did not want their color to stand against them, nor the Chinese, nor the East Indians. I interposed to say that all of these people were accepted by us and that the only people that we had anything contrariwise, so far as I knew, were the negroes. Then they said that they were very sure that the question of equality of negroes would come up, whether so titled or otherwise ...

I told her I thought this was no time to stir the negro question in the United States, having in mind the situation in Arkansas and the resulting feeling that has come from that; that to stir that question now would cause great injury to the negroes themselves and might eventuate into a situation that would be regretable to everybody, and therefore I thought she should do what she could to keep the National Council from going on record in favor of what in the last analysis would be regarded as negro equality.

[Source: The Diaries of J. Reuben Clark, 1933-1961, Abridged, Digital Edition, Salt Lake City, Utah 2015]

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