Minutes of the Council of the Twelve and of the First Presidency: President [Wilford] Woodruff informed the Council that Sister Jane James, a negress of long standing in the Church, had asked him for permission to receive her endowments, and that he and his counselors had told her that they could see no way by which they could accede to her wishes; and they asked the brethren present if they had any ideas on the subject favorable to her race.
President Joseph F. Smith told of brother Abel having been ordained a Seventy and afterwards a High Priest at Kirtland under the direction of the Prophet Joseph Smith.
President [George Q.] Cannon remarked that the Prophet Joseph [Smith] taught this doctrine: That the seed of Cain could not receive the Priesthood nor act in any of the offices of the priesthood until the seed of Abel should come forward and take precedence over Cain's offspring; and that any white man who mingled his seed with that of Cain should be killed, and thus prevent any of the seed of Cain's coming into possession of the priesthood.
Brother George F. Gibbs, the secretary, reminded President Woodruff of a sister Smith, whose first husband was a man named Berry, by whom she had two children - girls - who are now living, and it is held by those who knew Berry that he had negro blood in him. She separated from Berry and married a man named Smith who is not in the Church and by whom she had one child, a boy, that she now desires to be sealed to her second husband for whom her son will stand proxy, but that President Angus M. Cannon had refused to sign her recommend to the temple for the reason that she had married a man with negro blood in him and borne him children, and she had appealed to the First Presidency to have President Angus M. Cannon's action overruled, denying at the same time that her first husband was part negro.
It being understood that Mr. Berry was part negro, President [George Q.] Cannon raised the question: What would become of the girls? One at least of whom was in the Church, as they could not be admitted to the temple, and he thought it would be unfair to admit their mother and deny them this privilege. President Cannon thought too that to let down the bars in the least on this question would only tend to complications, and that it is perhaps better to let all such cases alone, believing, of course that the Lord would deal fairly with them all.
President Woodruff assented to this.
[Source: Marquardt, H. Michael, Mormon Central: Excerpts From Minutes of the Council of the Twelve and of the First Presidency, 1879-1947, George Albert Smith Papers, typed copy, Manuscripts Division, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, http://www.xmission.com/~research/central/chorg2.htm]
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