The restriction was not present at the founding of the movement, and the church now says so in its own published statement. Under Joseph Smith at least two Black men were ordained. Elijah Abel was ordained an elder in 1836 and a seventy shortly afterward, served missions, and held his office until his death in 1884. Q. Walker Lewis, a Black abolitionist in Massachusetts, was ordained an elder around 1843. Joseph Smith ran for president of the United States in 1844 on a platform that included compensated emancipation.
The change came under Brigham Young. In 1852, addressing the Utah territorial legislature, Young stated that men of Black African descent could not hold the priesthood, and the restriction hardened into settled policy over the following decades, extending in practice to the temple ordinances and therefore to the sealing on which exaltation depends. Explanations were offered afterward rather than at the outset, drawn from readings of the curse of Cain and of Ham in Genesis and from speculation about conduct in the premortal existence. None was ever presented as a revelation, and the absence of one became increasingly conspicuous.
Its administration produced genuine anguish. Missionary work in Brazil, where mixed ancestry was common and often undocumented, forced the church into genealogical investigations of converts that satisfied nobody, and the announcement of a temple at Sao Paulo in 1975 sharpened the problem to the point of unsustainability. Members of African descent joined the church throughout this period and remained in it without access to its central ordinances.