Don’t condemn Morehouse for facing difficult history and human contradictions

To some, the portrait signals moral compromise.

To others, historical amnesia or proof that HBCUs are “for sale.” But that narrative misses a fuller, more nuanced story.

Examine the historical context

Credit: Jack Manning III

Credit: Jack Manning III

On Feb. 1, 2026, during Vesper Hour, the Rev. Dr. Lawrence Edward Carter Sr., the chapel’s founding dean, offered a historical reflection on Joseph Smith’s 1844 presidential platform.

Specifically, he examined Smith’s proposal for federally administered compensated emancipation, an attempt to abolish American slavery through national legislation before the Civil War.

Smith’s platform, which can be read through the Joseph Smith Papers project, proposed using federal resources to purchase the freedom of enslaved people nationwide.

Four months before that election, Smith was assassinated, becoming the first U.S. presidential candidate killed while running for office.

Whether one judges Smith’s proposal politically naive or morally prescient, it was an explicit national plan for abolition at a time when leading candidates like Henry Clay and James K. Polk offered no such direct path. That fact situates him.

Hall of Honor is not a ‘shrine to perfection’

Critics ask: Does Smith belong in a Hall of Honor bearing King’s name? The answer depends on what we believe the chapel is.

The Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel is not a shrine to perfection. It is a sacred academic space at the intersection of theology, ethics and public life.

Its Hall of Honor has never functioned as a gallery of flawless figures. If moral recognition required an unblemished biography, the walls would be empty.

We must not evade the hard truths. In 1852, under Brigham Young, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints formalized a priesthood restriction barring Black men from ordination, a policy that lasted until 1978. That restriction inflicted real harm and has since been disavowed by the church (see the church’s “Race and the Priesthood” essay).

Historical accuracy, however, also matters. During Smith’s lifetime, Black men were ordained to priesthood office, and the Book of Mormon declares that God invites “all to come unto him — black and white, bond and free” (2 Nephi 26:33). Scholars such as W. Paul Reeve have documented how racial policies developed over time within the tradition. The 1852 restriction represented a narrowing of that trajectory rather than a simple continuation of Smith’s practice.

History resists caricature. It rarely gives us pure villains or pure heroes. It gives us morally complex actors navigating imperfect systems.

Practice discipline of reconciliation

The chapel bearing King’s name stands on a theology of reconciliation. In Christian thought, reconciliation is not amnesia or historical naïveté. It is the disciplined work of holding truth and grace together, the conviction, rooted in 2 Corinthians 5:19, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

Reconciliation rejects “cheap grace” that excuses harm. But it also rejects the instinct to freeze persons or institutions in their most compromised historical frame.

If later denominational failures automatically erase earlier moments of moral courage, we flatten history into slogans. We exchange moral complexity for ideological certainty.

Joseph Smith was not without contradiction. The question is whether institutions dedicated to moral formation can examine courage and contradiction in the same frame.

Students grow by engaging with difficult history

The suggestion that Morehouse is “burnishing racism” for donor dollars misunderstands the nature of institutional stewardship.

Morehouse became “Morehouse” not by isolation, but by disciplined engagement with the world. To study a forgotten anti-slavery proposal is scholarship, not surrender.

The portrait does not displace King; it invites thought. The student dissent that followed is not a failure of leadership. It is evidence of formation. Morehouse trains men to wrestle with power and representation.

We do not hang a portrait to say, “Be exactly like this person.” We hang it to ask, “What did they see that others missed — and where did they fail where we must succeed?”

If we cannot examine courage and contradiction within the same frame inside a chapel dedicated to moral leadership, then we have misunderstood the prophetic tradition of the Black Social Gospel that shaped it (as historian Gary Dorrien documents in “A Darkly Radiant Vision”).

Morehouse is not weakened by engaging difficult history. It is strengthened by refusing intellectual laziness and by trusting that moral maturity requires nuance.

The Rev. Keyon S. Payton, M.Div., D.Min., (MSW) is a 2001 graduate of Morehouse College and senior pastor of New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in Pontiac, Michigan.