Alexander Bankhead: A Devout Black Latter-day Saint Pioneer of Spanish Fork (1848)

Alexander Bankhead was an enslaved African-American Latter-day Saint who, with the Bankhead family that had enslaved him, emigrated to the Salt Lake Valley in 1848 in the Heber C. Kimball company. After his freedom came, Brother Bankhead married Marinda Redd Bankhead—herself formerly enslaved—and the two settled in Spanish Fork, Utah, where a visiting reporter for the Broad Ax newspaper noted that they were 'well-liked in the small town and devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints.' Their life is a faith-promoting witness of the Black pioneer Saints who, after the bondage of their early years, built faithful homes and lives of devotion in the Lord's restored Church.