On April 7, 1844, the same day Brown ordained James M. Flake into the priesthood, Brown baptized Flake’s slave “Green Flake,” the most well documented black Mormon slave. Later that same year, Green Flake and his master moved to Nauvoo. Green Flake was a member of Brigham Young’s Vanguard Company, which entered the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847. Before leaving Utah for the Mormons’ settlement in San Bernardino, California, in 1854 James Flake’s widow Agnes Flake tithed Green Flake to the church. According to James Flake’s son, William J. Flake, Green then worked two years for Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball before the Mormon leaders freed him. Green Flake lived in Union, Utah’s small black community, before settling in Idaho where he died in 1903. In 1897, along with the some 250 surviving pioneers of 1847, including Jane Manning James, Green Flake was awarded a golden badge made by Tiffany’s in New York as part Utah’s 1897 Pioneer Jubilee. William J. Flake, letter to Church Historian, February 14, 1894, transcribed in Dennis Lythgoe, “Negro Slavery in Utah” (MA thesis, University of Utah, 1966), 27–28. See also “Green Flake (1828-1903),” in Richard Van Wagoner and Steven C. Walker,, A Book of Mormons (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1982), 87; Ronald Coleman, “A History of Blacks in Utah, 1825-1910” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1980), 59. Throughout his journal, John Brown refers to white southern converts’ slaves as “servants.” John Brown, The Autobiography of John Brown: A Member of the Original Company of Utah Pioneers of 1847, ed. John Zimmerman Brown (Salt Lake City: Stevens & Wallis, 1941)
Interesting glimpse into slavery in early Utah.