As she was finishing her senior year at Davis High School in 1993, Fatimah Salleh learned that she’d received the Presidential Leadership Scholarship from Utah State University. It’s a four-year scholarship awarded to student leaders and is one of the school’s most prestigious honors. She had served as a student body officer at Davis and was chosen as Homecoming Queen earlier that school year. 

It should have brought nothing but moments of joy to Salleh and her family. It did not.

“The (Utah State) scholarship office received calls from Davis High parents who disagreed with their decision,” Salleh said in a Facebook post in 2016 as part of a letter she wrote to her Davis classmates. “These parents told USU that the only reason they gave me the scholarship was because I was black. It was the scholarship director who would pull me aside and say he had never in all his years heading the office seen the DHS community act so cruel.”

In light of the recent well publicized death of 10-year-old Izzy Tichenor by suicide, who family members said was bullied because of her race and autism while attending Foxboro Elementary in North Salt Lake, Salleh is reflecting back and speaking out about her own experiences. She recently reposted part of that 2016 message as the discussion of prejudice and racism in Davis County has risen again.

“At that time, I wanted to leave Utah,” she said during our telephone conversation from Durham, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband Eric and their four children. “I was done trying to be a good example for black people living in Utah – the mantel was too heavy. But I did go to Utah State, where I met my husband who is from Hyrum, and I studied history. Still, the pain was strong, and I said to myself, ‘You can’t hold on to that. You have to speak out.’ USU encouraged me to do that.”

Her years in Logan gave her room to “awaken the activist in me. My teachers and professors encouraged me to find my voice and use it. They asked me to speak about injustice and racism, and I did, and still do.”

Her family had moved to Kaysville from Texas during her junior year at Davis High after they converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She served an LDS mission in Brazil, graduated from USU and married Eric, had two children and moved to New York for her Master’s degree in public communications from Syracuse University. She worked as a reporter for two years, then moved to North Carolina in 2005 for her doctorate in Mass Communications from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

“We had two more children while I was in the doctorate program,” she said with a smile in her voice. “We were plenty busy.” 

A friend then recommended she study for a Masters in Divinity from the Duke Divinity School. It was a three year program the now-Rev. Dr. Fatimah Salleh started in 2016, and it led to founding her own company called  “A Certain Work.”

“I loved teaching in the (LDS) church – Gospel Doctrine and Institute,” she said, “and now, I’m a pastor’s pastor. My whole business plan is to teach how not to be a racist. I have an anti-racism theology. I walk alongside clergy to help with their sermons, their teachings, their congregations. It’s been a lovely journey.”

She says to proactively fight racism takes action, in the way people vote and the need for “the necessary examination of their own whiteness. You have to build your bravery through your humanity.”

From her experience here in Davis County, where she still has many friends and much support for her efforts to fight bigotry and prejudice, she’s learned that people need to “talk about these hard topics, to move and analyze systematically and institutionally how to begin to make this a safer world for those who are vulnerable.” She concluded with this:

“As the great civil rights activist Audre Lorde once said, ‘In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.’ That’s my hope, and that’s what I’m working for every day.”