Monday, September 10, 2007

Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons

Watch the trailer here:
http://www.untoldstoryofblackmormons.com/trailer_md.html


Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons is a documentary about
African American Latter-day Saints, now in post-production. The
project is headed by Margaret Young and Darius Gray, authors of
several award-winning books and articles about Black Mormons, and by
Danor Gerald, a promising new filmmaker.

Few people, Mormon and non-Mormon, are aware that there has been an
African American presence in the LDS Church from its earliest days,
that the vanguard company of Mormon pioneers included three "colored
servants" who were baptized Mormons, and whose descendants remained
active in the Church for several generations. This documentary talks
about that little-known legacy, and confronts the hard issues which
surfaced in the most turbulent years of the Civil Rights Movement,

when the Church restricted its priesthood from those of African
descent. It discusses how that restriction was lifted and what the
lives and challenges of the modern Black Mormon pioneers are. Besides
never-released footage shot in 1968 and many rare archival
photographs, the documentary includes interviews with renowned
scholars, historians, Black Mormons, with Martin Luther King III, and
with Dr. Cecil "Chip" Murray, retired pastor of the First AME Church
of Los Angeles, which was founded by a former slave of Mormon
pioneers.

http://www.untoldstoryofblackmormons.com/

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