Storming Caesars Palace
Documentaries
•
1h 26m
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas — until now. When Ruby Duncan loses her Las Vegas hotel job due to a workplace accident and accepts public assistance, she discovers firsthand the stigma and harassment by an over-zealous, fraud-obsessed welfare department. With Mary Wesley and Alversa Beals, Ruby creates a welfare rights group to fight for an adequate income, dignity, and justice. They, along with low-income mothers across the country, form the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) with the support of George Wiley, a chemistry professor-turned-activist and Frances Fox Piven, a radical social-scientist. Together, the mothers of the NWRO introduce a Universal Basic Income campaign with feminist Gloria Steinem at their side, at the Democratic National Convention in Miami in 1972.
STORMING CAESARS PALACE shares the story of how a group of ordinary low-income mothers launched an extraordinary grassroots movement for economic justice and Black women’s empowerment in the 1960s and 1970s. This film reveals the roots of today’s movements, highlighting the experiences of Black women organizers from one of the most challenging and forgotten feminist, anti-poverty movements in our history, and places it in the limelight, where it will inspire, embolden and honor the women whose courage, tenacity and dreams could not be quashed, against all odds.
Up Next in Documentaries
-
Free(d)-by-Faith
When a young man from Fairfield—one of the most dangerous cities in Alabama—grows up without a father figure to form him as a man, how does he find his way out of the poverty, violence, and desperation that surrounds him?
FREE(d) by Faith tells the story of Dion Watts, a man who found faith in t...
-
We Went Out
We Went Out is a short film based in Toronto that explores coming of age in the in-between spaces of a city.
In the spring of 2021 Rosina Kazi called to ask if I would contribute to a project she was curating as part of the 2021 Luminato Festival. The project would become a five-part docu-music ...
-
Black Daddy The Movie
Being an artist comes with great responsibility. Being able to control the narrative is even more important. As a father I have come to know some amazing men who use love, great caution and wisdom at the core of their masculinity. A huge component of how they raise their children, the next wave o...
