Hollywood Black Film Festival 2008

Narrated by venerable actress Ruby Dee, this unique documentary interweaves an acclaimed historical performance, based on Mary Pleasant's own words, with scholars' commentary, period music and montage, and historical re-enactments to reveal an unsung, 19th-century African-American heroine. Mary Ellen Pleasant (often misnamed Mammy Pleasant) was born a slave in Georgia and raised in Nantucket, MA. In Boston she married a rich merchant and became a slave rescuer on the Underground Railroad in Nantucket, New Bedford, Ohio, and finally New Orleans before going West. She lived most of her life in San Francisco and once studied social leveraging tactics with the great voodoo queen, Marie LaVeaux. For her great contributions to the abolition of slavery, the protection of Civil Rights, and acquisition of jobs for African-Americans there, that San Francisco has honored her with a memorial at the corner of Bush and Octavia Streets with the title 'Mother of Civil Rights in California' inscribed upon it. Mrs. Pleasant gained national significance when she aided the abolitionist John Brown before the Civil War and via a court battle that she waged in the California State Supreme Court that changed modern-day civil rights law. As entrepreneur and philanthropist she amassed a joint fortune once assessed at $30,000,000! Having had powerful enemies who distorted her name in the press and a few misdeeds of her own, Pleasant's colorful story has been all but lost. This film restores it fully (57 min)