Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons is an award-winning documentary about African American Latter-day Saints. The project is headed by Margaret Blair Young and Darius Aidan Gray, authors of three books and many scholarly articles about Black Mormons.
Editor James B. Hughes spent the last years of his life working on this film, and often donated his services because of his passion for the project. He died of brain cancer in 2011. Danor Gerald also edited the film, and appears in it. Interviews were conducted and filmed by Richard Dutcher, Alex Nibley, and Scott Freebairn.
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” (slaves), and that subsequent pioneer companies included both freeborn Blacks (such as Jane Manning and Isaac James) and enslaved Blacks, such as Biddy Smith Mason and Elizabeth Flake. 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 continued to restrict its priesthood from those of African descent (a policy put into place in 1852). It discusses the context for that restriction, and how it was finally lifted. It also addresses the challenges of modern Black Mormon pioneers.
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.
Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons is currently under contract with the Documentary Channel, which shows the 56:40 version of the film monthly. The full version (directors’ cut) is seventy-two minutes. In addition, the DVD includes one hundred minutes of special features, including more interviews and important "untold stories."