The Price of Survival: A Documentary Film About Pauli Murray

FAIN: TD-250107-16

Documentary Educational Resources, Inc. (Watertown, MA 02472-1640)
Margo Guernsey (Project Director: January 2016 to July 2018)

Development of a one-hour documentary film script on the life, work, and historical impact of civil rights activist Pauli Murray.

This is a request for $75,000 for the development of a script for The Price of Survival, a one-hour documentary film appropriate for public television about Pauli Murray, a leading twentieth century intellectual. Murray advocated the only way to root out inequality was to address race and gender discrimination simultaneously. As a civil rights leader, she is credited with helping to develop direct non-violent action in the 1930s as a strategy for civil rights that would pave the way for the movement of the 50s and 60s. As a lawyer she is the architect of modern feminist legal theory. As a writer and theologian, she has left us with groundbreaking material on American democracy and identity. Privately, Murray feared that her homosexual identity could ruin her career or worse. The film weaves Murray’s diaries, private notes, poetry, and autobiography into a narrative that takes viewers on a journey through the shifting social boundaries and cultural landscape of twentieth-century America