Thomas Day, American

FAIN: TD-50092-09

Apprend Foundation (Durham, NC 27713-2219)
Laurel Sneed (Project Director: February 2009 to January 2011)

Development of a script for a 90-minute documentary on the life of Thomas Day and the history of 19th-century free blacks in the South.

"Thomas Day, American"(working title) is a 90 minute documentary-in-progress for which The Apprend Foundation seeks $75,000 to develop a shooting script. On the eve of the Civil War there were 500,000 free blacks in the United States. In telling Thomas Day's story, the history of this significant, yet little-known group of Americans will be illuminated for the first time in an important documentary film. Described as a "major antebellum figure" by the New York Times, Thomas Day (1801-1861), a furniture maker and successful business man in the South, stood at the center of competing forces in nineteenth century America: between black and white, slave and free, and North and South. A black man who owned slaves and who also had abolitionist ties, he embodied the contradictions, complexity and agony of his era.