#Green flake free

The book, “Slavery in Zion,” eight years in the making, is in the final editing stage and will be published by University of Utah Press. The film, titled “Green Flake,” two years in the making, is wrapping up production this week and will soon be shopped to Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and other major streaming services for distribution. The fact that Green Flake’s life matters is what inspired filmmaker Mauli Bonner and historian Amy Tanner Thiriot to want to tell his story. With exquisite - and quite unplanned - timing, the life and times of Green Flake are coming front and center just as the Black Lives Matter crusade is cresting in America.

#Green flake free

There’s plenty more to the story - how Green built a home for his masters prior to their arrival the following year how Green married a fellow slave named Martha how Brigham Young was believed to be instrumental in eventually setting Green free how Green dealt with the ban barring people of color from receiving the priesthood within the faith.Īll of which, and more, will be covered in a film and a book that are about to be released.

Nineteen years old, broad-shouldered, over 200 pounds and strong as an ox, the slave Green Flake was chosen by Brigham Young to leave Winter Quarters in the spring of ’47 with his vanguard group of 147 pioneers and make sure they made it safe and sound to the middle of nowhere. Two years later, the Flakes fled Nauvoo in the exodus of 1846 and made their way to Winter Quarters, Nebraska, where everyone in the family stayed for the next two years - except for Green. Flake and his wife, Agnes, joined the church at their plantation in Mississippi circa 1844, after which they packed up their slaves, who were baptized right along with them, and headed to live with the saints at church headquarters in Nauvoo, Illinois. His owner was a convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with the presidential name of James Madison Flake. Kimball, Orson Pratt, Orrin Porter Rockwell, et al.īecause Green Flake was a Black man. He had already planted crops and started building shelter when Brigham Young arrived in his wagon on the 24th and proclaimed, “This is the place.”īut his is hardly a household pioneer name like Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, Heber C.

He was with the advance party that broke the trail down Emigration Canyon ahead of the main body of pioneers. Green Flake was one of the first men to leave a bootprint in what we now call the Wasatch Front. SALT LAKE CITY - For one of the few times in the past 173 years, no formal celebrations are planned this year to commemorate the arrival of the first permanent settlers into the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847.īut if the coronavirus pandemic has killed the fanfare everywhere else, for one of those original pioneers of ’47, recognition is shaping into proportions he never could have dreamed of.