Richard D. Maurice

Entertainment career

In July 1920, he founded the Maurice Film Company. Its offices were at 184 High Street in Detroit. The film production company released two feature films almost ten years apart. Nobody's Children (originally titled, "Our Christianity and Nobody's Child"), the company's first feature, premiered at E. B. Dudley's Vaudette Theatre in Detroit on Monday, September 27, 1920, and played widely within the eastern United States. While extensive documentation exists regarding the release of Nobody's Children, no prints are known to exist.

Very little is known about the release of Eleven P.M., Maurice's second and only known surviving feature. It is generally dated 1928, but Pearl Bowser and Charles Musser in their essay, "Richard D. Maurice and the Maurice Film Company," speculate that the experimental film may have been completed the following year or possibly even 1930 because it "possesses a cinematic style and internal evocations of other race films" of the period.

Involvement in organized labor In 1940, Maurice became involved in dining-car service as a waiter for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad in New York City. Following his move three years later to the New York Central Railroad in the same capacity, he helped found the Dining Car and Railroad Food Workers union, local 370.

In 1946, Maurice began to have major disagreements with the union. His dissatisfaction with the union culminated in an op-ed piece published in the Amsterdam News in which he accused the union leadership of being ineffective in representing the rights of rank-and-file workers.