What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas — until now. When Ruby Duncan loses her Las Vegas hotel job due to a workplace accident and accepts public assistance, she discovers firsthand the stigma and harassment by an over-zealous, fraud-obsessed welfare department. With Mary Wesley and Alversa Beals, Ruby creates a welfare rights group to fight for an adequate income, dignity, and justice. They, along with low-income mothers across the country, form the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) with the support of George Wiley, a chemistry professor-turned-activist and Frances Fox Piven, a radical social-scientist. Together, the mothers of the NWRO introduce a Universal Basic Income campaign with feminist Gloria Steinem at their side, at the Democratic National Convention in Miami in 1972.

Storming Caesars Palace shares the story of how a group of ordinary low-income mothers launched an extraordinary grassroots movement for economic justice and Black women’s empowerment in the 1960s and 1970s. This film reveals the roots of today’s movements, highlighting the experiences of Black women organizers from one of the most challenging and forgotten feminist, anti-poverty movements in our history, and places it in the limelight, where it will inspire, embolden and honor the women whose courage, tenacity and dreams could not be squashed, against all odds.