The Negro Farmer: Extension Work for Better Farming and Better Living (1938)

“The Negro Farmer: Extension Work for Better Farming and Better Living” (1938) was made by the United States Dept. of Agriculture with assistance from the Tuskegee Institute. It features music, entitled “Negro Melodies”, from the Tuskegee Institute Choir directed by African American composer William L. Dawson. The film has been assessed as a condescending, paternalistic portrait of Black rural life that was intended to slow or stop the mass migration by Blacks to the North. The film features Redoshi (c. 1848 – 1937) (renamed Sally Smith by her enslaver, Washington Smith), a West African woman taken to Dallas County, Alabama in 1860. Redoshi was considered one of the two last surviving victims of the transAtlantic slave trade.