19 Facts About Redoshi

Redoshi was sold again and enslaved on the upcountry plantation of the Washington M Smith family in Dallas County, Alabama, where her owner renamed her Sally Smith.

Redoshi survived slavery and the imposition of Jim Crow laws during the post-Reconstruction era of disenfranchisement, and lived into the Great Depression.

Redoshi lived long enough to become acquainted with people active in the civil rights movement; she is the only known female transatlantic slavery survivor to have been filmed and to have been interviewed for a newspaper.

Redoshi lived in a village in West Africa in present day Benin.

The name "Redoshi" is unknown in West Africa, though 14 names similar to it appear in the African Origins database.

Redoshi's village was attacked in a raid by warriors of the Kingdom of Dahomey, who killed her father and took her captive at about age 12, around 1860.

Redoshi was forced to marry another captive, a man from West Africa who was already married and spoke a different language.

Redoshi's husband was later referred to as "Uncle Billy" or "Yawith".

Redoshi was transported on the Clotilda, the last ship known to bring enslaved African people to the United States.

Redoshi had a townhouse in Selma and was among the founders of the Bank of Selma.

Redoshi renamed her "Sally Smith" and put her to work in the fields and sometimes the big house.

Yawith died in the 1910s or 1920s; Redoshi died in 1937.

Redoshi was 25 years old, strong and healthy, and imbued with the love of life in the jungles.

Redoshi's life was written about by Emma Langdon Roche in a 1914 book and by Zora Neale Hurston in a 1928 article.

The appendix lists Sally Smith as having a son, Jessie Smith, a farmer, but Redoshi's only known child was a daughter.

Redoshi said that Lewis was not the only survivor of the Clotilda: she had met a "most delightful" woman, "older than Cudjoe, about 200 miles up state on the Tombig[b]ee river".

Redoshi, referred to as "Aunt Sally Smith", was interviewed in 1932 by the Montgomery Advertiser, when she was living on a plantation then owned by the Quarles family.

Redoshi was filmed for a 1938 educational film, The Negro Farmer: Extension Work for Better Farming and Better Living, made by the United States Department of Agriculture with assistance from the Tuskegee Institute.

Redoshi noted that Smith had come from Africa and that they talked about her retention of African cultural traditions within her family.