Redoshi

Redoshi ( 1848 – 1937) was a West African woman who was enslaved and smuggled to the U.S. state of Alabama as a girl in 1860. Until a later surviving claimant, Matilda McCrear, was announced in 2020, she was considered to have been the last surviving victim of the transatlantic slave trade. Taken captive in warfare at age 12 by the West African kingdom of Dahomey, she was sold to Americans and transported by ship to the United States in violation of U.S. law. She 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. She 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.

Biography 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. and took her captive at about age 12, around 1860. They sold her to the American captain of the illegal slave ship Clotilda. She was forced to marry another captive, a man also from West Africa who was already married and spoke a different language. Her husband was later referred to as "Uncle Billy" or "Yawith". Alabama businessman Timothy Meaher had commissioned the captain and ship for a slave-buying mission to Ouidah, a port city in what is today Benin. He renamed her "Sally Smith" and put her to work in the fields and sometimes the big house. and her husband Yawith continued to live on the plantation, working as sharecroppers. Washington Smith died in 1869, but his wife continued to run the plantation. Together with advance merchants and others, the planters essentially controlled the finances of the sharecroppers and settled annual accounts to their own benefit. Her daughter was listed on the U.S. Census and in marriage documents variously as "Leasy", "Luth A.", "Lethe", "Letia", and "Lethy", and had children. Previously historians believed that Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola) was the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. A spokesman for Africatown in Mobile, he was interviewed by numerous people. His life was written about by Emma Langdon Roche in a 1914 book and by Zora Neale Hurston in a 1928 article. Hurston returned to Alabama to interview him over a period of months and wrote a book about him, but it was not published until 2018, long after her death, as Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo". The appendix lists Sally Smith as having a son, Jessie Smith, a farmer, but Redoshi's only known child was a daughter. The article reported that she was 25 when she was captured, that she was a "princess" from the tribe of the Tarkars, and that she came from the same village in present-day Benin as Kossola/Cudjo Lewis. Durkin says this is "apparently the only newspaper article that is devoted to the experiences of a female Middle Passage survivor". The account, she says, is mediated by the white journalist and "reflects its white interviewer's romantic fantasies of the African continent" and "reinforces the customary pre-civil-rights era depictions of U.S. slavery as a benevolent, 'civilising' practice".

Civil-rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson of Alabama said in her 1979 memoir Bridge across Jordan that she had met "Aunt Sally" in about 1936. Boynton Robinson later organized voter registration and other grassroots efforts there in the early 1960s. She noted that Smith had come from Africa and that they talked about her retention of African cultural traditions within her family. Historian Alston Fitts included a short biography of Redoshi in Selma: A Bicentennial (1989, rep. in 2017), which was based on "Quarles family tradition" and on the account in Robinson's book.