Movie spotlight
Under the tutelage of anthropologist Franz Boas (her former Columbia professor) and Harlem Renaissance arts patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, Zora Neale Hurston spent nearly two years, from 1927 to 1929, studying the folkloric customs, work songs, spirituals, and vernacular language of African American communities along the River Road and from New Orleans to Florida.
Currently identified as "Fieldwork Footage," this 3-minute excerpt shows the Loughman, Florida, logging community in 1928. The first part is filmed from a moving traincar and shows Black workers pulling lumber from the forest and loading it...