Reverend Solomon Sir Jones was both a filmmaker and a minister who, between 1924 and 1928,
captured 355 minutes of footage documenting black life in Oklahoma. His collection would endure as the most extensive film record of black life and culture in the South in the 1920s.
In her HistoryMakers interview, the late poet Naomi Long Madgett told of Reverend Solomon Sir Jones, “my father's childhood minister. And he had the vision to realize that black family--black life in Oklahoma, in the all-black towns and elsewhere, was important to record. So he took movies of that, and then the next year he came to New Jersey to see us and took movies of us. So I've got pictures of myself now at three years old waving bye-bye. And when he died, his wife evidently sent all of his film to my father, and then my brother ended up with it. So, my sister-in-law found somebody to work with this old film and put some of it on video…… I don't think anything like it exists anywhere else.” Reverend Solomon Sir Jones’ impressive collection of footage is now preserved at the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and was added to the National Film Registry in 2016.
https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/naomi-long-madgett-41?
