This color educational film from the 1950s is about the history of Southern plantations in the USA, from the Civil War days to “the present”. The film was produced during the era of Segregation and as such, contains many outdated terms and concepts, some of which may be offensive to a modern audience.

Opening titles: A Coronet Film – The Plantation System in Southern Life (:10). A white family on vacation looks at an old plantation home built before the Civil War (:31). Inside a home, the family looks around at the beautiful furnishings (1:00). A map that explains how the plantation was organized (1:28). Slaves lived in dilapidated, small houses (2:01). Blacksmith shop run by African American (2:19). Hand labor done by the slaves including spinning thread, cutting firewood, etc. (2:28). A wagon is shown bogged down in mud; two African American men struggle to get their team of horses to pull it out. Because of roads like this and poor transportation in general, in-house production of many items was the norm (2:44). A sternwheel riverboat or steamboat on the Mississippi (3:03). Slaves move bales of cotton onto a steamship (3:18). Slaves in the field pick cotton (3:36). White minder or foreman on a horse talks to slaves in the field (4:03). White man gets off his horse and meets his family at the house (4:29). Map of the United States shows plantations from Virginia to Texas; tobacco, cotton, and sugar were the main crops (5:05). Plantation home in ruins, that was abandoned after the Civil War (6:06). Rich land; source of labor – the slaves remained (6:38). African Americans picking cotton today as part of sharecropping system (6:59). A landlord and his tenants work on a farm (7:24). Tenant farmers and their families live on the plantations today, and the homes of the White owners and Black workers are compared (7:51). People at work on the farm, judging from the man’s shirt this is near Wayside, Mississippi in Washington County (8:14). Paved roads exist today (8:33). Cattle graze (8:49). A Ford tractor plows a field (9:09) and a McCormick harvester at work. A man among the soy bean crop, riding a John Deere tractor (9:40). African Americans pick cotton today (9:57). People exhibit southern hospitality with manners and food while the narrator speaks about “society separated into distinct groups” as a veiled attempt to justify segregation (10:08). African Americans pick cotton in the field as they have for hundreds of years (10:33). End credits (10:42).

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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com