''Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States'' (often referred to as the WPA Slave Narrative Collection) is a collection of histories by formerly enslaved people undertaken by the

Federal Writers' Project The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was a federal government project in the United States created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression. It was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. It wa ...

of the

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...

from 1936 to 1938. It was the simultaneous effort of state-level branches of FWP in seventeen states, working largely separately from each other. FWP administrators sought to develop a new appreciation for the elements of American life from different backgrounds, including that from the last generation of formerly enslaved individuals. The collections of life histories and materials on African American life that resulted gave impetus to the collection. The collection of narratives and photographs, as works of the U.S. federal government, are in the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired ...

, has been digitized, and is available online. In addition, excerpts have been published by various publishers as printed books or on the Internet. The total collection contains more than 10,000 typed pages, representing more than 2,000 interviews. The Library of Congress also has a digitized collection of audio recordings that were sometimes made during these interviews.

Origins and Inspiration

After 1916 '' The Journal of Negro History'' published articles that in part had to do with the African American experience of slavery (as opposed to the white view of it). This resulted in several efforts to record the remembrances of living former enslaved individuals, especially as the survivors of the generation born into slavery before Emancipation in 1865 were declining in number. The earliest of these were two projects begun in 1929, one led by

Charles S. Johnson Charles Spurgeon Johnson (July 24, 1893 – October 27, 1956) was an American sociologist and college administrator, the first black president of historically black Fisk University, and a lifelong advocate for racial equality and the advance ...

at Fisk University and the other by John B. Cade at Southern University, calle
"Opinions Regarding Slavery - Slave Narratives."
In 1934 Lawrence D. Reddick, one of Johnson's students, proposed a federally-funded project to collect narratives from formerly enslaved individuals through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which was providing work opportunities for unemployed people as part of the first wave of

New Deal The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Con ...

funding. This program, however, did not achieve its ambitious goals. Several years passed before narratives began to be collected again. Although some members of the

were aware of Reddick's project, the FWP slave narrative collection was more directly inspired by the collections of folklore undertaken by John Lomax. Carolyn Dillard, director of the Georgia branch of the Writers' Project, pursued the goal of collecting stories from persons in the state who had been born into slavery. A parallel project was started in Florida with Lomax's participation, and the effort subsequently grew to cover all of the southern states (except

Louisiana Louisiana , group=pronunciation (French: ''La Louisiane'') is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It is the 20th-smallest by area and the 25th most populous of the 50 U.S. states. Louisiana is bord ...

) and several northern states. In the end, Arkansas collected the largest volume of slave narratives of any state.

Controversy surrounding the interviews

Though the collection preserved hundreds of life stories that would otherwise have been lost, later historians have agreed that, compiled as it was by primarily white interviewers, the collection does not represent an entirely unbiased view. Because the federal government employed mostly white interviewers to document these former enslaved individuals' stories, there is a debate regarding whether these interviews are tainted by racism.

John Blassingame John Wesley Blassingame (March 23, 1940 – February 13, 2000) was an American historian and pioneer in the study of slavery in the United States. He was the former chairman of the African-American studies program at Yale University. Blassing ...

, an influential historian of slavery, has said that the collection can present "a simplistic and distorted view of the plantation" that is too positive. Blassingame's argument proved controversial; one historian in the 1990s described support for Blassingame's position as "rare," but defended him on the grounds that "all historical evidence has to be measured against a minimum standard of truth that would allow historians to use it properly. Historians have not, to date, applied this stipulation to the slave narratives". Other historians worried that individuals interviewed may have modified their accounts in other ways because of being interviewed by whites. Historian Catherine Stewart argues in her book ''Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writer's Project'', that "a way for Anderson, a former slave being who was interviewed by a white man, to comment on race relations in Jim Crow Florida- a means for a black interviewee to make an argument about the unwelcome presence of a white interviewer in her home, and to point out the danger she perceived in his presence, all while perserving a mask of civility and giving the interviewer what he had asked for? While Federal Writer's Project interviewers like Frost were engaged in writing down African American ghost stories", Stewart writes, "former slaves such as Josephine Anderson were conjuring up tales about power and racial identities". Historian Lauren Tilton asserts that "the Ex-Slave Narratives became a site to negotiate black people's right to full citizenship and to be a part of the nation's identity. The subjectivity of the interviewer, the questions posed, responses from the interviewees, and the ways the stories were written shaped the narratives, which became a contested space to assert or de-legitimize black selfhood and therefore rights to full incorporation into the nation."

Project impact

More recently, even as the narratives have become more widely available through digital means, historians have used them for more narrow, specific kinds of studies. For instance, one historian has examined responses to conflict among the members of the Gullah community of the Low Country, with a view to relating it to traditional African ideas about restorative justice. Another has drawn from them for a history of representations of the black body extending to the present. Another historian has studied them as a window into the time period of their transmission, the 1930s and the Great Depression, rather than the antebellum period they document. Though most of the narratives are preserved only in the notes of the interviewers, large numbers of photographs and 78 rpm audio recordings were made as well. These have proved valuable for such purposes as examining changes in African-American Vernacular English over time. These narratives have also impacted current movements such as the Black Lives Matter Movement beginning in 2013. Clint Smith writes, "The Black Lives Matter movement has further pushed historians to revisit these stories. The past several years—and particularly the months since last summer’s racial-justice protests—have prompted many people to question what we’ve been taught, to see our shared past with new eyes. The FWP narratives afford us the opportunity to understand how slavery shaped this country through the stories of those who survived it".

Publication

A small group of the narratives first appeared in print in a Writers' Project book, ''These Are Our Lives''. Excerpts from them were included in a Virginia Writers' Project book in 1940, and

Benjamin Botkin Benjamin Albert Botkin (February 7, 1901 – July 30, 1975) was an American folklorist and scholar. Early life Botkin was born on February 7, 1901, in East Boston, Massachusetts, to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. He attended the English High Schoo ...

's ''Lay My Burden Down'' in 1945. However, large numbers of the narratives were not published until the 1970s, following the

civil rights movement The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the Unite ...

when changing culture created more widespread interest in early African American history. The influence of

New Social History Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...

, as well as increased attention to the historical agency of enslaved individuals, led to new interpretations and analysis of slave life. An anthology was published in 1998 that included audio cassettes with excerpts from the collections' recordings. The narratives also served as the basis for the 2003 HBO documentary ''

Unchained Memories ''Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives'' is a 2003 American documentary film about the stories of former slaves interviewed during the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project and preserved in the WPA Slave Narrative Colle ...

: Readings from the Slave Narratives''.

Photograph gallery

File:William Watkins.png, Photograph of William Watkins, ex-slave, from the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. File:Uncle Van Moore, ex-slave.png, Photograph of Uncle Van Moore, ex-slave from the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writer's Project, 1936-1938, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. File:George Dillard 85 former slave.jpg, Photograph of George Dillard, age 85, former slave, from the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. File:Wayman Williams.png, Photograph of Wayman William, ex-slave, from the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writer's Project, 1936-1938, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. File:Susan Merritt, ex-slave.png, Photograph of Susan Merritt, ex-slave, from the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

References

External links

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938
(Library of Congress) Online versions of collected narratives, by state: {{Authority control Slave narratives Federal Writers' Project