WPA Slave Narratives: History
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Projects before the WPA
The slave narrative has been in existence in the United States almost as long as slavery. Some of the earliest narratives are from the early part of the eighteenth century. The stories became popular in the sectional conflicts that led up to the Civil War. Many abolitionists and anti-slavery advocates used slave narratives to help further their goal of freeing the slaves. Narratives were also use by pro-slavery groups to show that slaves were happy and content with their way of life and that they would rather be a slave than be free. After the war, many people felt that the war had settled the issue of slavery and no longer saw the value in slave narratives. The United States had just emerged from one of the most violent periods in American history, and the public did not want to hear the horror stories of slavery that many of these narratives contained.
It was not until 1918 when Ulrich B. Phillips wrote American Negro Slavery: A survey of the supply, employment, and control of Negro labor as determined by the Plantation regime that interest in slavery was again peeked. Phillips did not use a single narrative or make any effort to get any information from the slave’s point of view even though he makes many assumptions on how they lived and felt under slavery. Phillips states his reasoning by saying that, “ex-slave narratives in general... were issued with so much abolitionists editing that as a class their authenticity is doubtful.”1 Almost every study, article or book that uses slave narratives to any degree and has been written since Phillips' statements were made almost one hundred years ago feels the need to justify why they have used them in their research.
By 1929, people started to see the value in interviewing ex-slaves while they were still alive. Two universities, Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee and Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, started separate projects to interview ex-slaves, both projects being influenced by Phillips' book in that both wanted to see what the slaves themselves would say. Lawrence D. Reddick, who had worked under the head of the program at Fisk, in 1934 at Kentucky State College, proposed a project that would employ black college graduates in the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Reddick’s proposal was for a unit of twelve black college graduates who would gather the “personal testimonies of ex-slaves in...Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia, Ohio Southern Indiana and Illinois.”2 It was meant to be a pilot project for a more intensive one in the south meant to employ five hundred black college graduate workers interviewing surviving ex-slaves. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration agreed to fund the pilot and work began in September 1934 in Kentucky and went through July 1935. They conducted 250 interviews during this period. While the original pilot project was meant to hire blacks with college educations, individuals with little or no college or interviewing experience were hired instead. The project did not go any further. This was the first attempt by the government or under government supervision to collect interviews with ex-slaves.
WPA and the Slave Narratives
As Ronald L. Baker notes, “In April 1935, Congress passed the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, which provided authority for the establishment for the Works Projects Administration (WPA).”3 In August of that year, Harry L. Hopkins the director of the WPA, created the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). The FWP goals were clear: “The primary task of the Federal Writers’ Project as originally conceived was the preparation of a comprehensive and panoramic American Guide a geographical-social-historical portrait of the states, cities and localities of the entire United States.”4 While the primary focus of the Federal Writers’ Project was to produce the American guide, as time went on the focus broadened but the best writers were still assigned to the guides.
Georgia was the first state to use the Federal Writers’ Project to obtain slave narratives in 1936, and the states of South Carolina, Florida, and Virginia soon followed. John Lomax, the national adviser to the project, read the narratives from these states and proposed that a large-scale program directed by the national office should be started to collect ex-slave narratives. In April of 1937, his proposal was accepted, and orders were sent out to the directors of the Southern and Border States offices to collect ex-slave narratives in their states.
A few months later, in July of 1937, the national director of the FWP sent out a memorandum containing several suggestions and a list of twenty categories of sample questions. This document “seems to have become a model for many of the interviews it urged state workers to ‘take the greatest care not to influence the point of view of the informant’ emphasized that ‘all stories should be nearly word for word as is possible.’”5
Interviewing continued through the Federal Writers’ Project until August of 1939, when the states gained control of the WPA when it lost its federal funding. The Federal Writers’ Project became simply the Writers’ Project. Between 1937 and 1939, about 2300 slave narratives were gathered. In October of 1939, the WPA established the writers unit of the Library Congress Project, which worked to edit the interviews, and getting them ready to be deposited in Library of Congress. The material was bound into 17 volumes and placed into the rare book room at the Library of Congress in 1941 under the name Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.
WPA Slave Narratives: Problems
References
1. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Charles T. Davis, eds. The Slave's Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
2. Yetman, Norman R., ed. Voices From Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2000.
3. Ronald L. Baker, Homeless, Friendless, and Penniless: The WPA Interviews with Former Slaves Living in Indiana, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2000.
4.Yetman, Norman R., ed. Voices From Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2000. pg. 346.
5.Paul D. Escott Slavery, Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives, Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979.
Related Pages
WPA Slave Narratives
WPA Slave Narratives: Problems
WPA Slave Narratives: Uses
WPA Slave Narratives: Additional Information
