From OHA Wiki

Today slave narratives are being used more than ever, and in ways in which the people associated with the project never would have imagined. Historians are not only looking at the narratives to learn about slavery, but also to learn more about the time in which the interviews were conducted. Many of the narratives include information about the condition in which the ex-slaves lived at the time of the interview. This information can be used to research the lives of blacks during the 1930s and the Great Depression. Many historians are also studying race relations during the time of the interviews. Many of the interviews were taken in the deep south during the heart of segregation. Now that we have the Internet, there are even more ways in which the narratives have been used. The Library of Congress developed an online exhibit for the collection entitled "Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938." This online exhibit includes information about slave narratives and the WPA, as well as fifty pages from the narratives that have been scanned from the microfilm of the typewritten documents’ these were then scanned in a format using an optical character recognition which allows the text to be keyword searchable. They have only done fifty of the close to 10,000 pages since the originals that were placed into the Library of Congress were bound into 17 separate volumes. The process of scanning the originals would most likely have resulted in damage of some kind.

Another online collection is entitled “Been Here So Long” and includes selections from the WPA American slave narratives. This website has information about the WPA project, information about the narratives themselves as well as lesson plans for teachers. There are two other websites which includes lesson plans for teachers to be able to use the narratives in the classroom. The first is entitled “Slave Narratives, black autobiography in 19th century America.” This website was formed from the Yale New Haven Teachers Institute and includes a high school unit using the WPA narratives and was just copyrighted in 2009. Another website that includes slave narratives is entitled “Slave Narratives, Constructing US History through Analyzing Primary Sources.” This website includes lesson plans from the National Endowment for the Humanities for grades three through five. It seems to be a growing trend to include the narratives in the classroom while in the past historians hardly even touched them.

Two other recent endeavors include an HBO documentary entitled Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives. This is a 74-minute documentary that claims it “presents dramatic selections from the extensive the slave narrative collection through on camera readings by over a dozen actors interspersed with archival photographs, music film and period images.”¹ Continuing describing the documentary HBO states that the: "documentary brings the selected words of these former slaves to life through the voices of celebrated African-American actors - Narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, the film features emotion-charged readings by Angela Bassett, Michael Boatman, Roscoe Lee Browne, Don Cheadle, Sandra Daley, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Robert Guillaume, Jasmine Guy, Samuel L. Jackson, CCH Pounder, LaTanya Richardson, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Roger Guenveur Smith, Courtney B. Vance, Vanessa L. Williams, Oprah Winfrey and Alfre Woodard. In addition to their in-character readings, the actors sometimes add their own anecdotes and editorial comments, giving a contemporary and emotional perspective to the documentary's serious subject matter as well as archival photographs, authentic slave-era music performed by the McIntosh County Shouters, and creative footage evoking the brutal legacy of slavery in America."²

In 2004, PBS also came out with a documentary of its own, Slavery and the Makings of America.  The website for this documentary includes information on the WPA and slave narratives as well as links to other sites for more information.

The use of the WPA slave narratives have come a long way from sitting on the Library of Congress's shelves untouched to having their own online exhibit and lesson plans for students from elementary to high school to learn about the WPA and what they did. While it can be agreed that the narratives are not perfect and have many problems as long as these problems are taken into account there is much that we can learned from the narratives of ex-slaves taken in the 1930s.

WPA Slave Narratives: Additional Information

Refences

1. http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/unchained_memories/index.html

2. Ibid

Related Pages

WPA Slave Narratives
WPA Slave Narratives: History
WPA Slave Narratives: Problems
WPA Slave Narratives: Additional Information