LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Dear Readers,
In the past we have advised you to take advantage of holiday gatherings and the summer-reunion season to collect information from your relatives about family history. Get your kin talking, pull out a digital voice recorder, and before you know it, you will have begun a collection of oral histories that will provide a gold mine of genealogy information for you and for future generations.
It’s too bad we can’t debrief our slave ancestors in the same way, to know what life was like for them in bondage. As Professor Gates has written before, only a couple hundred book-length narratives by slaves and former slaves have been published; voices of the vast majority of enslaved Africans are lost to us. However, there are a few slave narrative collections that can aid our attempts to know our own antebellum ancestors better, whether their own words were recorded, or not.
The Federal Writers Project
The Federal Writers Project is a collection of written works, photographs and documents created by the Works Progress Administration to employ writers during the Great Depression. As a part of this larger project, more than 2,300 firsthand accounts by enslaved African Americans were collected, as well as more than 500 photographs of former slaves. Today the Library of Congress holds this collection of documents, titled “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938.”
Most of the interviews, stories and written accounts created by the writers were compiled into a 17-volume set. Each volume is dedicated to a single state included in the project. The states in this collection are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. The Library of Congress has made the entire “Born in Slavery” collection available online inboth pdf and txt files. A more detailed explanation of the history of the project can be found in the article “An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives.”
Source: The Root | HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. AND KRISTIN BRITANIK, NEHGS RESEARCHER
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