From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the
AmericanSouth were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former
slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences
on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of
America's four million slaves. What makes the WPA narratives so rich is that they capture the very voices of American slavery,
revealing the texture of life as it was experienced and remembered. Each narrative taken alone offers a fragmentary, microcosmic
representation of slave life. Read together, they offer a sweeping composite view of slavery in North America, allowing us
to explore some of the most compelling themes of nineteenth-century slavery, including labor, resistance and flight, family
life, relations with masters, and religious belief.
This web site provides an opportunity to read a sample of
these narratives, and to see some of the photographs taken at the time of the interviews. The entire collection of narratives
can be found in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1972-79).
Emma Crockett, about 79 or 80 years old, is seen here sitting on the porch of her home near Livingston, Alabama, not far from the plantation
where she grew up. She was the daughter of Cassie Hawkins and Alfred Jolly, and the slave of Bill and Betty Hawkins. After
emancipation, she learned to read a bit of printing, but never learned how to read handwriting. She was a member of the New
Prophet Church; despite her headache the day she was interviewed, she sang her favorite hymn for the interviewer
Ms. Holmes, whose first name is not known, was interviewed in the 1920s as part of an oral history project at Fisk University. She was
born in Morgantown, West Virginia, around the time of the Civil War, and lived with the family of her father's master. Her
father was sent to the Confederate Army in his master's place, but left to join the Union Army. Ms. Holmes' husband abandoned
her for a light-skinned woman, and a later mate left her after her religious conversion. She was a member of the Santified
Church of God on Harding Street in Nashville, Tennessee; the congregation there supported her in her old age.
Walter Calloway was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1848. Calloway and his mother and brother were purchased by John Calloway, who owned a
plantation ten miles south of Montgomery, Alabama. By the time he was ten years old, Walter Calloway was doing a grown man's
work. The white overseer used a black hand to administer the whippings; Calloway recalls seeing one thirteen-year-old girl
whipped almost to death. Calloway also tells of worshipping in a brush arbor, the outbreak of the Civil War, and federal troops
ransacking the plantation at war's end. He is pictured sitting on the front steps of his home in Birmingham, Alabama, where
he worked for the city street department for twenty-five years.
For more information contact: Torentha A. Clark, Executive Director
It's Not Just My Story, It's The Story of Us All!!!
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