Slave Narrative Collection

Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States (often referred to as the WPA Slave Narrative Collection) was a massive compilation of slave narratives undertaken by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1938. It was the simultaneous effort of state-level branches of FWP in seventeen states, working largely separately from each other. The collections, as works of the US federal government, are in the public domain, and excerpts from them 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 2000 interviews.

Following on the renewed interest in the African-American experience of slavery (as opposed to the white view of it) engendered by The Journal of Negro History after 1916, there were several efforts to record the remembrances of living former slaves. The earliest of these were two projects begun in 1929, one led by Charles S. Johnson at Fisk University and the other by John B. Cade at Southern University. One of Johnson's students, Lawrence D. Reddick, proposed a federally funded continuation of these efforts in 1934 through the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. This program, however, did not achieve its ambitious goals, and several years passed before narratives began to be collected again. Although some members of the Federal Writers' Project were aware of Reddick's project, the FWP slave narrative collection was more directly inspired by the folklore collections of John Lomax, and was pursued by Carolyn Dillard, director of the Georgia branch of the Writers' Project. A parallel project was then started in Florida with Lomax's participation, and the effort subsequently grew to cover all of the southern (except Louisiana) and several northern states. The most productive state project, in the end, was in Arkansas.

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