Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938. 

In the Depression years between 1936 and 1938, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the current day Stimulus Plan, under the Federal Writers’ Project sent out-of-work writers in seventeen states to interview ordinary people in order to write down their life stories. Initially, only four states involved in the project (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia) focused on collecting the stories of people who had once been held in slavery. In 1937 the director of the program required the remaining states involved in the project to carry out interviews with former slaves as well. Federal field workers were given instructions on what kinds of questions to ask their informants and how to capture their dialects. They often visited the people they interviewed twice in order to gather as many recollections as possible. Sometimes they took photographs of informants and their houses.

The results of this program was a book entitles Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938.  The book contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. This online collection is available at the Library of Congress website.

Lords Prayer Dave White Slave

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Interview Dave White

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Slavery Quarterman