Alabama Wpa Slave Narratives

Author : Federal Writers' Project
Publisher : CreateSpace
ISBN 13 : 9781492289470
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (894 download)

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Download or read book American Slave Interviews written by Federal Writers' Project and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2013-08 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Slave Interviews Slave Narratives Alabama Narratives A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves In the Depression years between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project (FWP) 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. John A. Lomax, the National Advisor on Folklore and Folkways for the FWP (and the curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress), was extremely interested in the ex-slave material he received from these states. In 1937 he directed 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 workers then turned the narratives over to their state's FWP director for editing and eventual transfer to Washington, D.C. Slave narratives by African slaves from North America were first published in England in the 18th century. They soon became the main form of African-American literature in the 19th century. Slave narratives were publicized by abolitionists, who sometimes participated as editors, or writers if slaves were not literate. During the first half of the 19th century, the controversy over slavery in the United States led to impassioned literature on both sides of the issue. To present the reality of slavery, a number of former slaves, such as Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, published accounts of their enslavement and their escapes to freedom. Lucy Delaney wrote an account that included the freedom suit waged by her mother in Missouri for their freedom. Eventually some 6,000 former slaves from North America and the Caribbean wrote accounts of their lives, with about 150 of these published as separate books or pamphlets.