The Slave Narratives as History

Abstract

Abstract One of the most significant research projects generated by the Depression was the Federal Writers Project’s Slave Narrative Collection. Drawing upon precedents established by Lawrence Reddick and John McCade, the F.W.P. collected thousands of oral narratives during the nineteen thirties from black men and women who had once been enslaved. Used as sources of folklore by Benjamin Botkin in his collection Lay My Burden Down ( 1945), the worth of these narratives as historical data has remained in question until the last decade. Sterling Brown’s memorandum to that project’s interviewers reveals the care encouraged by the project’s directors to make those data collected of potential use to historians, linguists, and to literary scholars. One such literary scholar, John Widman, compares the use of language in these narratives to that used by Charles Chesnutt in his fictions. Essays by historians are sustained responses to the published edition of these oral tales, edited by the historian, George P. Rawick, and published as a “composite history” in over forty-volumes entitled The American Slave.