Federal Writers' Project

By: Lisa Clayton Robinson

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Federal Writers' Project

Project funded by the United States government during the 1930s to collect American history through oral narratives, including the testimonies of former slaves.

Although their accuracy and usefulness have been debated, the Slave Narratives collected through the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) add significantly to the study of Slavery in the United States. The FWP began in 1935 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, which created new jobs for Americans suffering during the Great Depression. The Writers' Project hired unemployed writers to collect folklore and histories from each state for a series of books called Guide to America. President Roosevelt's Black Cabinet—African American advisers John Davis, William Hastie, and Robert Weaver—persuaded the administration to include oral testimonies of former slaves and other African Americans as part of this program.

As a result, between 1935 and 1939 thousands of African Americans were interviewed through the FWP's Office of Negro Affairs. The FWP produced more than a dozen collections of rural and urban black studies. The slave narrative collection is its largest contribution to black history and literature. Over 2,000 former slaves in eighteen states were interviewed, an estimated two percent of the surviving former slave population.

The topics discussed in the interviews included the type of work the interviewees had done as slaves, what they ate and what they wore, and what their families and homes were like. Published collections of their narratives include Benjamin Botkins's anthology Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (1945) and George P. Rawlins's comprehensive forty-one-volume The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (1972, 1977, 1979).

The FWP employed several prominent African American writers. Sterling A. Brown was the FWP Negro Affairs director, and Zora Neale Hurston briefly directed the Florida office. Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, and Margaret Walker worked in the office, and Wright, Claude McKay, and Ralph Ellison all worked in New York. The position gave many of these writers extra time for their own writing—Hurston, for example, finished three novels during her fieldwork, and Wright wrote Twelve Million Black Voices (1941) as part of the project and Native Son (1940) during his free time.

While the FWP was an excellent opportunity for these black authors, the program failed to employ large numbers of African Americans. In 1937, only 106 out of the 4,500 writers were black. Several state offices simply refused to hire black workers for the project. Many historians have argued that the racial inequality on the staff undermined the value of the endeavor because black interviewees tended to censor themselves when they were responding to white questioners. This has become one of the major criticisms of the project.

Other criticisms of the narratives have been raised as well. Most of the writers had no standard training or background in conducting interviews. They did not use tape recorders, so it is difficult to tell how accurate their transcriptions were. Many writers either rephrased the subjects' answers in their own words or exaggerated the African American dialects that they heard. There is also evidence that writers cut certain material altogether, including accounts of severe cruelty by whites. Two-thirds of the interviewees were over eighty years old at the time of the interviews, and they were trying to recall events that had taken place over seventy years earlier. Finally, their experiences may not have been representative of the broader African American slave experience because the majority of them had been slaves only as children and only during the last two decades of American slavery.

Despite these limitations, the FWP narratives remain one of the most extensive sources of first-person information on African American slavery. They continue to be useful to scholars, historians, and general readers interested in learning more about the slave experience. A series of paperback selections titled I Was a Slave, published in the 1990s, made the narratives available in an affordable new edition.

See also Literature, African American; Women Writers, Black, in the United States.

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