During the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project, a subsidiary of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), attempted to create work for unemployed writers, journalists, and historians by having them travel across the South to interview former slaves, many of whom – seventy years after emancipation – were fast nearing the end of their lives. The WPA researchers conducted and transcribed interviews with more than 2,300 former slaves about their experiences before and after emancipation, thus providing subsequent generations of historians with a priceless resource for understanding the lives of African-American slaves and freedmen in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, including their perceptions of and responses to the daily indignities of that “peculiar institutions,” as John Calhoun and others called slavery.

Yet, for all their worth, the WPA slave narratives pose many significant problems for historians. To take just one example, consider the following passage from a 1937 interview with Charity Anderson, a 101-year-old (by her reckoning) former slave in Mobile, Alabama:

My old Marster was a good man, he treated all his slaves kind, and took care of dem, he wanted to leave dem hisn chillun. It sho’ was hard for us older uns to keep de little culled chillun out ob de dinin’ room what ol master ate, cause when dey would slip in and stan’ by his cheer, when he finished eatin’ he would fix a plate and gib dem and dey would set on de hearth and eat. But honey chile, all white folks warn’t good to dere slaves, cause I’se seen pore n— almos’ tore up by dogs, and whippped unmercifully, when dey didn’t do lack de white folks say. But thank God I had good white folks, dey sho’ did trus’ me to, I had charge of all de keys in the house and I waited on de Missy and de chillun. I laid out all dey clos’ on Sat’dy night on de cheers, and den Sund’y awnings I’d pick up all de dirty clos,’ they did’nt have to do a thing. And as for working in the field, my master neber planted no cotton, I neber seed no cotton planted til’ a’ter I was free.[1]

The most immediately evident characteristic of Anderson’s account is the dialect in which it is written, which perhaps suggests to the reader a plausible manner of speaking for a 101-year-old woman who had been born and raised under slavery. Yet this dialect in fact tells us much more about the interviewers than it does about the former slaves, since it is uniform throughout all the WPA narratives and, as historian Blassingame and others have noted, was ascribed even to African-Americans who spoke perfect English! Indeed, in his 1975 essay “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems,” Blassingame points out that the WPA narratives were altered in even more disturbing ways, including some that were “edited to delete references to cruel punishments, blacks serving in the Union Army, runaways, and blacks voting during Reconstruction.”[2]

These lamentable revisions aside, the WPA narratives are also compromised by the often condescending attitude of the young, well-educated, and almost universally white interviewers–some of whom were even the grandchildren of the interviewees’ former masters–toward their subjects, as well as the resulting patterns of deference and obfuscation that African-Americans were accustomed to using in the presence of white people in the still overtly racist Jim Crow South. As Blassingame puts it:

The white staff of the WPA had mastered so little of the art and science of interviewing that many of them found it impossible to obtain trustworthy data from their informants. . . . Many of the WPA interviewers consistently referred to their informants as darkeys, n—, aunties, mammas, and uncles. Reminiscent as these terms were of rigid plantation etiquette, they were not calculated to engender the trust of the blacks. Rather than being sensitive, the white interviewers failed to demonstrate respect for the blacks, ignored cues indicating a tendency toward ingratiation, and repeatedly refused to correct the informants’ belief that the interviewer was trying to help them obtain [a] coveted pension. Not only did most of the whites lack empathy with the former slaves, they often phrased their questions in ways which indicated the answers they wanted.[3]

Despite these significant problems, Blassingame concedes, the WPA narratives “are incomparable sources” and “a rich source of information on black speech patterns.” But, he warns, “uncritical use of the interviews will lead almost inevitably to a simplistic and distorted view of the plantation as a paternalistic institution where the chief feature of life was mutual love and respect between masters and slaves.”[4]