WPA Slave Narrative Collection Preserves Testimony of 2,300 Formerly Enslaved People

Between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project employed interviewers, primarily Black interviewers supervised by John Lomax and Sterling Brown, to record testimonies of over 2,300 surviving formerly enslaved people across 17 states. The resulting 10,000-page collection, now held at the Library of Congress, constitutes the most significant body of primary source documentation of enslaved experience in American history. The project was imperfect, white interviewers in the South received different, more guarded testimony, but preserved irreplaceable voices. Scholars including Eugene Genovese and Herbert Gutman later used this collection to reconstruct the social world of enslavement.