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.