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

Between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project employed interviewers 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 preserved irreplaceable voices; white interviewers in the South received more guarded testimony than Black interviewers. Scholars later used this collection to reconstruct the social world of enslavement.