The WPA's "Slave Narratives"
About the Interviews
Between 1936 and 1938, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP), a program of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), interviewed over 2,300 formerly enslaved Americans. The entire online collection has nearly 10,000 pages and more than 500 images. The Texas FWP office conducted over 300 interviews.
Despite being published in the Library of Congress's online collection since the beginning of the twenty-first century, these interviews remain widely underused and unknown to the public.
The interviews offer insight into a generation's transition to freedom and a recollection of events spanning over seventy years. They discuss slavery (and pre-abolition freedom), the Civil War, emancipation, the Reconstruction Era, the Jim Crow Era, World War I, and The Great Depression.
Agatha Babino's interview appears in the collection without an image.
28 Photographs and Stories from Formerly Enslaved Texans
The brutal and unabridged content of the narratives can be hard to read. The conversations revealed challenging moments in the interviewees' lives.
However, the interview documents remain critical. They evidence the ability of these earlier Texans to navigate roadblocks while building families during a difficult era for African Americans in the United States.
Sourced from the Project:
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.
Access the entire Collection on the Library of Congress website.
