The Federal Writers' Project: 'Born in Slavery' Collection

Between 1936 and 1938 the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project sent interviewers to record the accounts of formerly enslaved people in their own words. The interviews were conducted across seventeen states and produced a corpus of more than 2,300 first-person narratives.

The full collection — known officially as "Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936–1938" — is hosted by the Library of Congress and is in the public domain. It contains transcribed interviews, contextual notes from the interviewers, and approximately 500 photographic portraits.

Modern historians treat the collection as essential primary source material for understanding daily life under chattel slavery, even while noting its limitations: most interviewees were children at emancipation and elderly at interview, several interviewers were white Southerners whose presence shaped responses, and the linguistic transcriptions were sometimes stylized by editors.

Rather than re-publish individual narratives here, we direct readers to the Library of Congress's own presentation, which preserves the original interview metadata and offers full-text search.

The institutional history of the Federal Writers' Project is worth understanding because it shapes the way the collection should be read. The Project was established in 1935 as one division of the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal agency that employed unemployed Americans in public-works and white-collar projects. The Writers' Project employed approximately 6,600 writers and editors at its peak. Its main products included the American Guide Series — a state-by-state travel guide series covering all forty-eight states, the District of Columbia, and several territories — and a number of more specialized projects. The Slave Narrative Collection was a sub-project of the Writers' Project conducted principally between 1936 and 1938 in seventeen states.

The Slave Narrative Collection produced interviews with approximately 2,300 formerly enslaved people. The interviewees were elderly — the median age at interview was over eighty, given that the youngest possible interviewees would have been children at emancipation in 1865 — and the interviews were conducted across the South and in border states. The interviewing protocols were not uniform across the participating states; each state's Federal Writers' Project office set its own field practice within general guidance from the national office. The variability in interviewing practice is one of the methodological caveats subsequent historians have addressed in their use of the collection.

The interviewers themselves are a substantive part of the methodological picture. The Federal Writers' Project employed both Black and white interviewers, but the majority of the interviewers who collected the Slave Narratives were white. Several state offices, particularly Virginia and Florida, operated relatively integrated interviewing teams in which Black interviewers conducted a substantial share of the interviews. The Virginia and Florida narratives have been treated by subsequent scholars as a partial control on the broader collection because the racial composition of the interviewing team affected what interviewees were willing to say. Interviews conducted by white interviewers tend to read more guardedly on questions of cruelty under slavery; interviews conducted by Black interviewers tend to read more directly. The pattern is not absolute but is detectable across the corpus.

The editorial treatment of the interviews varied substantially across state offices and across the timeline of the project. Some interviewers transcribed interviewees' speech in standard English; others rendered dialect, often in stylized forms that have struck subsequent readers as condescending. The Federal Writers' Project national office issued guidance discouraging the most heavily stylized renderings, but the guidance was not uniformly applied. Modern scholarly editions of the narratives, including the Library of Congress digital presentation, retain the original transcriptions as the documentary record. Some scholars working with the narratives produce normalized-English versions for educational use; others argue that the original transcriptions, dialect and all, are themselves part of the documentary record and should not be cleaned up.

The interviewees were paid in some states and not in others. Where payment was provided, it was typically a small sum and a share of any commercial product that resulted from the interview. No substantial commercial product resulted from the interviews during the lifetimes of the interviewees. The Federal Writers' Project was wound down in 1939 as part of the broader political campaign against the Works Progress Administration. The narrative manuscripts were transferred to the Library of Congress in 1941, where they sat largely unpublished and underused until George P. Rawick's monumental nineteen-volume edition 'The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography' was published between 1972 and 1979. Rawick's edition brought the collection to a wide academic audience and is the foundation of modern scholarly use.

The Library of Congress's current digital presentation of the collection — 'Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938' — is the canonical modern access point. The presentation includes full-text searchable transcriptions of the interviews, scanned images of the original typewritten manuscripts, the approximately five hundred photographic portraits taken during the interviewing process, and substantial scholarly apparatus on the project's history and methodology. We direct readers to the Library of Congress's presentation rather than re-hosting the narratives ourselves because the Library's contextual apparatus is essential to reading the collection responsibly. The platform's contribution is to point readers at the collection, situate it within the broader documentary record, and provide the methodological context in which the narratives are most usefully read.

The collection's importance for the modern documentary record is its position as the closest available approximation to first-person primary-source narrative of antebellum slavery. The alternative documentary record — plantation account books, antebellum newspapers, slave-narrative volumes published by abolitionist presses, court records of slave sales and disputes, and the slave schedules of the federal census — provides the institutional skeleton of slavery as a system but not the first-person experience of having lived under it. The Federal Writers' Project narratives provide the experiential dimension. They are, with all of their methodological complications, the voices most directly available across the temporal gap between emancipation and the modern documentary infrastructure.

The Library of Congress's digital presentation of the 'Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938' collection is the principal modern scholarly-access infrastructure for the collection. The presentation includes full-text searchable transcriptions, scanned images of the original typewritten manuscripts, the approximately five hundred photographic portraits taken during the interviewing process, and substantial scholarly apparatus addressing the project's history, methodology, and interpretive challenges. The collection's URL is www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/. The collection is in the public domain.

The platform's editorial position treats the Library of Congress presentation as the canonical access point for the collection and directs readers to the Library's infrastructure rather than re-hosting the narratives ourselves. The Library's contextual apparatus is essential to reading the collection responsibly; the platform's contribution is to point readers at the collection, situate it within the broader documentary record, and provide the methodological context in which the narratives are most usefully read.