THE MISSION: To complete an essay, approximately 5 double—spaced typed pages in length, that analyzes  interviews conducted with  ex—slaves in the 1930s. Longer essays are certainly welcomed. This assignment is one of the two main components of the second-half portfolio.

PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT: This assignment is designed to let you experience first—hand the recollections of former slaves. In so doing, you will not only learn about the history of slavery, but will become an historian yourself, transforming interviews into organized analysis and assessing the potential biases of these primary sources.

BACKGROUND: From 1936 to 1938, employees of the Federal Writers’ Project, a sub—division of the Work Projects Administration (a major New Deal agency), collected more than two thousand interviews with ex—slaves. The transcripts eventually expanded to ten thousand pages. Many of these are available on-line through the Library of Congress and other archives.

PROCEDURE: The Library of Congress interviews can be accessed through the Born in Slavery link listed below.  This is an enormous archive of material, consisting of some 2,300 typewritten narratives and approximately 9,500 pages. Do at least some browsing in this archive, taking some notes as you proceed.

The Born in Slavery archive is admittedly somewhat unwieldy.  Thus, I have also xeroxed 100 pages of North Carolina interviews for class distribution.  The NC interviews are from this same archive, but you can choose to focus on them alone if this helps to provide you with a focus.

The best way to negotiate around the Born in Slavery site is through clicking on Browse By Volume.  The Introductory Essay by Norman Yetman is also very helpful.

Use the questions on the next two pages as a loose guide to help you organize your analysis of the interviews. Write an essay that both judges the usefulness of the interviews as historical sources and uses the testimony of the ex—slaves to bring the experience and memories of slavery to life.

1. How important is it to hear directly from the ex—slaves themselves? Do these interviews allow us to hear unfiltered slave voices?

2. Of what significance might it be that most of the interviewers were white? To what extent do the interviews seem to be pushed in a certain direction?

3. How important is it that these interviews were conducted seven decades after Emancipation? How might a child’s memories of slavery differ from those of an adult? Why?

4. How important is it that these interviews were conducted during the last years of the Great Depression? Is it an era of freedom that slavery is being contrasted with by these interviewees?

5. What most surprised you about these interviews? How would you explain this?

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   PART B: USING THE EX—SLAVE INTERVIEWS AS HISTORICAL SOURCES

    

6. What can these interviews teach us about slavery as an institution and as a lived experience?

7. How would you characterize the relationship between master and slave as presented in these interviews? What distinguished a "good" master from a "bad" master and how important, in your mind, is this distinction?

8. What do these interviews say about family? About work? About resistance? About leisure? About religion? About other aspects of plantation life?

9. What other characters beyond slave and master appear in these interviews? How are these other individuals presented? What, for example, is said about the overseers, the slave patrol (the "paddyrollers"), and the manner in which control was maintained on the plantation? Do "common" whites appear in these accounts?

10. What do the ex—slaves have to tell us about the Civil War? What do they say about Union soldiers and Abraham Lincoln?

11. What do the former slaves say about their post—Emancipation experiences? What did "freedom" bring for them?

12. What, if anything, did all slaves share in common? What divided them? What patterns emerge? How, for example, would the size of the plantation have made a difference? How might this have affected the relationship between master and slave? What would have been the advantages and disadvantages for a slave living on a small plantation? A large plantation? How might slavery have differed from place to place and what distinctions were apparent in your readings? Is it appropriate to speak of the "slave experience"?

13. What, ultimately, can these interviews tell us about the legacies and/or memories of slavery? What can they teach us about history and/or historians?