FootNote
The new kid on the block, FootNote is known for digitizing historical
documents... many of which are genealogical gems. With naturalizations,
city directories, war records, newspapers, town records, etc... this new
kid is quickly being recognized as an alternative to Ancestry.
While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Typewritten
records prepared by the Federal Writers' Project 1936-1938.
Assembled by the Library of Congress Project work projects
administration for the District of Columbia sponsored by the
Library of Congress.
The present
Library of Congress Project, under the
sponsorship of the Library of Congress, is a
unit of the Public Activities Program of the
Community Service Programs of the Work
Projects Administration for the District of
Columbia. According to the Project Proposal
(WPA Form 301), the purpose of the Project
is to "collect, check, edit, index, and
otherwise prepare for use WPA records,
Professional and Service Projects."
The Writers' Unit of the Library of Congress
Project processes material left over from or
not needed for publication by the state
Writers' Projects. On file in the Washington
office in August, 1939, was a large body of
slave narratives, photographs of former
slaves, interviews with white informants
regarding slavery, transcripts of laws,
advertisements, records of sale, transfer,
and manumission of slaves, and other
documents. As unpublished manuscripts of the
Federal Writers' Project these records
passed into the hands of the Library of
Congress Project for processing; and from
them has been assembled the present
collection of some two thousand narratives
from the following seventeen states:
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia,
Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland,
Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio,
Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas,
and Virginia3.
The work of the
Writers' Unit in preparing the narratives
for deposit in the Library of Congress
consisted principally of arranging the
manuscripts and photographs by states and
alphabetically by informants within the
states, listing the informants and
illustrations, and collating the contents in
seventeen volumes divided into thirty-three
parts. The following material has been
omitted: Most of the interviews with
informants born too late to remember
anything of significance regarding slavery
or concerned chiefly with folklore; a few
negligible fragments and unidentified
manuscripts; a group of Tennessee interviews
showing evidence of plagiarism; and the
supplementary material gathered in
connection with the narratives. In the
course of the preparation of these volumes,
the Writers' Unit compiled data for an essay
on the narratives and partially completed an
index and a glossary. Enough additional
material is being received from the state
Writers' Projects, as part of their surplus,
to make a supplement, which, it is hoped,
will contain several states not here
represented, such as Louisiana.
All editing had previously been done in the
states or the Washington office. Some of the
penciled comments have been identified as
those of John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, who
also read the manuscripts. In a few cases,
two drafts or versions of the same interview
have been included for comparison of
interesting variations or alterations.
Set beside the
work of formal historians, social
scientists, and novelists, slave
autobiographies, and contemporary records of
abolitionists and planters, these life
histories, taken down as far as possible in
the narrators' words, constitute an
invaluable body of unconscious evidence or
indirect source material, which scholars and
writers dealing with the South, especially
social psychologists and cultural
anthropologists, cannot afford to reckon
without. For the first and the last time, a
large number of surviving slaves (many of
whom have since died) have been permitted to
tell their own story, in their own way. In
spite of obvious limitations—bias and
fallibility of both informants and
interviewers, the use of leading questions,
unskilled techniques, and insufficient
controls and checks—this saga must remain
the most authentic and colorful source of
our knowledge of the lives and thoughts of
thousands of slaves, of their attitudes
toward one another, toward their masters,
mistresses, and overseers, toward poor
whites, North and South, the Civil War,
Emancipation, Reconstruction, religion,
education, and virtually every phase of
Negro life in the South.
The narratives belong to folk
history—history recovered from the memories
and lips of participants or eye-witnesses,
who mingle group with individual experience
and both with observation, hearsay, and
tradition. Whether the narrators relate what
they actually saw and thought and felt, what
they imagine, or what they have thought and
felt about slavery since, now we know why
they thought and felt as they did. To the
white myth of slavery must be added the
slaves' own folklore and folk-say of
slavery. The patterns they reveal are folk
and regional patterns—the patterns of field
hand, house and body servant, and artisan;
the patterns of kind and cruel master or
mistress; the patterns of Southeast and
Southwest, lowland and upland, tidewater and
inland, smaller and larger plantations, and
racial mixture (including Creole and
Indian).
The narratives belong also to folk
literature. Rich not only in folk songs,
folk tales, and folk speech but also in folk
humor and poetry, crude or skilful in
dialect, uneven in tone and treatment, they
constantly reward one with earthy imagery,
salty phrase, and sensitive detail. In their
unconscious art, exhibited in many a fine
and powerful short story, they are a
contribution to the realistic writing of the
Negro. Beneath all the surface
contradictions and exaggerations, the
fantasy and flattery, they possess an
essential truth and humanity which surpasses
as it supplements history and literature.
Washington, D.C.
June 12, 1941
B.A. Botkin
Chief Editor, Writers' Unit
Library of Congress Project
1 Mr. Lomax served from June
25, 1936, to October 23, 1937, with a
ninety-day furlough beginning July 24, 1937.
According to a memorandum written by Mr.
Alsberg on March 23, 1937, Mr. Lomax was "in
charge of the collection of folklore all
over the United States for the Writers'
Project. In connection with this work he is
making recordings of Negro songs and cowboy
ballads. Though technically on the payroll
of the Survey of Historical Records, his
work is done for the Writers and the results
will make several national volumes of
folklore. The essays in the State Guides
devoted to folklore are also under his
supervision." Since 1933 Mr. Lomax has been
Honorary Curator of the Archive of American
Folk Song, Library of Congress.
2 Folklore Consultant, from
May 2 to July 31, 1938; Folklore Editor,
from August 1, 1938, to August 31, 1939.
On August 31, 1939, the Federal Writers'
Project became the Writers' Program, and the
National Technical Project in Washington was
terminated. On October 17, the first Library
of Congress Project, under the sponsorship
of the Library of Congress, was set up by
the Work Projects Administration in the
District of Columbia, to continue some of
the functions of the National Technical
Project, chiefly those concerned with books
of a regional or nationwide scope. On
February 12, 1940, the project was
reorganized along strictly conservation
lines, and on August 16 it was succeeded by
the present Library of Congress Project
(Official Project No. 165-2-26-7, Work
Project No. 540).
3
The bulk of the Virginia narratives is still
in the state office. Excerpts from these are
included in The Negro in Virginia, compiled
by Workers of the Writers' Program of the
Work Projects Administration in the State of
Virginia, Sponsored by the Hampton
Institute, Hastings House, Publishers, New
York, 1940. Other slave narratives are
published in Drums and Shadows, Survival
Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes,
Savannah Unit, Georgia Writers' Project,
Work Projects Administration, University of
Georgia Press, 1940. A composite article,
"Slaves," based on excerpts from three
interviews, was contributed by Elizabeth
Lomax to the American Stuff issue of
Direction, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1935.
