Activity 1: How authentic is the depiction of the speaker?: Reconstructing and understanding the many voices of the WPA Slave Narratives
Students will be able to think critically about the slave narratives and to understand that the slave narratives represent many voices and points of view, which are impacted by many factors and motivations.
Define point of view and speaker for your students. Ask students to consider the many points of view and speakers involved in the creation of the WPA slave narratives.
Define and discuss speaker bias and agenda. Ask students to explain the impact of bias and agenda on the creation of the WPA narratives.
When reading, it is crucial to understand the perspectives of the individuals involved in the creation of the WPA slave narratives.
Ask your students to use the following background information to make inferences and deductions about the authenticity of the WPA slave narrative excerpts provided.
1. The ex-slaves: Approximately four-thousand former slaves were interviewed for the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), representing about 4% of the still-surviving freed slaves (Musher, “The Other” 1). All participants were 80 years of age or older, and were enslaved as children. Unlike former slave Frederick Douglass who penned his own story of his experience in slavery, the men and women interviewed for the WPA project were mostly illiterate. Many of the freed slaves lived under the harsh conditions caused by the Great Depression and by Jim Crow laws. Some were afraid to be honest, including those who believed the federal writers interviewing them were relief workers determining aid distribution. (Musher, “Remembering” 1).
2. The FWP workers: Most of the federal writers conducting interviews with ex-slaves were unemployed, white, white collar workers–such as journalists, teachers, librarians, and clerks. Their interviews were informed by their own perspective, including, for some, racist beliefs in the mythology that slaves were content and that masters were kind. The majority of the interviewers were not trained historians, and they did not electronically record the interviews (McMillen 2). Often, they would ask leading questions and reconstruct dialects after the interviews.
3. The FWP state officials: In the 1970’s, historian George Rawick worked with civil rights and political activists to recover thousands of pages of interviews with formers slaves that state editors from the FWP failed to submit to the national office in Washington, D.C. Some of those interviews were left to rot in state archives and local repositories despite multiple requests for them made by FWP administrators in the Capitol because of their controversial tone or content (Musher, “Remembering” 2). In fact, as Musher explains, before submitting the narratives from Mississippi and Texas to D.C., “state editors altered the narratives to downplay masters’ abuse of their slaves and racial violence following Emancipation and, instead, to suggest a paternalistic relationship existed between slaves and their benign masters” (Musher, “The Other” 5).
4. The FWP Administrators in Washington, D.C.: The administrators included John Lomax and Sterling Brown, who had conflicting agendas in the project, resulting in differences in approaches and questions. Lomax’s interests were the ex-slaves’ “daily life, folk songs, and superstitious practices” and his interview script “shows how it led him at times to promote racial stereotypes” (Musher, “Contesting” 8). In contrast, Sterling Brown, “the son of an emancipated slave” felt the interviews should focus less on the daily lives of slaves, “but rather that they should record individuals’ responses to varying conditions of slavery and freedom” (Musher, “Contesting 9). As Musher points out, “Lomax’s interview script facilitated the project’s transition from one that sought to contest racist assumptions about slavery to one that unemployed white-collar workers could use to record nostalgically the passing away of a generation” (“Contesting” 11).