1967/01/01 by Norman R. Yetman
Social Sciences · #Race, History, and American Society #Latin American and Latino Studies #Caribbean history, culture, and politics
paper · doi:10.2307/2711071
the Slave Narrative Collection by the Federal Writers' Project.' This group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves today stands as one of the most enduring achievements of the Writers' Project. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the Collection consists of over two thousand interviews with ex-slaves. Most of these are verbatim testimonies concerning ante-bellum slave life and the respondents' personal reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave. The Collection constitutes a unique and illuminating source of information not only about the institution of slavery but about the psychology of the enslaved as well. Aside from the large number of interviews that comprise it, the most attractive feature of the Collection is the composition of the sample of the slave population represented. Unlike previous slave narratives, which represented a skewed sample of the total slave population, the Collection achieved a high degree of representativeness and inclusiveness. The ex-slaves ranged in age from one to over fifty at the time of emancipation in 1865. Their ages were distributed as follows: