The WPA Slave Narratives are transcriptions of interviews conducted by WPA employees (usually unemployed school teachers) in the 1930s of elderly people who had been born into slavery.
I am not sure I grasp Mr. South's distinction between "second-hand oral history" and "first hand accounts." What we have is a transcription of an interview. In an ideal world, to assess its credibility and value we would want information on the interviewer, interviewee, and the survey instrument. We have some of that, but not in complete form. What we to read and analyze is a record of the notes taken by an interviewer, processed afterwards and revised. In some instances we have the original, unrevised notes as well. The WPA narratives in no simple way constitute a direct and unbiased and unmediated window into the past. The same is true, of course, of *any* primary source available to us. It is all mediated, to one degree or another, by a host of factors, including memory, ideology, assumptions, habits, and institutions.
Eye-witness testimony is notoriously unreliable, as any number of studies have demonstrated. The notion that it is somehow less biased than the conclusions of researchers who analyze other kinds of data simply does not withstand close scrutiny. Mr. South's insistence otherwise is itself an ideological position.
Law courts have their own rules of evidence, which differ by jurisdiction, among other things. U.S. jurisprudence provides one set of rules--but it does not and can not provide unmediated access to the truth, any more than can any other methodology. Legal truth is not scientific truth, nor is it historical truth.
One excellent legal scholar who meditates usefully on the distinction is John Phillips Reid. I'd recommend his jurisprudential introduction to his CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION to anyone who wants to capture the difference between what historians count as truth and what U.S. trained lawyers count as truth.
All best,
Kevin
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University
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