I had a now deceased cousin, whom I called aunt, one of those  
unemployed school teachers, actually a college trained historian, who  
participated in this WPA program. Back in 1960, when I was a callow  
Echols Scholar at the University with a bent for history I talked  
with her about the WPA slave narrative project. My interest in this  
arose because, at the time, I knew an elderly white woman, Miss  
Georgia of Gloucester who, as a girl, had once owned a slave, a girl  
who slept at the foot of her bed on a pallet, and I had a friendship  
with an ancient black man, known as Old Sam, who knew the music of  
his youth, and who had been born a slave.  My cousin, then a woman in  
her 90s told me that the people who did these interviews often had  
passionate feelings — she certainly did — that the African Americans  
in the South had not only been oppressed but were in danger of losing  
200 years of their history, with the passing of the last members of  
their community who had been slaves. They saw them as men and women  
who represented the last repository of this lost history. She told me  
they were almost all acutely aware that they were white, and  
relatively privileged — they had been to some kind of college — and  
their informants were Black and had no advantages. She said the group  
with whom she worked constantly discussed this, and tried very hard  
to discover ways of interacting that would encourage trust, and would  
not convey prejudice. For instance she said that they had women  
interview women, and men interview men, if possible. She told me they  
were dedicated to getting as accurate an oral history as they  
possibly could, and saw their task as a trust, their way of partially  
making up for the terrible things their forebearers had done. Did  
they do everything correctly? I am sure they did not. Did they ask  
all the right questions? Having read some of the narratives, I know  
they did not. But I am also sure that their accounts are no less  
accurate than the anthropological oral histories that have been a  
foundation of cultural anthropology for several generations, and the  
basis for dozens, if not hundreds, of doctorates.

It is wrong, poor scholarship, and disrespectful of these  
interviewers, and their informants, to dismiss what was for many a  
labor of love and atonement.

-- Stephan


Stephan A. Schwartz
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On 6 Oct 2008, at 18:44, [log in to unmask] wrote:

> 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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