Mr. Forest:
I am afraid that you do not know the history of the WPA narratives.
Very few were published while FDR was alive (i.e. The Negro in Virginia,
1940.) In fact, when a historical sociologist George P. Rawick decided to
publish the collected interviews in about 1970, he discovered that the
project was about three times larger than he had been led to believe by
NARA. The reason for this was that state directors of the project, chiefly
in the deep South, and sometimes state librarians or archivists, had been so
horrified about the critical things said by former slaves about slavery,
their masters, and the South, that they simply locked the mss. up and never
reported their existence to Washington, DC.
Thus, when John Hope Franklin published From Slavery to Freedom, first
edition, 1947, he did not have access to most of this material.
I think that the first series of the narratives, The American Slave: A
Collective Autobiography was published by Greenwood Press in 1977. I
remember pressing the library at the college where I then worked to buy the
set, which was a coup because it was quite expensive at the time.
Harold S. Forsythe
----- Original Message -----
From: "Basil Forest" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 10:21 AM
Subject: Re: Slave Narrative for WPA Project
>I am surprised that many historians writing on the slave period in America
> fail to acknowledge the existence of these narratives as evidence of the
> other
> side of slavery. I will have to reread John Hope Franklin's work to see
> if
> he mentions it.
>
> Let us not forget the possibility that slaves were conscientious and
> worked
> hard out of a sense of duty and gratitude rather than fear. I get this
> sense
> from Ira Berlin's Generations of Captivity. Moreover, three squares and
> a
> place to live is some incentive as well. The true story is obviously
> somewhere between Heaven and Hell.
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