To provide work for unemployed writers during the 1930s Great Depression, the Library of Congress created the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). One of the FWP’s most interesting endeavors was “Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States.” Writers interviewed more than 2,000 former slaves, primarily residing in the South. All were at least 80 years of age and some over 100 years old.

These individuals told interviewers about their years in bondage with some relating incidents that occurred during the post Civil War Reconstruction period, 1865-1877. Historian and writer Belinda Hurmence notes the war’s end “brought virtually no improvement” to former slaves. “Uneducated and ignorant of the world outside the plantation, oppressed by the law, intimidated by night riders and Klansmen” former slaves were “abandoned to exploitation as sharecroppers.”

Written in dialect, the following are excerpts from narratives of former slaves residing in South Carolina.

FANNIE GRIFFIN, age 94: “My master was good to all the slaves, but Missy Grace [the master’s wife] was mean to us. She whip us a heap of times when we ain’t don nothin’ bad to be whipped for. When she go to whip me, she tie my wrists together with a rope an put the rope through a big staple in the ceiling and draw me up off the floor and give me a hundred lashes. I think about my old mammy heap of times now and how I’s seen her whipped, with the blood dripping off of her.”

SAVILLA BURRELL, age 83: “Old Master was the daddy of some mullato chillun. The relations with the mothers of those chillun is what give so much grief to Missus [the Masters’ wife]. The neighbors would talk about it and he [Master] would sell all them chillun away from their mothers to a trader … They sell one of Mother’s chillun once, and when she take on and cry about it, Master say, ‘Stop that sniffing there if you don’t want to get a whipping.’ She grieve and cry at night about it.”

SYLVIA CANNON, age 85: “I see ’em sell plenty of colored people away in them days, ’cause that the way white folks make money … Just stand ’em up on block about 3 feet high and speculator bid ’em off just like they was horses. Them what was bid off didn’t never say nothing either. Don’t know who bought my brothers, George and Earl … Our slaves was told if every they learned to write they’d lose the hand or arm they wrote with.”

SAM POLITE, age 93: “On Saturday night, every slave that works get peck of some corn and pea, and sometime meat…You never see any sugar, neither coffee in slavery … Every year, in Christmas month, you get four or either five yard cloth, according to how you is. Out of that, you have to make your clote [clothes]. You wears the same clote until next year. You wear it winter and summer, Sunday and every day. You don’t get no coat, but they give you shoe.”

ELIJAH GREEN, age 94: “When slaves run away and their masters catches them, in the stockade they go, where they’d be whipped every other week for a number of months. And for God’s sake, don’t let slave be catch with pencil and paper. That was a major crime. You might as well had killed your master or missus … Slaves was always buried in the night as one could not stop to do it in the day. Old boards was used to make a coffin that was blackened with shoe polish.

“One song I know I used to sing to the slaves when the master went away, but I wouldn’t be fool as to let him hear me. What I can remember is: ‘Master gone away / But darkies stay at home / The year of jubilee is come / Ane freedom will begun.'”

AMY PERRY, age 82: “The first year of Freedom, I gone to school on Mr. John, Townsend place … After peace declared, the colored people lived on cornmeal mush and salt water in the week, and mush and vinegar for Sunday. Mind you that for Sunday! I don’t see how we live, yet we is.”

ROBERT TOATLEY, age 82: “Night riders come by and drop somethin’ at your door and say, ‘I’ll just leave you somethin’ for dinner.’ Then ride off in a gallop. When you open the sack what you reckon’ in there? One time it was six darkie heads that was left at the door.”

GEORGE BRIGGS, age 88: “In Union County is where I was born and raised, and it’s where I’m going to be buried. Ain’t never left the county but once in my life and if the Lord see fittin,’ I ain’t going to leave it no more, ‘cept to reach the Promise Land. Lord, Lord, the Promise Land, that’s where I’m going when I leave Union County.”

The over 2,000 FWP slave narratives were largely ignored until the 1970s Civil Rights movement, and few — if any — are found in high school and college history textbooks. No doubt any effort to include them in public school history curriculums today would trigger the wrath of people opposed to critical race theory, a framework for examining policies and laws that have given rise to and perpetuate systemic racism.

In November 2020, the Central York School District in Pennsylvania implemented a “freeze” on a four page list of books about people of color including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. The Sesame Street town hall on racism and the award winning documentary about James Baldwin (“I Am Not Your Negro”) were also banned. After protests by students and parents (black and white) the school board reinstated the books in late September.

Too many people have long turned a blind eye to the nation’s often violent racist and sexist history. Perhaps the protest that led to rescinding the Central York School District’s book ban is a step toward recognizing that history and building a more equitable country for all Americans.

George J. Bryjak lives in Bloomingdale and is retired after 24 years of teaching sociology at the University of San Diego.

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Sources

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Belia, T. (2021) “Pennsylvania school district ends ban on list of books by or about people of color after student backlash,” September 23, The Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com

Hurmence, B.(2001) Before Freedom, When I Just Can Remember: Twenty-seven Oral Histories of Former South Carolina Slaves, John F. Blair Publishers: Winston-Salem, North Carolina

“The WPA and the Slave Narrative Collection” (accessed 2021) Library of Congress, www.loc.gov