Read the WPA slavery narratives with the interview room in mind

An extraordinary body of testimony

The Library of Congress’s Born in Slavery collection contains more than 2,300 accounts gathered through the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. These narratives preserve experiences and recollections of people who had lived under slavery.

They provide perspectives absent from many records created by enslavers or public officials. Their value does not require treating every transcript as an unfiltered recording of exactly what happened decades earlier.

The interview had its own history

The Library’s introduction explains the long interval between emancipation and the interviews, the age of participants, and problems involving recollection and interviewing. Many participants had experienced slavery as children.

The encounter also occurred in the segregated society of the Depression era. A transcript was shaped by questions, selection, and writing choices as well as the speaker’s memories.

Reading carefully means asking who conducted the interview and how the words reached the published page.

Do not turn one passage into a verdict

An isolated recollection should not be used to excuse slavery or to claim that one person’s account represents every enslaved person. Place it beside other testimony and records concerning the same place or subject.

If a transcript uses stylized dialect, avoid performing it as entertainment. Explain that the written form may reflect an interviewer’s choices.

The person being interviewed deserves attention as a human being with a life, relationships, and a perspective, not as a quotation selected to win a present-day argument.

A local reading exercise with care

Choose one account and make a short source note: speaker, interviewer if known, interview date, remembered location, and the topics discussed. Then list what the account supports and what it cannot establish alone.

For Pittsylvania family research, a shared place name can justify further investigation, but it does not prove a family connection. Used this way, the collection can deepen understanding while preserving uncertainty.

The goal is to listen closely, recognize the conditions under which testimony was collected, and bring more evidence into the conversation without pushing the speaker’s voice out.