Slave Narrative Project

The Slave Narratives is a seventeen-volume set of a collection of over 2,300 first-hand accounts of slavery by former slaves and around 500 black and white photographs collected by the Federal Writers' Project over the course of two years (1936 to 1938). These were made accessible online by the Library of Congress when they were scanned and digitized in 2000-2001 with the support of the Citigroup Foundation. The project developed from other the WPA’s other projects which focused on the folk aspects of American life and the idea of letting ordinary people share their own life stories. Each volume focuses on a state, and volume four focuses on the life stories of more than 40 different former slaves in the state of Georgia. Each new chapter takes the reader through the point of view of the interviewer, typically starting with a sentence from the interviewee or making note of the environment, essentially setting the stage for the story. Then the story would begin, prompted or assisted by the use of different questions provided by the interviewer so that they can truly capture not only the first-hand experience of being a slave from the person being interviewed but also the different stories and experiences shared by family members and passed down. The text was then written primarily through the use of direct quotes specifically written phonetically in an attempt to match the syntax of the former slave being interviewed and read with the inflection of that speech as the interview was originally conducted orally.