The Slave Narratives: Part 7

 

John Beckwith, 83, of Cary, NC, former slave, in 1937. “I reckon dat I wuz ‘bout nine years old at de surrender…I wuz happy den as I thinks back of it, until dem Yankees come.”

As part of the Federal Writer’s Project during the Great Depression, the Roosevelt Administration employed scores of journalists to interview former slaves and record verbatim (and in dialect) their memories of slavery. From 1936 to 1938 about 2, 300 former slaves were interviewed, most of whom were delighted to tell about “slavery times.”  In 1941, these systematically designed interviews were published by state in a multi-volume series called The Slave Narratives.

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