The total collection contains more than 10,000 typed pages representing more than 2000 interviews. Following on the renewed interest in the African-American experience of slavery (as opposed to the white view of it) engendered by The Journal of Negro History after 1916, there were several efforts to record the remembrances of living former slaves. Although some members of the Federal Writers Project were aware of Reddicks project, the FWP slave narrative collection was more directly inspired by the folklore collections of John Lomax, and was pursued by Carolyn Dillard, director of the Georgia branch of the Writers Project. A parallel project was then started in Florida with Lomaxs participation, and the effort subsequently grew to cover all of the southern (except Louisiana) and several northern states. The most productive state project, in the end, was in Arkansas. The influential historian of slavery John Blassingame has said that the collection can present a simplistic and distorted view of the plantation that is too positive. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Narrative_Collection
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 21:32:30 +0000