Using the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives to Study the Impact of the Great Depression‪.‬

FOR AT LEAST TWO GENERATIONS ACADEMICS HAVE BEEN REAPING THE benefits of the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Federal Writers' Project. White-collar workers employed by this program during the 1930s summarized and indexed government records and newspaper articles, compiled local histories, and interviewed men and women from all walks of life, preserving for posterity the life histories of thousands of ordinary people. (1) Folklorists, anthropologists, sociologists, theologians, human ecologists, and historians have all used these records to great advantage. (2) But for historians, one of these projects actually resulted in a paradigm shift in the scholarly discourse. The WPA workers' interviews with ex-slaves made it possible to rewrite part of the history of the antebellum South from the perspective of the slave. (3) Although the "new" histories of slavery represented a tremendous breakthrough in African American, southern, and American history, historians have not all been in agreement about how and whether to use the WPA narratives as source material. John W. Blassingame did not use them at all in his now classic study, The Slave Community (1972). In a later work, Blassingame detailed his concerns about the power dynamics of the interview process, the competence of the interviewers, and the advanced age of the informants that led to his discomfort with the narratives as sources. And although most scholars of slavery writing during and since the 1970s chose to use the narratives, they did point out that the documents were, in some ways, flawed. (4) It is partly in response to this seeming incongruity that historian Donna J. Spindel, in a recent study of history and memory, took her colleagues to task. Spindel concluded that they "allowed the potential richness of the ex-slave interviews to overshadow their weaknesses." (5)