Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Long Past Slavery
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Iowa City
STATE: IA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.cornellcollege.edu/academics/our-faculty/faculty-profile/index.php/show/cstewart * http://www.cornellcollege.edu/academics/our-faculty/faculty-profile/source/cstewart/2016-Faculty%20Page%20-%20CV-Stewart.pdf * https://www.newberry.org/03152017-catherine-stewart-long-past-slavery
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Lawrence University, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1989; State University of New York—Stony Brook, M.A., 1992, Ph.D., 1999.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Cornell College, Mount Vernon, IA, assistant professor, 1999-2005, associate professor, 2005-12, professor of history, 2012–, Richard and Norma Small Distinguished Professor. Adjunct instructor, State University of New York–Stony Brook, 1994-99
WRITINGS
Contributor to professional journals and other periodicals, including American Communist History, American Quarterly, Annals of Iowa, and Historian.
SIDELIGHTS
Cornell College professor of history Catherine A. Stewart “teaches courses in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. social and cultural history,” stated the contributor of a biographical sketch to the Newberry Library website. Those courses range from “the Documentary Imagination during the Great Depression, Public Memory and Public History, Work and Leisure in Modern America,” related a Cornell College website contributor, to “Reel History: The Cold War and American Film, and African American Autobiography and Film.” “Her research interests,” the Newberry Library contributor continued, “include the Federal Writers’ Ex-Slave Project, Zora Neale Hurston, public memory, and the politics of textual and visual representation.” She is the author of the monograph Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project.
In Long Past Slavery, Stewart “investigates how the racial politics of the 1930s impacted the creation and implementation of the Federal Writers’ Project,” declared Kate Stewart in Library Journal. The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) was started during the Great Depression as one of the New Deal projects meant to put authors and artists to work. One of the projects launched by the FWP was the recording of the stories of former slaves about their experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction, its aftermath. Those oral histories—which were preserved in the Library of Congress after they were collected—form an important part of the record of American history following the Civil War. However, the stories themselves have been questioned by some historians. “Historians have long debated the evidentiary value of the Federal Writers’ Project’s (FWP) ex-slave narratives as representations of slavery. In Long Past Slavery,” said Sarah K. Bowman in the Journal of Southern History. “Stewart takes a different tack, examining the production of the narratives, and the work of the FWP more broadly, as factors in the renegotiation of African American identity during the New Deal era.” “Many historians have noted that, because most of the FWP interviewers were white, African-American interviewees would have felt constrained by racial mores to downplay negative memories of slavery, resulting in rosy recollections of interracial bonhomie,” wrote David G. Cox in Reviews in History. “Nevertheless, for historians seeking to reconstruct the lived experience of the enslaved, the interviews remain a crucial, if compromised, source of evidence.”
Stewart’s monograph illuminates the politics and racism that lay behind the creation of the oral histories. “Long Past Slavery strikes out from this debate in an important new direction,” Cox explained. “Rather than approaching the FWP interviews as sources of social history, Stewart uses them to illuminate the racial politics of the 1930s…. Drawing upon admirable archival research, Stewart marshals an array of correspondence, manuscripts and memoranda to delineate the ways in which the FWP’s textual representations of black history and culture were shaped by the racial politics of its staff. Whereas the FWP’s federal directors envisaged the project as a celebration of cultural pluralism, helping to underpin a reformulated national identity, white southerners saw it as an opportunity to reinforce conservative notions of African-American racial inferiority, linked to ‘Lost Cause’ narratives of slavery as a benevolent institution and Reconstruction as an unmitigated disaster.”
Long Past Slavery shows that the full story about the collection and preservation of the oral histories of former slaves is much more complex than previously believed. “By the 1930s, most of the former slaves interviewed by employees of the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project were in their nineties; some were over one hundred years old,” Stewart explained in an essay published on the UNC Press Blog. “This last generation to bear witness to the experience of enslavement would have been slaves for twelve to fifteen years at most, and many were freed at the age of seven or eight. Their memories of childhood were memories of slavery, and their experience of slavery was that of children.” “Not surprisingly, a number of the narratives in the collection recall the kindness and generosity of ex-slaves’ former masters and speak longingly of the `good old days’ before emancipation,” Stewart declared in another UNC Press Blog contribution. “Some of these ‘faithful slave’ narratives were selected during the 1930s for circulation in southern public school districts, helping to inculcate Confederate perspectives on slavery in younger generations. When I teach about slavery in my northern college classroom, I am reminded of the long reach of southern textbooks and Confederate perspectives by occasional southern students for whom the documented brutalities and exploitative system of slavery directly challenge the [familiar] narrative.” “Formerly enslaved Americans,” said K.E. Williams in Choice, “had priorities of their own that informed whether and what they revealed or concealed.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, October, 2016, K.E. Williams, review of Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project, p. 275.
Journal of Southern History, May, 2017, Sarah K. Bowman, review of Long Past Slavery, p. 468.
Library Journal, March 15, 2016, Kate Stewart, review of Long Past Slavery, p. 126.
ONLINE
Cornell College Faculty Website, http://www.cornellcollege.edu/ (August 30, 2017), author profile.
Newberry Library, https://www.newberry.org/ (March 15, 2017), “Catherine A. Stewart, Long Past Slavery.“
Reviews in History, http://www.history.ac.uk/ (August 30, 2017), David G. Cox, review of Long Past Slavery; Catherine A. Stewart, response to Cox’s review.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (July 6, 2016), Rebecca Onion, “Is the Greatest Collection of Slave Narratives Tainted by Racism?”
UNC Press Blog, https://uncpressblog.com/ (April 20, 2016), Catherine A. Stewart, “Having an Honest Conversation about Slavery—Now and Then”; (May 25, 2016), “Looking Backward: On Memory and the Challenges of Oral History.”*
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Catherine A. StewartProfessor of HistoryDepartment of History1815 BStreetCornell CollegeIowa City, IA 52245Mount Vernon, Iowa (319) 688-0142(319) 895-4373(319) 594-6371cstewart@cornellcollege.eduAs a cultural historian specializing in American and Ethnic Studies, my work as a scholar and teacherfocuses on the politics of cultural representation and the history of race. Because I teach at a small liberal arts college that prizes interdisciplinary work and faculty collaboration, my courses regularly incorporate a wide range of historicmaterials and introduce students to historical methods (archival research, documentary, oral history) and issuessuch as public memory and commemoration, the ideological work accomplished by visual representations, and spatial conceptualization (through visits to historic sites and structures). EDUCATIONPh.D.1999State University of New York at Stony Brook, Department of HistoryDissertation: “Native Subjects: ‘Race’ and the Rise of Ethnographic Authority in the Federal Writers’ Project.”Advisors: William R. Taylor, Matthew Jacobson, Nancy Tomes, and Lawrence W. Levine.M.A.1992State University of New York at Stony Brook, Department of HistoryThesis: “Fade to Gray—From Melodrama to Masquerade: The Metatext of the Image, the Wilderness of Leisure, and the Death of Language in Soap Opera and Silent Film.”B.A.1989Lawrence University, Magna cum laudeHonors Thesis: “Hermanas de la Chingada: Mexican Women’s Gender Construct Expressed through Cultural Archetypes from the Conquest to the Twentieth Century.”TEACHING EXPERIENCEFull Professor, Department of History, Cornell College, 2012-present; Associate Professor, 2005-2012; Assistant Professor, 1999-2005Lower Level Courses:Introduction to Ethnic Studies(EST 123)The Making of Modern America(HIS 154)Public Memory and Public History(HIS 240)American Lives: African American Autobiography(HIS 255)Reel History: African Americans and Film(HIS 257)Reel History: The Cold War and American Film(HIS 257)Slavery and the Environment in a Comparative Context(HIS/ENV260)Upper Level Courses:U.S. Social History since 1940(HIS 354)African Americans in U.S. History(HIS 356)
Stewart CV 2014Page 2of 4TEACHING EXPERIENCE(CONTINUED)Upper Level Courses:Work and Leisure in Modern America (HIS 358)The Documentary Imagination during the Great Depression(HIS 364)Newberry Library Short-Term Seminar, Chicago: The Transformation of America’s Second City, 1880-1940(HIS 369)Chautauqua Series: High Brow, Low Brow, No Brow: Culture and Democracy in the U.S.(October 2006), Cornell College.Adjunct Instructor, Department of History, SUNY at Stony Brook, 1994-99Courses:The Modern Color Line(HIS/AFS 277); U.S. Urban History(HIS 319); History of American Popular Culture(HIS/Cinema Studies 326); Change and Reform in the U.S., 1877-1917(HIS 367); U.S. Social History, 1870-1970(HIS 370).Teaching Assistant, Department of History, SUNY at Stony Brook, 1990-94Courses:U.S. History,Post-Civil War to the Present(HIS 104); U.S. History, 1919 to the Present(HIS 268); The Witch and the Healer in History (HIS 316); American Constitutional Development(HIS 329); Women in U.S. History(HIS 333); Change and Reform in the U.S., 1877-1919 (HIS 367); U.S. History, Colonial to Reconstruction(HIS 369); U.S. Social History, Reconstruction to 1950(HIS 370).PUBLICATIONS AND DOCUMENTARIESBook, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project.Universityof North Carolina Press, April 25, 2016.“‘Crazyfor This Democracy’: Postwar Psychoanalysis, African American Blues Narratives, and the Lafargue Clinic.” American Quarterly65, no.2 (June 2013).Review of Eric Bennett, Workshops of Empire:Stegner, Engle and American Creative Writing during the Cold War(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), The Annals of Iowa(forthcoming).Review of Micki McElya,Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), The Historian71(2009): 614-16.ReviewofJerrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), American Communist History, Vol. 3, no. 2 (2004): 292-94.Oral History Interview with Stetson Kennedy,formerDirector of Folk Life Studies for the FWP in Florida,Beluthahatchee, FL, 2005, DVD (requested for archival deposit by the Director of the Folklife Division of the Library of Congress—forthcoming).“Imag(e)ined Communities: Portraits of the Diaspora,”Short Documentary Video,Anglo-American Media Workshop, London, England, Summer 1991.INVITED TALKSAND INTERVIEWSBook Interview with Rebecca Onion, “Is the Greatest Collection of Slave Narratives Tainted by Racism?” Slate Magazine, Slate.com, July 6, 2016.“Rewriting the History of Slavery, Long Past Slavery,” Lecture and Libations Series, Cornell College Club of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, March 16, 2016.“Feast, Flood, and Famine: Zora Neale Hurston’s Search for African American Folk Culture,” Keynote Speaker, National Endowment for the Humanities’ Big Read, AfricanAmerican Museum of Iowa, 2009.
Stewart CV 2014Page 3of 4INVITED TALKS (CONTINUED)“Representing the Race: Zora Neale Hurston and the Florida Writers' Unit,” Center for FloridaHistory, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, FL, October 2005.“Black Letters, Lives, and Racial Lines: Zora Neale Hurston’s and Langston Hughes’ Correspondence on the Color Line,”Brown Bag Lecture Series, African American Historical Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa, October 2002.CONFERENCE PAPERSAND PRESENTATIONS“Traces of the Everyday: Ephemera and Oral History,” Cornell Summer Research Institute, Cornell College, June 2016.“The New Maid: Real Stories during the Great Depression of African American Domestics and the Color Line,” Humanities and Arts Interest Group (HAIG) Lecture,Cornell College, January 2016.“The New Maid: African American Domestics and the Economics of the Color Line during the Great Depression,” Mid-America Conference on History, McKendree University, September 10-12, 2015.“Pack Your Books and Your Machetes:Interdisciplinary Practices for Place-Based Learning,” co-presenter, Colorado College’s Inaugural Symposium on Field Study, July 8-11, 2015.“‘Limitations of Life’: Black Domestics, White Womanhood, and the Economics of the Color Line during the Great Depression in Hollywood’s Imitation of Life,” Humanities and ArtsInterest Group (HAIG) Lecture,Cornell College, January 2011.Panel Chair, “Erasures,”Global Perspectives on Gender and the History of Slavery,Obermann Humanities Symposium, University of Iowa,October 13-15, 2010.“‘Crazy for This Democracy’: Psychoanalytic Theory and African American Autopathography,” American Association for the History of Medicine, Cleveland, OH, April 2009.“‘Crazy for This Democracy’: Psychoanalytic Theory and African American Autopathography,” Northeast Modern LanguageAssociation, Boston, MA, February 2009.Seminar Fellow, “Slavery: Scholarship and Public History,” Gilder Lehrman Institute and the Council of Independent Colleges Summer Seminar, Columbia University,August 9-11, 2004.“Going Native: Zora Neale Hurston’s Navigations on the Borders of Race and Class,”37thAnnual Northern Great Plains History Conference,Minneapolis, MN, October 2002.“Native Accents: Zora Neale Hurston’s Ethnographic Navigations,”Black History Workshop,“Women in the Making of the Black World,” University of Houston, March 2001.HONORS AND AWARDSRichard and Norma Small Distinguished Professor, Cornell College, 2015-17.Campbell McConnellResearch Grant, Cornell College, 2013-14.Sabbatical Grant, CornellCollege, 2012-13.Dimensions’ Center for the Science and Culture of Healthcare Research Grant, Cornell, 2009.Environmental Studies Travel Grant for Course Development, Cornell Mellon Workshop, Gerace Research Centre, San Salvador, Bahamas, July 2009.Campbell McConnell Travel Grant, Cornell, 2009.Campbell McConnell Fellowship, Cornell, 2005-06.FaCE Grant for Sabbatical Planning, AssociatedColleges of the Midwest, 2005-06.President’s Award to Distinguished Doctoral Students, SUNY at Stony Brook, 1999.Madeline Fusco Women’s Fellowship, SUNY at Stony Brook, April 1999.Distinction, Ph.D. Oral Examinations, SUNY at Stony Brook, 1993.Best Teaching Assistant Award, Department of History, SUNY at Stony Brook, 1992-93.
Stewart CV 2014Page 4of 4HONORS AND AWARDS(CONTINUED)Distinction, M.A. Oral Examinations, SUNY at Stony Brook, 1991.Teaching Assistantship, Department of History, SUNY at Stony Brook, 1990-94.SELECTED SERVICEFaculty Advisor, Cornell Fellows Program, 2016-18.Faculty Advisor, “Public History and the Digital Humanities: Creating a Visual-Audio Tour for Cornell’s Historic Campus,”Cornell Summer Research Institute, Cornell College, May –July 2016.Faculty Advisor, Cornell Fellowship in Museum Studies, African American Museum of Iowa, Cedar Rapids, Iowa (2007; 2010; 2011; 2016).Member, Diversity Committee, Cornell College, 2013-14.Humanities Evaluator, Iowa City Book Festival, Humanities Iowa, 2012.Member, Literary Arts CenterCommittee, Cornell College, 2011-12.Chair, Ethnic Studies Program, Cornell College, 2004-05; 2006-09; 2011. Member: 1999-2016.Chair, History Department, Cornell College, 2006-09.Member, Herbert Hoover Presidential LibraryAssociation’s Book Award and Travel Grant Committee, 2007-08.Executive Member, Associated Colleges of the Midwest Minority Concerns Committee, 2001-04.Faculty Advisor, Sister for Sister (Student Organization for Women of Color), Cornell College, 2000-03.
Catherine A. Stewart, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers' Project
Catherine A. Stewart
Catherine A. Stewart
A Meet the Author Program
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
6 pm
Ruggles Hall
Free and open to the public; no registration required.
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
MEET THE AUTHOR
Listen to the audio of this program.
From 1936 to 1939, the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project collected life stories from more than 2,300 former African American slaves. These narratives are now widely used as a source to understand the lived experience of those who made the transition from slavery to freedom. But in this examination of the project and its legacy, Catherine A. Stewart shows it was the product of competing visions of the past, as ex-slaves’ memories of bondage, emancipation, and life as freedpeople were used to craft arguments for and against full inclusion of African Americans in society. Dr. Stewart demonstrates how project administrators, such as the folklorist John Lomax; white and black interviewers, including Zora Neale Hurston; and the ex-slaves themselves fought to shape understandings of black identity. She reveals that some influential project employees were also members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, intent on memorializing the Old South. Dr. Stewart places ex-slaves at the center of debates over black citizenship to illuminate African Americans’ struggle to redefine their past as well as their future in the face of formidable opposition.
By shedding new light on a critically important episode in the history of race, remembrance, and the legacy of slavery in the United States, Dr. Stewart compels readers to rethink a prominent archive used to construct that history.
After her talk, Dr. Stewart will sign copies of the book in the Newberry lobby. Long Past Slavery will be available for purchase in the Newberry Bookstore. Your purchase helps to support the Newberry Library, and this program’s featured author.
Download a PDF flyer for this program to post and distribute.
Catherine A. Stewart is the Richard and Norma Small Distinguished Professor at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where she teaches courses in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. social and cultural history, such as the Documentary Imagination during the Great Depression, Public Memory and Public History, Work and Leisure in Modern America, Reel History: The Cold War and American Film, and African American Autobiography and Film. Her research interests include the Federal Writers’ Ex-Slave Project, Zora Neale Hurston, public memory, and the politics of textual and visual representation. She received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1999. She has presented her work at the Northeast Modern Languages Association, the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the University of Houston’s Black History Workshop. Her book, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) examines how 1930s debates over race and the legacy of slavery shaped representations of African American identity in the ex-slave narratives collected under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. She is currently at work on her next book on race and domestic service during the Great Depression.
This event is part of programming related to the Newberry exhibition Photographing Freetowns: African-American Kentucky through the Lens of Helen Balfour Morrison, 1935-1946, which will be open through April 14, 2017. Explore slave narratives in the Newberry collection, and other collection items related to the exhibition.
Your generosity is vital in keeping the library’s programs, exhibitions, and reading rooms free and accessible to everyone. Make a donation today.
Catherine Stewart
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Catherine Stewart
Catherine Stewart
Professor of History
(319) 895-4373
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Biographical Sketch
Catherine A. Stewart is the Richard and Norma Small Distinguished Professor at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where she teaches courses in late nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. social and cultural history, such as the Documentary Imagination during the Great Depression, Public Memory and Public History, Work and Leisure in Modern America, Reel History: The Cold War and American Film, and African American Autobiography and Film. Her research interests include the Federal Writers’ Ex-Slave Project, Zora Neale Hurston, public memory, and the politics of textual and visual representation. She received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1999. She has presented her work at the Northeast Modern Languages Association, the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the University of Houston’s Black History Workshop. Most recently, her work on African Americans’ blues narratives, psychoanalysis, and the Lafargue Clinic appeared in American Quarterly. Her book, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press, 2016) examines how 1930s debates over race and the legacy of slavery shaped representations of African American identity in the ex-slave narratives collected under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. She is currently at work on her next book on race and domestic service during the Great Depression.
Link to Curriculum Vitae
2016-Faculty Page - CV-Stewart
Academic History
Ph.D. in History, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1999. Dissertation Advisors: William R. Taylor, Matthew Jacobson, Nancy Tomes, and Lawrence W. Levine.
M.A. in History, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1992.
B.A. in History, Lawrence University, Magna cum laude, 1989.
Publications
http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/13020.html
Courses Taught
Introduction to Ethnic Studies (EST 123)
The Making of Modern America (HIS 154)
Public Memory and Public History (HIS 240)
American Lives: African American Autobiography (HIS 255)
Reel History: African Americans and Film (HIS 257)
Reel History: The Cold War and American Film (HIS 257)
Slavery and the Environment in a Comparative Context in the Bahamas (HIS/ENV 260)
U.S. Social History since 1940 (HIS 354)
African Americans in U.S. History (HIS 356)
Work and Leisure in Modern America (HIS 358)
The Documentary Imagination during the Great Depression (HIS 364)
Newberry Library Seminar, Chicago: The Transformation of America’s Second City, 1880-1940, in Chicago (HIS 369)
Talks/Lectures
“Feast, Flood, and Famine: Zora Neale Hurston’s Search for African American Folk Culture,” Keynote Speaker, National Endowment for the Humanities’ Big Read, African American Museum of Iowa, 2009.
“Representing the Race: Zora Neale Hurston and the Florida Writers' Unit,” Center for Florida History, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, FL, October 2005.
“Black Letters, Lives, and Racial Lines: Zora Neale Hurston’s and Langston Hughes’ Correspondence on the Color Line,” Brown Bag Lecture Series, African American Historical Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa, October 2002.
Stewart, Catherine A.: Long Past Slavery:
Representing Race in the Federal Writers' Project
Kate Stewart
Library Journal.
141.5 (Mar. 15, 2016): p126.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Stewart, Catherine A. Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers' Project. Univ. of North Carolina.
Apr. 2016. 372p. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781469626260. pap. $29.95; ebk. ISBN 9781469626277. SOC SCI
Although the oral histories collected by the Federal Writers' Ex-Slave Project transformed our understanding of the
history of slavery, few scholars have examined the context in which they were created. Stewart (history, Cornell Coll.)
investigates how the racial politics of the 1930s impacted the creation and implementation of the Federal Writers'
Project (FWP) in general and its focus on collecting black folklore specifically. Editors and writers debated the
authenticity of the narratives, the use of dialect, and who was qualified to interview subjects. Stewart gives particular
focus to folklorists Sterling Brown, John Lomax, and Zora Neale Hurston, who played major roles in the project but
with considerable controversy. Stewart's detailed analysis of voluminous correspondence and comments on drafts
illuminates the high stakes of the FWP to rewrite American history and on the precipice of a global war, reshape future
race relations. While some now dismiss many of the discussions owing to the power white interviewers had over their
black subjects, Stewart asks us to read between the lines. VERDICT While Stewart's use of jargon may turn off general
readers, this work is essential for those interested in African American history and the Great Depression.--Kate Stewart,
American Folklife Ctr., Washington, DC
Stewart, Kate
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Stewart, Kate. "Stewart, Catherine A.: Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers' Project." Library
Journal, 15 Mar. 2016, p. 126. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA446521206&it=r&asid=a9585a03dbd9741985305dd621825c80.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A446521206
8/13/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502650657233 2/2
Stewart, Catherine A.: Long past slavery:
representing race in the Federal Writers' Project
K.E. Williams
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
54.2 (Oct. 2016): p275.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Stewart, Catherine A. Long past slavery: representing race in the Federal Writers' Project. North Carolina, 2016. 353p
bibl index afp ISBN 9781469626260 pbk, $29.95; ISBN 9781469626277 ebook, $28.99
54-0864
El85
2015-17267
CIP
This excellent, penetrating study presents much-needed information about the Ex-Slave Project's creation. Stewart's
compelling study of the contexts of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) collection of over 2,300 African
Americans' personal stories of bondage offers critical historical insight into fights over the history of chattel slavery.
Examining Federal Writers' Project records, Stewart (history, Cornell College) deftly peels back the layers of the
competing racial agendas that gave shape to the WPA's ex-slave narratives and subsequent histories of slavery.
Ethnographers battled over how African American history and culture should be collected and presented. Federal and
state workers wrangled over resources and for editorial control over the histories developed. Whether they were
slaveholders' descendants who needed to present slavery as a benevolent institution, or descendants of enslaved people
who believed an honest but redemptive history of slavery's horrors was required to make a case for black people's
entitlement to citizenship rights, interviewers clashed with each other, federal directors, and their informants. Formerly
enslaved Americans had priorities of their own that informed whether and what they revealed or concealed about their
stories. An important book deserving of a wide readership. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Most
levels/libraries.--K. E. Williams, Wayne State University
Williams, K.E.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Williams, K.E. "Stewart, Catherine A.: Long past slavery: representing race in the Federal Writers' Project." CHOICE:
Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2016, p. 275. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479869084&it=r&asid=f76befc9c369e863c66a0115739ea227.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479869084
Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ ProjectPrinter-friendly versionPDF version
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Book:
Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project
Catherine A. Stewart
Chapel Hill, CT, The University of North Carolina Press, 2016, ISBN: 9781469626260; 368pp.; Price: £27.95
Reviewer:
Dr David G. Cox
University of Southampton
Citation:
Dr David G. Cox, review of Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project, (review no. 2020)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2020
Date accessed: 13 August, 2017
See Author's Response
Of all the Federal Arts Projects set up as part of the New Deal, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) was, in the words of one contemporary, the ‘ugly duckling’ (p. 35). As Catherine Stewart notes in her fascinating book, the American public looked on with scepticism as unemployed writers, academics and sundry white-collar ‘boondogglers’ were removed from relief rolls and set to work producing copy on the history and culture of the United States. One of the many branches of the FWP was the Ex-Slave Project. Conceived in 1937, this initiative saw scores of interviewers dispatched across 17 states to gather life histories from the rapidly diminishing number of formerly enslaved African Americans. Two years later, over 2,300 interviews were sent to the Library of Congress, where they remain a monument to oral history and its ability to rescue the voices of the marginalised.
The New Social Historians of the 1970s were quick to grasp the value of the Ex-Slave Project; indeed, when Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll was published in 1974, readers were treated to over 600 references to FWP interviews.(1) Yet, as primary material, the interviews are far from unproblematic. In 1940, Benjamin Botkin, the FWP’s recently appointed folklore editor, composed a memorandum adumbrating the shortcomings of the interviews as historical evidence: the interviewers, he warned, were amateur, their informants senescent and, in translating recollections from word to page, ‘much of the scent as well as the sense’ was lost (p. 237). Passing the buck somewhat, the Harvard-educated academic decided that their historical value was a Gordian knot best ‘left to the scholars’ to untangle (p. 237). In the eight decades since Botkin penned this memorandum, however, critical consensus on the interviews has remained elusive. Many historians have noted that, because most of the FWP interviewers were white, African-American interviewees would have felt constrained by racial mores to downplay negative memories of slavery, resulting in rosy recollections of interracial bonhomie. Nevertheless, for historians seeking to reconstruct the lived experience of the enslaved, the interviews remain a crucial, if compromised, source of evidence.
Long Past Slavery strikes out from this debate in an important new direction. Rather than approaching the FWP interviews as sources of social history, Stewart uses them to illuminate the racial politics of the 1930s. The FWP, she argues, should be approached as a site of contested meaning, within which competing parties struggled to inscribe divergent representations of African-American identity onto the nation’s consciousness. According to Stewart, debate over the place of African Americans within the body politic intensified during the 1930s as the mass migration of black southerners to northern cities made the so-called ‘Negro Problem’ a national, rather than regional, concern. Drawing upon admirable archival research, Stewart marshals an array of correspondence, manuscripts and memoranda to delineate the ways in which the FWP’s textual representations of black history and culture were shaped by the racial politics of its staff. Whereas the FWP’s federal directors envisaged the project as a celebration of cultural pluralism, helping to underpin a reformulated national identity, white southerners saw it as an opportunity to reinforce conservative notions of African-American racial inferiority, linked to ‘Lost Cause’ narratives of slavery as a benevolent institution and Reconstruction as an unmitigated disaster. Conversely, Stewart argues, the FWP afforded an unprecedented opportunity for African Americans to undermine the cultural apparatus of white supremacy. Black FWP staff sought to align the project with the cause of racial assimilation; countering negative portrayals of African Americans, they emphasised the political capacity, civic commitment, and economic nous of the formerly enslaved. At the same time, the interviewees grasped the rare opportunity to make their voices heard, refuting saccharine southern nostalgia, even if only indirectly. Stewart concludes that although the egalitarian potential of the project was ‘never fully realized’ (p. 9) it ‘helped to permanently destabilize a white monopoly on representations of black history, culture, and identity’ (p. 121). The organisation of the book mirrors the contrapuntal nature of Stewart’s argument. The first half details the genesis of the Ex-Slave Project and the tug-of-war between federal and state editors over the form and content of the interviews, while the latter half deals with the counter-narrative created by both black writers and African American interviewees.
The seeds of the Ex-Slave Project were sown during work on the American Guide Series, an FWP enterprise begun in 1935 to boost tourism and capitalise on the growing commercial popularity of folk culture. As federal relief administrator Harry Hopkins put it, the guides would document ‘the infinite variety and rich folklore of the American scene’ (p. 37). Guidebooks for every state, it was hoped, would foster an inclusive ‘Americanism in the best sense of the word’ (p. 38). Unsurprisingly, southerners had different ideas, painting dialect portraits of ignorant African Americans in order to reinscribe racial stereotypes underpinning Jim Crow. Two factors strengthened the southern hand: firstly, they were able to invoke the traditional assumption (discussed recently by K. Stephen Prince) that only southerners could authoritatively represent the South, thus excluding northerners from southern FWP offices; secondly, commercial pressures acted insistently to push representations of African-American folk culture towards the kind of exoticism long-favoured by ‘local color’ authors.(2) The federal office of the FWP pushed for standardisation and sought to correct white southern misrepresentations, establishing the Office on Negro Affairs under the directorship of Howard University Professor Sterling A. Brown. However, although Brown bristled at ‘the unsympathetic attitude and the tone of amused condescension’ (p. 56) permeating white southern discourse on black folk culture, state directors were able, for the most part, to resist what they decried as ‘the Washington attitude’ (p. 52).
To furnish material for their Guide, Florida staffers conducted a number of interviews with former slaves; the FWP’s federal office was so impressed by the results that, in 1937, with an eye on publication, it instructed 16 other states to follow Florida’s lead, giving birth to the Ex-Slave Project. Initially conceived as a way of gathering information about slavery, the project, as Stewart demonstrates, took an increasingly ethnographic turn, focusing on the culture and character of the informants. Once again, federal directors found themselves at odds with their counterparts in state offices. Whereas liberals like Elizabeth and Alan Lomax reflected that ‘for the first time in the history of literature […] a poor and despised people are being given a chance to speak their piece’, southerners saw yet another opportunity to bulwark Jim Crow (p. 68). The fact that, as Stewart shows, a number of southern FWP staff were also members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) speaks volumes. Again and again, the Office on Negro Affairs returned manuscripts to state directors with complaints that African Americans were being portrayed as superstitious, ignorant, and unfit for political responsibility. An especially prickly issue was the ubiquitous use of dialect to represent black speech: drawing on the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr and Toni Morrison, Stewart argues that dialect writing was a visual representation of difference hand-in-glove with depictions of racial inferiority. Although the federal office was conscious of these problems, it felt constrained by commercial considerations, assuming that, to a white reading public accustomed to a certain way of representing blackness, standard-English depictions of African-American speech would be unpalatable. Ultimately, commerce won the day: state directors enthusiastically dispatched exotic and entertaining interviews to the federal office; conscientious but dull interviews fell by the wayside. Racism and capitalism made for easy bedfellows.
Throughout the Ex-Slave Project, however, African-American writers struggled to present readers with an alternative representation of black history and identity. Stewart demonstrates that most black FWP employees were middle class, well-educated assimilationists who shared with Sterling Brown the conviction that interviewees ‘should be shown in relation, rather than as a thing apart’ (p. 56). Eschewing cumbersome dialect, these writers emphasized the political sophistication and economic achievements of their informants. In place of comical ‘Old Time Negroes’ reminiscing fondly about slavery and spinning tales of the supernatural, black staff presented civic-minded businessmen and former politicians whose recollections of slavery were far from pleasant. As Stewart asserts, these writers were well aware that wresting the right to represent black culture from white supremacists was ‘an essential political step toward equality’ (p. 22). Yet this was no easy task: for a start, African Americans were lamentably underrepresented within the FWP, and, when they could find employment, custom and law meant that they had to work from home or in segregated Negro Writers’ Units (NWUs). Furthermore, African Americans had to struggle constantly against the accusation of ‘Negro bias,’ the notion that black writers were too personally invested to treat the history of slavery and emancipation objectively, or to accurately portray the folk culture of the formerly enslaved (an idea reinforced by the shibboleth that blacks were emotional rather than rational).
Using Florida as a case study, Stewart describes in detail the ways in which these tensions played out. In Jacksonville, racial hierarchy manifested in the FWP accommodations: white writers were sequestered in the plush environs of the city’s new Exchange building, whilst the Florida NWU operated from a working soup kitchen. It was in this inauspicious locale that the NWU assembled The Florida Negro, envisioned as a special Ex-Slave Project volume. Beset by accusations of ‘Negro bias’, the NWU struggled nonetheless to present a positive picture of African-American identity, one that would encapsulate the bootstraps ideology of its leading lights. Stewart does a good job elucidating the rhetorical techniques employed by the NWU to validate its interview material in the eyes of the sceptical state editor, Carita Corse. A future UDC member, Corse scoffed at both criticisms of slavery and recollections of black agency during Reconstruction.
Stewart devotes two chapters to the racial attitudes and influence of a pair of folklorists involved with the Ex-Slave Project, John Lomax and Zora Neale Hurston. As folklore editor, Lomax was hugely influential in determining the direction of the project. Styling himself as an intrepid ‘hunter’ of authentic black folk songs, Lomax’s search for ‘pure’ music – unblemished by (white) mass culture – led him into some jaw-droppingly exploitative situations. Taking his recording equipment into segregated penitentiaries, which he imagined as incubators of hermetic black culture, Lomax had wardens force reluctant inmates to sing for him. Collecting music from prisoners had an added benefit: they were unable to seek remuneration. Lomax lined his pockets under the cover of ethnography, presenting individual compositions as collective products of the folk and publishing them under his own name. (Historians of folklore may see this as piquant illustration of D. G. Kelley’s observation: ‘“folk” has no meaning without “modern”’.(3)) As Stewart explains, Lomax’s notion of authenticity was bad news for black writers on the Ex-Slave Project; he saw these middle class assimilationists as conduits for mass culture, inimical to the purity of African-American folklore. Lomax, interested in difference not similarity, steered the project away from accounts of black achievement, towards ‘the note of weird’ (p. 109).
Stewart’s chapter on Zora Neale Hurston is fascinating. An author and folklorist of immense personal charisma, Hurston certainly enlivened Florida’s FWP, turning in peerless prose at the last minute and breaking racial etiquette by smoking insouciantly in the offices of the Exchange Building. Hurston was initially envisaged as director of Florida’s NWU, but her ultimate contribution was minimal. As Stewart notes, Hurston’s work was ‘all but eviscerated’ (p. 172) from the final manuscript of The Florida Negro. Indeed, her slight involvement with the FWP is reflected in the fact that it is dealt with in only five of the chapter’s 32 pages. Not only was Hurston’s prose-poetry unsuited to the scientific aspirations of the project’s editors but, crucially, her portrayal of folk culture as vital and evolving was also anathema to those, like Lomax, to whom folklore was the calcified remnant of a disappearing past. But there was an affinity between Hurston and Lomax, which Stewart might have brought into greater relief: both writers essentialised race and racialised culture. In searching for the essence of blackness, Hurston diverged from African American assimilationists like Sterling Brown who sought to privilege class over race. However, as Michael Sobel and others have demonstrated, cultural forms had crossed and re-crossed the permeable boundaries of ethnicity for so long and with such frequency that any search for ‘Negroness’ (to use Hurston’s term) was bound to be chimerical.(4) Neither Lomax nor Hurston discovered ‘Negroness’, but both helped to invent it. This is an important point (and one germane to debates over cultural appropriation), because, as K. Anthony Appiah has repeatedly warned, race may be a scientifically discredited social construct, but essentialised notions of culture threaten to smuggle it back into public discourse.(5)
The final chapter seeks to reclaim the agency of those formerly enslaved African Americans interviewed under the aegis of the FWP. Making intelligent use of the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr and Gladys-Marie Fry, Stewart argues that the interviews should be seen as oral performances in which interviewees harnessed the African American tradition of ‘signifying’ in order to create ‘counternarratives of black identity and experience’ (p. 199). In the face of white interviewers asking leading questions (‘Were your Master and Mistress good to you?’) the formerly enslaved were able to employ indirection and other rhetorical techniques in order to undermine Lost Cause myths (p. 213). Although this is a fascinating thesis (and one that is flagged throughout the book), the chapter might have been more fully developed. To support her claims, Stewart draws upon only the Georgia and Florida ex-slave narratives: it would be interesting to see what turns up in a wider selection of interviews. Similar work has already been done by Mia Bay, who used the FWP narratives to survey the racial thought of the enslaved.(6) Another cause for pause is signifying’s essential slipperiness: although Stewart insists that it is ‘high time’ historians ‘recovered the evidence’ that interviewees ‘intentionally left behind’ (p. 228), pinning down the definitive meanings of their evasive replies is like nailing jelly to a wall. Unlike the bulk of the book, which is built upon archival research, the argument in this chapter hinges upon imported literary theory and will convince some readers more than others.
Stewart’s thesis will certainly appeal to historians seeking to recover subaltern agency, but we need to be careful not to let the existence of counter-narratives obscure the relationships of power within which they were created.(7) The FWP may well have helped to ‘destabilize’ white cultural hegemony but, as Stewart herself reminds us, African Americans remained shamefully underrepresented on the FWP staff; the Office on Negro Affairs was ‘often sadly ineffectual’ (p. 48); the manuscript for The Florida Negro remained unpublished for nearly six decades and the signifying of African American interviewees went unremarked for almost a century. Those employing the concepts of James C. Scott (as Stewart does) should remember that the weapons of the weak are fashioned to work within extant structures of power, they are not designed to bring them crashing down. These considerations aside, Stewart provides the most comprehensive account yet published of the Ex-Slave Project. This is a superbly researched, engaging, and insightful book, which deserves to be read by all social historians thinking of using the FWP interviews as evidence, as well as any scholars interested in American racial politics. Indispensable.
Notes
Norman R. Yetman, ‘Ex-Slave interviews and the historiography of slavery’, American Quarterly, 36 (1984), 199.Back to (1)
See K. Stephen Prince, Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016).Back to (2)
D. G. Kelley, ‘Notes on deconstructing “The Folk”’, The American Historical Review, 97 (1992), 1402.Back to (13)
See Michael Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, NJ, 1987).Back to (4)
See Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, ed. K. Anthony Appiah, and Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ, 1996).Back to (5)
See Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-–1925 (Oxford, 2000).Back to (6)
See Patrick Rael, ‘The New Black Intellectual History’, Reviews in American History, 29 (2001).Back to (7)
Author's Response
Catherine A. Stewart
Posted: Thu, 10/11/2016 - 15:30
I was delighted to receive Dr. David G. Cox’s insightful and substantive review of my book, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project. I would like to thank Dr. Cox, Deputy Editor Danny Millum, and the Editorial Board of Reviews in History for providing such a thorough and prompt review.
While it feels a bit churlish to quibble with any part of such of a generous and thoughtful review, in keeping with the spirit of collegial dialogue encouraged by the Institute of Historical Research’s Reviews in History, there are three points in Dr. Cox’s review to which I would like to briefly respond.
Cox writes appreciatively of my case study of the Florida Project provided in chapter seven, which examines African-American employees’ (including Zora Neale Hurston’s) experience working for the Federal Writers’ Project in a segregated Negro Writers’ Unit. However, he mischaracterizes Florida State Director Carita Doggett Corse’s response to these writers’ submissions. Citing my documentation that she became a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy at the close of the Project, Cox infers erroneously that ‘Corse scoffed at both criticisms of slavery and recollections of black agency during Reconstruction’. To the contrary, as I point out, Corse was an early advocate for the establishment of black writers’ units that would ensure employment and also greatly facilitate the collection of black folk culture and material pertaining to African Americans in Florida. ‘Unlike many other state directors who dragged their feet when it came to hiring African Americans, Corse quickly hired the maximum number of workers authorized by the federal office’ (p. 177). It was Corse who recognized the value of collecting ex-slave narratives and who helped spur the creation of the Ex-Slave Project by sending them to the Federal Office, for which she received commendation from the Federal Writers Project (FWP)’s Folklore Editor John Lomax ‘for being the first to open up … this field of investigation’ (p. 175). It was also Corse’s idea to hire the folklorist Zora Neale Hurston to direct a separate black writers’ unit; she wrote to Associate Director George Cronyn urging him to authorize ‘a State-Wide Negro Project under Zora Hurston’ (p. 176). While Corse was, according to one fellow employee, ‘a typical southern conservative’, she recognized the value of black history and culture and sought to hire the best known writer in the field of black folk culture as supervisor of Florida’s Negro Writers’ Unit. She was also willing to break, on rare occasion, the strictures pertaining to racial segregation. Hurston was invited to visit the office headquarters where only white employees were permitted to work, and Corse warned the staff in advance that they would have to make ‘allowances for Zora’, as one employee later recalled, ‘and sure enough, Zora came, and Zora smoked, and we made allowances’ (p. 179). I felt it was important to document, for the first time in the scholarship on the WPA Slave Narratives, that certain employees who worked for the FWP were also members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, including at least one state director, and that dedication to the ‘Lost Cause’ often shaped their approach to the Ex-Slave Project in significant ways. And yet, I also note that membership by itself is not sufficient to determine an individual’s perspective on race relations or, in the case of FWP employees, to predict their approach to the collection of material relating to African-American history.
Dr. Cox expresses a wish that my examination of the folklorists John Lomax and Zora Neale Hurston might have ‘brought into greater relief’ the ‘affinity’ they shared in their approach to black folk culture. ‘Both writers,’ Cox states, ‘essentialised race and racialised culture’. The malleability of cultural forms and their hybridity, Cox asserts, meant that ‘any search for “Negroness” (to use Hurston’s term) was bound to be chimerical’. However, this glosses over the fact that distinct African-American cultural forms and traditions were forged during slavery and continued long after owing in part to racial segregation and the continued disfranchisement of black citizens, as many black writers from Frederick Douglass to Hurston to Ralph Ellison have noted. These writers were not subscribing to ‘essentialised notions of culture’, but recognizing how cultural forms express and reflect historical experiences and outlooks shaped by social constructions of ‘race’ through political, social, economic, legal, and even violent means. While Hurston, as Cox astutely suggests, at times romanticized black folk culture as the wellspring of African-American identity, Hurston’s celebration of black folk culture was animated by a very different agenda from Lomax’s, one that aimed to document black folk’s full humanity and equal capacity as opposed to one invested in portrayals of black primitivism and racial inferiority.
This brings me to Dr. Cox’s critical discussion of my approach to reading and interpreting the ex-slave narratives, elucidated in chapter eight, where I examine them for evidence of the rhetorical strategies former slaves employed when addressing and responding to interviewers from the FWP. Cox praises my ‘intelligent use of the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gladys-Marie Fry’ to argue ‘that the narratives should be seen as oral performances in which interviewees harnessed the African American tradition of “signifying” in order to create’ their own counter-narratives of black history, experience, and identity. However, he feels the chapter could ‘have been more fully developed’ if I had gone beyond the narratives from Florida and Georgia to see ‘what turns up in a wider selection of interviews’. I intentionally limited the scope of my discussion to these states as a means of more thoroughly grounding what is arguably the most theoretical aspect of my work in the archival research and historical context provided here and elsewhere in the book on these particular state projects as case studies. I found many other examples of interviewees’ use of humor, indirection, and figurative language in my reading across the collection, but I felt readers were more likely to embrace a cultural studies approach to textual interpretation if it was firmly situated within the historical context of how this project was carried out in specific states. It is my hope that other scholars and students interested in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narrative collection will try out my approach in reading and re-reading other interviews from the 2,300-plus available in print and also online at the Library of Congress’s American Memory Website ‘Born in Slavery’, to test the methodology.
Cox is not entirely persuaded by this aspect of my argument; noting signifying’s ‘essential slipperiness’ he asserts that ‘pinning down the definitive meanings of their evasive replies is like nailing jelly to a wall’. I would have hoped for an analogy a little more viscous than jelly! Cox follows up with a criticism that ‘Unlike the bulk of the book, which is built on archival research, the argument in this chapter hinges upon imported literary theory and will convince some readers more than others’. I am somewhat perplexed by the phrase ‘imported literary theory,’ as relevant theory helps to inform good scholarship and often makes new discoveries possible. The concept of signifying, the creative use of language to say one thing while implying another, is an oral tradition whose nativity lies within the black vernacular and which was documented and named by Hurston herself, as a professionally-trained ethnographer.
While my book offers a new approach to reading the WPA narratives, it builds on work in this collection by previous historians, most notably Lawrence Levine’s use of the narratives in Black Culture and Black Consciousness to ‘recreate the voices and consciousness of the slaves and freedmen who left few if any written sources behind them’.(1a) I completely agree with Dr. Cox’s cautionary note, by way of James C. Scott, that ‘we need to be careful not to let the existence of counter-narratives obscure the relationships of power within which they were created’. Indeed, the evidence I uncover and present of the methods African-American interviewers and ex-slaves employed to create their own narratives of black history and identity cannot be understood apart from the structures of unequal power relations within which they were produced, as my book aims to elucidate.
Many thanks to Dr. Cox for his illuminating review and to Reviews in History for this rare opportunity to respond.
Notes
Lawrence W. Levine, ‘The folklore of industrial society: popular culture and its audiences’, AHR Forum, The American Historical Review, 97 (1992), 1369.Back to (1a)
Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project. By Catherine A. Stewart. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. xviii, 353. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2626-0.)
Historians have long debated the evidentiary value of the Federal Writers’ Project’s (FWP) ex-slave narratives as representations of slavery. In Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project, Catherine A. Stewart takes a different tack, examining the production of the narratives, and the work of the FWP more broadly, as factors in the renegotiation of African American identity during the New Deal era. Conflict over how to depict African Americans’ past and their present circumstances, Stewart argues, formed a crucial element in the ongoing national debate over African Americans’ place in the nation.
On the one hand, FWP staff members (especially at the state and local levels) used African American folklore and the stories told by the formerly enslaved to portray slavery as benevolent and African Americans as primitive and exotic. Stewart devotes a chapter to the FWP’s American Guides, detailing the series’s lack of attention to African American culture and racial progress. Another chapter explores the Ex-Slave Project, arguing that the questions white interviewers asked of former slaves, their methods of transcribing informants’ answers, and their narrative interpretation of those responses amounted to “a type of literary minstrelsy” and thereby “reinforced notions of racial difference” (p. 65). Stewart then narrows the focus to John Lomax, the folklore director of the FWP, using his commercially driven folklore collection—he described himself as a "ballad hunter”—to elucidate the racial condescension at the heart of much ethnographic practice in the 1930s (p. 93).
The second half of Long Past Slavery attends to how African Americans responded to these attempts to write them out of the body politic. As Stewart demonstrates, using Georgia’s and Florida’s projects as examples, African Americans fought against discriminatory hiring practices within the FWP, faced accusations that their folklore material was biased, and approached their work on the Ex-Slave Project with a discourse of racial uplift, aiming to “add ballast to arguments for racial equality and the full rights of citizenship” (p. 177). A chapter on Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic work provides a counterpoint to the chapter on Lomax. Hurston used her status as a participant- observer to showcase the adaptability of African American folk culture, countering white ethnographic views that relegated it (and its practitioners) to an unchanging past. Stewart’s final chapter argues that the former slaves being interviewed—largely by white interviewers invested in a nostalgic vision of the Old South—drew on the African American oral tradition of signifying and “created their own counternarratives of black identity and experience” (p. 199).
Stewart relies in part on the unpublished ex-slave narratives and on the publications of the FWP to make her case, but she also extensively mines the internal documentation of the FWP (including telling correspondence between state and federal directors), as well as letters of John Lomax and Zora Neale Hurston. Long Past Slavery also deploys the scholarly literature on topics such as the history of ethnography, of folklore, of memory of slavery, and of the Civil War to good effect.
Stewart contends that this history “reclaims ex-slaves’ storytelling as public performance” (p. 230). Yet the book dedicates little space to examining how both these performances, and the larger field of racial representation in the FWP, were in fact public. Further consideration of the public’s reception of these materials might strengthen Stewart’s ar gument for their centrality in the national debate over African American identity.
Scholars and graduate students interested in the New Deal, cultural memory, ethnography, the legacies of slavery, and African American history will find in Long Past Slavery a richly detailed new take on the work of the Federal Writers’ Project.
Columbus State University
Sarah K. Bowman
Long Past Slavery
Representing Race in the Federal Writers' Project
By Catherine A. Stewart
Long Past Slavery View Inside
372 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 10 halftones, notes, bibl., index
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-2626-0
Published: April 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-2627-7
Published: February 2016
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Awards & distinctions
A 2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
From 1936 to 1939, the New Deal’s Federal Writers' Project collected life stories from more than 2,300 former African American slaves. These narratives are now widely used as a source to understand the lived experience of those who made the transition from slavery to freedom. But in this examination of the project and its legacy, Catherine A. Stewart shows it was the product of competing visions of the past, as ex-slaves' memories of bondage, emancipation, and life as freedpeople were used to craft arguments for and against full inclusion of African Americans in society. Stewart demonstrates how project administrators, such as the folklorist John Lomax; white and black interviewers, including Zora Neale Hurston; and the ex-slaves themselves fought to shape understandings of black identity. She reveals that some influential project employees were also members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, intent on memorializing the Old South. Stewart places ex-slaves at the center of debates over black citizenship to illuminate African Americans’ struggle to redefine their past as well as their future in the face of formidable opposition.
By shedding new light on a critically important episode in the history of race, remembrance, and the legacy of slavery in the United States, Stewart compels readers to rethink a prominent archive used to construct that history.
About the Author
Catherine A. Stewart is professor of history at Cornell College.
For more information about Catherine A. Stewart, visit the Author Page.
Reviews
"A compelling read which will provide an invaluable contribution to scholarship around the Federal Writers' Project and for those interested in the construction and representation of competing historical memories of race."--Slavery & Abolition
“Enters the interdisciplinary realm by offering a nuanced examination of how the fields of sociology, anthropology, history, and folklore intersected with New Deal politics. . . . Essential reading for anyone hoping to make use of [the WPA Ex-Slave Interviews] archive.”--Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"Essential for those interested in African American history and the Great Depression."--Library Journal
“This excellent, penetrating study presents much-needed information about the Ex-Slave Project’s creation. . . . An important book deserving of wide readership. Highly recommended.”--CHOICE
“This is a superbly researched, engaging, and insightful book, which deserves to be read by all social historians . . . as well as any scholars interested in American racial politics. Indispensable.”--Institute of Historical Research
“Scholars and graduate students interested in the New Deal, cultural memory, ethnography, the legacies of slavery, and African American history will find in Long Past Slavery a richly detailed take on the work of the Federal Writers’ Project.”--Journal of Southern History
Multimedia & Links
Read: Rebecca Onion at Slate discusses Stewart's book in the article "Is the Greatest Collection of Slave Narratives Tainted by Racism?" (7/6/2016)
Read: Stewart's guest blog post: "Looking Backward: On Memory and the Challenges of Oral History"" (4/20/3016)
Read: Stewart's guest blog post: "Having an Honest Conversation about Slavery---Now and Then" (4/20/3016)
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Catherine A. Stewart: Having an Honest Conversation about Slavery—Now and Then
Posted by Connie Chia on 20 April 2016, 10:36 am
Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers' Project, by Catherine A. StewartWe welcome to the blog a guest post by Catherine A. Stewart, author of Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project. From 1936 to 1939, the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project collected life stories from more than 2,300 former African American slaves. These narratives are now widely used as a source to understand the lived experience of those who made the transition from slavery to freedom. But in this examination of the project and its legacy, Stewart shows it was the product of competing visions of the past, as ex-slaves’ memories of bondage, emancipation, and life as freedpeople were used to craft arguments for and against full inclusion of African Americans in society. By shedding new light on a critically important episode in the history of race, remembrance, and the legacy of slavery in the United States, Stewart compels readers to rethink a prominent archive used to construct that history.
In today’s post, Stewart argues for the ongoing need for a much-avoided and uncomfortable conversation for many Americans today: the history of slavery in the United States.
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Recent public conversations have revealed how ignorant most Americans remain about slavery, and also how resistant many are to hearing the truth about it. Reporting from the frontlines of this battle over Civil War memory are those doing public history: the educators, interpreters, and docents at historic sites, who engage a large number of visitors exhibiting a wide spectrum of assumptions and ideological perspectives—many of them mistaken—about the relationships of slaveholders and the enslaved.
Former tour guide Margaret Biser discusses the misconceptions that she encountered about slavery during her six years working at a historic site on Twitter as @AfAmHistFail. And, in the Web series “Ask a Slave,” which has become a cult phenomenon, actress Azie Dungey plays the role of a fictional house slave, Lizzie Mae, maid to first lady Martha Washington. Dungey created the series based on her own experiences portraying the life of Caroline Branham, one of the slaves owned by the Washingtons at Mount Vernon. The questions Lizzie Mae fields in the series are based on actual questions posed by tourists, and they suggest that the American public is largely clueless about the history and institution of slavery. As Dungey explains the show’s rationale, “I am not talking about slavery . . . I’m talking about modern racism, and I’m talking about modern ignorance.”
Yet despite Americans’ illiteracy about slavery, they clearly want to have a conversation about it, if the sold-out symposium this past September sponsored by Slate and GWU, “How to Talk Honestly About Slavery,” is any indication. Media attention to racial inequality and violence against black Americans and public awareness raised by Black Lives Matter and other social justice organizations have made race and the continuing legacy of slavery a topic of national conversation, one even political leaders have joined. In a much-discussed podcast interview in June 2015, President Obama observed that “the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination, in almost every institution of our lives . . . casts a long shadow and that is still part of our DNA that is passed on and we are not cured of it.”
But this current conversation is not the first time Americans and political leaders have attempted to talk honestly about slavery. In the 1930s, the federal government began an unprecedented and revolutionary discussion of slavery and its legacy by hiring unemployed writers to interview the last living generation of African Americans to have experienced slavery. The Federal Writers’ Ex-Slave Project sparked conversations between direct descendants of Confederate slaveholders and former slaves. This project, with its radical objective of recovering and reclaiming African Americans’ experiences with slavery and freedom, along with its failings and limitations, has much to tell us about why conversations about the past of slavery remain so difficult for Americans today.
The FWP’s Ex-Slave Project marks a historic moment in which the federal government both invited and enabled African Americans (as informants, interviewers, and in one case, as a federal director of the Project) to talk about black identity, but it also created a space in which they could address Jim Crow. The Ex-Slave Project set in motion a series of profoundly earthshaking and revelatory encounters as black and white Americans from different regions, educational backgrounds, and economic classes spoke to each other across the racial divide.
But the compromising circumstances of the color line in 1930s America made it almost impossible for blacks and whites to speak to one another freely about slavery. At all levels of the project, white employees’ varied assumptions about black identity and the historical legacy of slavery came into contact, and often conflict, with African American perspectives. Although the project did employ a number of African Americans as interviewers—most notably in the states of Virginia, Louisiana, and Florida, all of which established racially segregated Negro Writers’ Units—the majority of FWP interviewers involved in collecting these oral histories were southern whites.
There were many factors that shaped these conversations and their primary outcome, the ex-slave narratives, but one of the most surprising discoveries I made in my research was Confederate involvement in the project. A number of FWP employees working on the Ex-Slave Project were also members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the organization founded in 1894 to memorialize Confederate heroes but also to enshrine the Confederate narrative in public memory. The narrative of the “Lost Cause” asserted, then and now, that the Civil War, or the “War between the States” as pro-Confederates called it, was about states’ rights and southern independence—not slavery—even as it idealized slavery as a mutually beneficial system based on benevolent white paternalism and loyal black dependents. Elite southern women played a central role in crafting and popularizing the Lost Cause as history and sought public vindication for the Confederacy by strategically rewriting the historical narrative in textbooks for schoolchildren and sponsoring essay contests and college scholarships. These women were brilliant strategists who recognized how powerful a role education could play in shaping future generations’ views of the nation’s past.
The 1930s saw a resurgence of UDC initiatives to sway public opinion on southern race relations. In 1934, the UDC began publishing its own magazine; a lengthy article from 1936, the year the Ex-Slave Project began, defended the Ku Klux Klan and its methods as necessary for the protection of the South from African Americans and “Negro rule.” Back in 1911, the UDC’s historian general, Mildred Rutherford, had urged members to engage in the work of historical production. Answering this call over the next three decades, many members wrote and published biographies of famous Confederate leaders, along with numerous essays on antebellum life and culture emphasizing the loving relationships between slaveholders and their devoted slaves. UDC members worked on the Ex-Slave Project as interviewers, editors, and in one case, as a state director for the FWP.
Not surprisingly, a number of the narratives in the collection recall the kindness and generosity of ex-slaves’ former masters and speak longingly of the “good old days” before emancipation. Some of these “faithful slave” narratives were selected during the 1930s for circulation in southern public school districts, helping to inculcate Confederate perspectives on slavery in younger generations. When I teach about slavery in my northern college classroom, I am reminded of the long reach of southern textbooks and Confederate perspectives by occasional southern students for whom the documented brutalities and exploitative system of slavery directly challenge the narrative familiar to them of benevolent masters and fortunate slaves.
In the heated arguments that take place today over slavery, the Confederate flag, and continuing racial inequality, it seems as if the Union may have won the Civil War but lost an important battle over how slavery would be remembered. There have been surprising and encouraging steps taken to draw the distinction between a truly national narrative of the history of slavery and Confederate nostalgia for a mythic Southern heritage, most notably with southern states’ decisions to remove the Confederate flag from capitol grounds and state license plates. But the battle continues over which version of the history of slavery will stand in school texts, as the 2010 controversy over depictions of slavery in Texas textbooks—or as I call them, “Tex-books,” for leaving out essential elements—attests. Like the federal directors of the Ex-Slave Project, textbook publishers hope to strike an uneasy compromise between historic fact and Confederate mythology. The Texas Board of Education has been joined by other conservative school board councils in Colorado and Wisconsin also seeking to alter the public school curriculum by excising American leaders and movements for social justice, with the aim of schooling children in a quiet, unquestioning form of patriotism. Fortunately, these attempts have been met with the very forms of public discussion and protest they intend to quell.
We need to keep talking to each other about our nation’s history and we need to keep conversing honestly about slavery. Otherwise, the legacy of that past will continue to directly shape and inform our nation’s future.
Catherine A. Stewart is professor of history at Cornell College. Her book Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project will be published this month.
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Catherine A. Stewart: Looking Backward: On Memory and the Challenges of Oral History
Posted by Connie Chia on 25 May 2016, 10:50 am
Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers' Project, by Catherine A. Stewart
We welcome to the blog a guest post by Catherine A. Stewart, author of Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project. From 1936 to 1939, the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project collected life stories from more than 2,300 former African American slaves. These narratives are now widely used as a source to understand the lived experience of those who made the transition from slavery to freedom. But in this examination of the project and its legacy, Stewart shows it was the product of competing visions of the past, as ex-slaves’ memories of bondage, emancipation, and life as freedpeople were used to craft arguments for and against full inclusion of African Americans in society. By shedding new light on a critically important episode in the history of race, remembrance, and the legacy of slavery in the United States, Stewart compels readers to rethink a prominent archive used to construct that history.
In a previous post, Stewart addressed the ongoing need for conversation about slavery in America’s history. In today’s post, she recounts her experiences with oral histories both personal and professional.
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Looking Backward: On Memory and the Challenges of Oral History
In memory of Stetson Kennedy
My mother and her only sibling, my aunt, are losing their memories. Though their short-term memory has all but disappeared, their shared memories of childhood still remain vivid. One of their neurologists described the brain’s storage of memory and the onset of dementia as a file cabinet, with the most recently filed folders disappearing first, and the ones stored long ago as the last to go.
As a historian interested in public and private memories of slavery and the Civil War, this image has helped me reflect on the memories of elderly ex-slaves, whose memories and the story of collecting them through oral history interviews are at the heart of my book, Long Past Slavery. By the 1930s, most of the former slaves interviewed by employees of the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project were in their nineties; some were over one hundred years old. This last generation to bear witness to the experience of enslavement would have been slaves for twelve to fifteen years at most, and many were freed at the age of seven or eight. Their memories of childhood were memories of slavery, and their experience of slavery was that of children.
A childhood game my mother and aunt still recall with pleasure was one they invented called “People Riddles.” In the dark, lying across from each other in their twin beds in their shared bedroom, after my grandmother had turned out the lights and forbidden further talking, they would whisper clues about the friends and acquaintances they both knew, telling signs that would identify the person to her equally observant sister: “This person rocks back in his chair in school,” my aunt would state; “Billy Hawking,” my mom would answer with glee. Doing oral history is a bit like playing “People Riddles,” but backwards.You know the person’s identity, but you look for tell-tale signs and clues to help you understand and evaluate the stories they tell you, and if you’re wise, you also observe how your subject is seen through eyes other than yours, refracted through the perceptions of those who know your subject better and closer and more fiercely than you ever will.
During my research, in the hopes of gaining further insight into the Florida Writers’ Project of the WPA, the relationship between white and black employees on this New Deal project, and a former project employee, the writer Zora Neale Hurston, I sought an oral history interview with Hurston’s former colleague, the folklorist, author, and activist Stetson Kennedy, with encouragement from the Director of the Center for Florida History at Florida Southern College, Mike Denham. I wrote Mr. Kennedy a formal letter, and received his invitation to visit him at his home, Beluthahatchee, in St. Johns County, Florida. On my arrival in St. Augustine, the eighty-nine year old Mr. Kennedy declined to meet with me until I had been screened by his fiancée, sixty-five-year-old Sandra Parks (they would wed in 2006). Of course, both he and she were too polite and too kind to put it that way; rather, I was encouraged to speak with her and then we’d see about arranging the interview. (This vetting may have been the result of the generous Mr. Kennedy’s encounter with the unscrupulous authors of Freakonomics, although Kennedy maintained his customary sense of wry humor about the affair.) What seemed like an impediment to my objective was a mitzvah instead.
Ms. Parks proved to be an invaluable local informant who not only put me up in her guest room, but arranged my interview with Mr. Kennedy, along with individual meetings with local experts on Hurston and African American history in St. Augustine. Ms. Parks proved that the advice given in the 1930s to Federal Writers’ Project employees for interviewing local informants is still relevant to the practice of conducting oral history research today. Without her extensive and impressive connections, along with her advice on how to approach various informants (don’t arrive empty-handed, and be prepared to socialize over lengthy meals while they make up their minds about your trustworthiness), and the gifts she provided me with to smooth the way, I don’t think I would have been granted the rare opportunity to spend several days with Stetson Kennedy, and the privilege of using his personal archival collection at Beluthahatchee.
Ms. Parks, a former city commissioner, human rights activist, and the owner of Anastasia Books, took me on a tour of St. Augustine that included the house Zora Neale Hurston rented while she taught temporarily at Florida State Normal and Industrial Institute, and the former site of the college grounds. Ms. Parks had her own fascinating stories to tell of growing up in segregated St. Augustine, and of the time Hurston came into her father’s record store to purchase a Billie Holiday recording.
For me to prove my mettle to Ms. Parks, she insisted that I dress up in her eighteenth-century British women’s costume and march in St. Augustine’s parade with the other historical re-enactors in the annual “Night of Illumination” that commemorates the British occupation of St. Augustine from 1763-1784. During this parade, I met a woman from south Florida who travels around the South in order to participate as a Confederate widow in Civil War re-enactments. As we marched, I smiled and waved to the tourists, and watched as her scowl intensified (proving Tony Horwitz’s point in Confederates in the Attic that farbs—“far be it from authentic”—like me are anathema to those who consider themselves hardcore “living historians”).
The following day I drove to Stetson Kennedy’s house (on the outskirts of Jacksonville), which has been designated as a historic site; Beluthahatchee is the name Kennedy gave his lakeside home in honor of Hurston’s definition that refers to a Shangri-La, a mythical place of forgiveness “where all unpleasant doings and sayings are forgotten” (Hurston, Go Gator and Muddy the Water, edited by Pamela Bordelon). Here Kennedy conducted his political campaign as a write-in candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1950 on the platform of “total equality.” Woody Guthrie also stayed at Beluthahatchee as a guest of Kennedy’s, writing songs and working on his autobiographical novel, Seeds of Man.
I took Mr. Kennedy out to breakfast, where I dined on grits for the first time. Afterwards, back at Beluthahatchee, I began videotaping my interview with Mr. Kennedy. When he became tired, he handed over boxes of his own archival materials on Hurston and the Florida Project for me to peruse while he napped. I also got to browse through the collection of unpublished songs Guthrie had composed during his stay at Belutahatchee. In addition to the oral history Mr. Kennedy provided, he generously allowed me to go through the archival papers he had not yet deposited in any library collection. (After his death in 2011 they became part of the collection at the University of Florida’s P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History.) He even insisted that I use his Walgreens senior citizen copy card so that I could xerox relevant documents for only four cents a page. On a day when he could not meet with me as planned, Kennedy told me he would leave the door to Beluthahatchee open, so I could spend more time digging into his files. When I arrived, the front door had been left literally wide open, welcoming me in, despite Kennedy’s absence.
Mr. Kennedy also arranged for us to have a private tour of the Clara White Mission and Museum located in downtown Jacksonville. The Mission is still in operation today, providing meals and advice for 400-500 people daily. During the Great Depression, the Mission, while operating as a soup kitchen and social service center, was where the employees of Florida’s segregated Negro Writers’ Unit (N.W.U.) worked during the tenure of the FWP. As we drove into Jacksonville, Kennedy showed me the office building where he and the rest of the Florida Project’s white employees worked, about a mile from the location of the Mission. As he recalled more memories from those days, he told me that Hurston was the only black employee who ever set foot in their building, aside from the African American man who came to pick up the salary checks for the N.W.U.
The tour of the Clara White Museum provided a fascinating glimpse into other aspects of African American history in Florida. The museum began operating informally during the 1880s as a soup kitchen under the direction of Clara White, and was legally incorporated as a Mission house in 1904. Her daughter, Dr. Eartha White, bought the current building in 1932 and named it in honor of her mother. The Mission provided housing for a number of former slaves, as well as material, spiritual, and cultural sustenance to the black community of Jacksonville. Music lessons were offered to local children free of charge, and a member of Duke Ellington’s band donated his walnut pump organ for this purpose. Eartha White had sung and toured with the first black opera company in the 1890s, called the Oriental America Opera Company, directed by John Rosamond Johnson. White also managed a Negro baseball team during World War II. The Mission’s Museum also had on display a number of photographs taken by E. L. Weems, one of the first professional African American photographers in Jacksonville, whose work (over 10,000 negatives) is archived in Atlanta.
“Pull over!” Kennedy shouted, as we drove away from the Mission, pointing ahead at a historic Elks Lodge. “That’s where I gave my losing campaign speech!”
I saw Stetson Kennedy through the multiple lenses of various important people in his life—including his fiancée and future wife Ms. Parks, his long-standing, long-suffering housekeeper Marina, and Jilly-fish, the woman he considered to be an adopted daughter—along with my direct experience of him. And I learned that without love—not hero-worship or adulation, but love—of one’s subject in all his or her complexities, there can be no true understanding. Steadfast attention and close observation are a form of love that provide the key to “People Riddles,” just as they offer the best method for ameliorating the increasingly difficult puzzle of dementia. As Toni Morrison writes, “Facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.”
Catherine A. Stewart is professor of history at Cornell College. Her book Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project is now available.
July 6 2016 5:30 AM
Is the Greatest Collection of Slave Narratives Tainted by Racism?
In the 1930s, the federal government sent (mostly white) interviewers to learn about slavery from former slaves. Can we trust the stories they brought back?
By Rebecca Onion
Henry Robinson, ex-slave.
Henry Robinson, ex-slave.
Library of Congress
When Josephine Anderson, a formerly enslaved Floridian, was visited by a white government interviewer in the fall of 1937, she told him a ghost story. Anderson described to Jules Frost a “white man” who walked alongside her as she traversed the railroad tracks one morning. “When I walk slow he walk slow, an when I stop, he stop, never oncet lookin roun,” the transcript of Anderson’s interview, rendered in dialect, reads. “My feets make a noise on de cinders tween de rails, but he doan make a mite o’ noise.” Anderson asked the man—who she declared to Frost to be a “hant”—to go away, by saying, “Lookee here, Mister, I jes an old colored woman, an I knows my place, an I wisht you wouldn’t walk wid me counta what folks might say.” The man went away, as bidden.
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Rebecca Onion is a Slate staff writer and the author of Innocent Experiments.
Why would Anderson tell a visiting researcher a ghost story? Was the tale a simple bit of folklore, passed on without motive? Or was it, as historian Catherine Stewart argues in her new book Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project, a way for Anderson to comment on race relations in Jim Crow Florida—a means for a black interviewee to make an argument about the unwelcome presence of a white interviewer in her home, and to point out the danger she perceived in his presence, all while preserving a mask of civility and giving the interviewer what he had asked for? “While Federal Writers’ Project interviewers like Frost were engaged in writing down African American ghost stories,” Stewart writes, “former slaves such as Josephine Anderson were conjuring up tales about power and racial identities.”
One of our largest surviving bodies of testimony about slavery are the 2,300 Depression-era oral histories of elderly ex-slaves, gathered by workers like Frost, who were employed by the federal government as part of the Works Progress Administration. The collection has inspired methodological debate ever since the interviews became available to scholars in the middle of the last century. As many historians have noted, a deep power imbalance often complicated the relationship between white interviewers and black interviewees. In the most extreme situations, interviewers were descendants of the same families that had held interviewees as slaves. And in the Jim Crow South, the presence of any white interviewer could make the informants rightfully nervous. Records of the interviews show that some interviewers didn’t explain their presence, leaving the people whose houses they were visiting to arrive at their own conclusions about the visitors’ intentions.
Betty Bormer, ex-slave, Ft. Worth.
Betty Bormer, ex-slave, Ft. Worth, Texas.
Library of Congress
Despite all of these caveats, the narratives have had great value for historians of slavery. “Initially when scholars first started to really engage with this collection, around the 1960s and 1970s, it really helped them rewrite and correct the traditional understanding of the history of slavery, which had been dominated for many decades by apologists for slavery and defenders of the institution,” Stewart told me. While the nature of the evidence has lead some scholars to refrain from using it—historian Walter Johnson, in his book Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, wrote that he didn’t tap WPA narratives in part because he believed the circumstances of the interviews to be “inhibiting”—many have incorporated the narratives into their writing, albeit with proper caution.
In her book, which is a history of the making of the WPA narratives, Stewart chooses to look at the complete institutional and cultural context of their production. She finds that WPA interviewers and their editors wrangled over how much the ex-slave interviewees should be asked about slavery, how much they could be trusted to remember the events of slavery correctly, and how their observations should be presented. The story of the production of the WPA narratives is, in itself, a telling history of the state of race relations in the 1930s.
The story of the WPA narratives is, in itself, a telling history of race relations in the 1930s.
One of Stewart’s major findings: It mattered—a lot—who the interviewers were and who was editing the text they produced. At the federal level, Sterling A. Brown, a black poet and professor of English at Howard University, was appointed editor for Negro Affairs with the Federal Writers Project and given some power to comment on the black-related materials that the project produced. And there were scattered groups of black interviewers, in Virginia, Louisiana, and Florida, where segregated Negro Writers’ Units were briefly established, hiring out-of-work writers and other professionals—including, in Florida, trained anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston.
This, Stewart argues, was revolutionary; at least for a short period of time, and in a scattered handful of places, there were black people building up a corpus of black history, and being paid by the federal government to do so. “This project was really sort of a step forward, for African-Americans to be invited to participate in the creation of the historical record of the African-American experience, when so often they had been left out of those conversations about the meaning of black identity, black citizenship, and slavery,” Stewart said, calling the project “radical.” Yet this was not a utopian advance by any means; the black interviewers were “the last hired and usually the first to be fired when budget cuts occurred,” Stewart writes, and “their presence did not guarantee that their voices would be recognized or heard.”
Brown, and the small groups of black interviewers in three states, was working within a larger white culture that wanted very particular things from black culture. During the 1920s and 1930s, white folklorists and writers observing the wave of black people moving north in the Great Migration wailed over the loss. Thomas Nelson Page wrote as early as 1904: “That the ‘old-time Negro’ is passing away is one of the common sayings all over the South … he will leave a gap which can hardly be filled.” The white rush to collect “pure, authentic” black expression, which hit the worlds of folklore, literature, and music in the interwar years, was actually a reflection of the racism of the time. Often, “pure and authentically black” came to mean Southern, rural, humble, superstitious, and uneducated.
Anderson & Minerva Edwards, ex-slaves, Marshall.
Anderson and Minerva Edwards, ex-slaves.
Library of Congress
Nor was this kind of racist commodification confined to the South. Northern intelligentsia and literati were just as guilty. Stewart’s chapter on folklorist John Lomax, and the way he shaped and appropriated the music and career of Huddie Ledbetter, or Leadbelly, using what Stewart calls “stealth, coercion, and domination,” is infuriating. In marketing his music, Lomax “depicted Ledbetter as a black man of uncontrolled primitive impulses whose talent was harnessed only through his pledged loyalty to Lomax and his son Alan,” Stewart writes. Lomax copyrighted recordings of many of the folksongs he “found” in his travels in the South, profiting at the expense of the music’s performers and creators. With the exception of Brown, the white federal-level directors who shaped the project of gathering ex-slave narratives seemed to be looking for the equivalent of Leadbelly when evaluating prospective interviewees, seeking a “natural” or “primitive” type of black elder, who would offer diverting entertainment in the form of folk stories.
The 75th anniversary of the Civil War, celebrated during the Depression, also affected the climate that WPA-funded interviewers worked in. “For southern whites nostalgic for the antebellum era,” Stewart writes, mourning the loss of the “old-time negro” “was code for the disappearance of a generation who accepted their place at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.” White communities in the South held “Old Slave Days,” bringing in ex-slaves to be put on display. Stewart identifies several WPA interviewers who were members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The narratives these UDC interviewers collected, “featuring stories of slaves who preferred to remain in bondage out of love and fealty to former masters,” were of the type that were later circulated as curriculum in the Florida public school system, reinforcing myths about the Confederacy increasingly popular in the decade that produced Gone With the Wind.
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Given this cultural climate, informants like Josephine Anderson found ways to satisfy white interviewers. “Ex-slaves were very skilled navigators of Southern mores and Southern customs, and speaking with whites,” Stewart told me. “Based upon leading questions, they could very often surmise what their listeners were hoping to hear, in terms of their testimony about slavery.” Zora Neale Hurston wrote about black strategies of conversational resistance in her 1935 book Mules and Men:
The Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.
Stewart observes that many narratives gathered by white interviewers for the WPA show evidence of this “feather-bed resistance.” Interviewees found ways to tell stories that white interlocutors might find objectionable, through signifying: a way of telling the truth indirectly, through symbolic expression, euphemism, humor, and metaphor.
Comparing ex-slave narratives gathered by black interviewers in Florida with those gathered by white interviewers in Georgia (where four employees of the FWP were also members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy), Stewart finds many instances of such hidden truths, recorded in collaboration with black interviewers and unwittingly by white interviewers. James Bolton, interviewed by a white worker in Athens, Georgia, told this story about whippings:
My employer—I means, my marster, never ’lowed no overseer to whup none of his niggers! Marster done all the whuppin’ on our plantation hisself. He never did make no big bruises and he never drawed no blood, but he sho’ could burn ’em up with that lash! Niggers on our plantation was whupped for laziness mostly. Next to that, whuppings was for steelin’ eggs and chickens. They fed us good and plenty but a nigger is jus’ bound to pick up chicken and eggs effen he kin, no matter how much he done eat! He jus’ can’t help it. Effen a nigger ain’s busy he gwine to git into mischief!
In this passage, Bolton wrapped a plain truth about a slaveholder’s violence—“he sho’ could burn ‘em up with that lash”—in humor and stereotype. The white listener, hoping to hear a story about paternalist slaveholders who cared for “their people,” would be attuned to the part of the testimony that praised the slaveholder for keeping the duty of whipping to himself, and might nod along with Bolton’s references to light-fingered slaves. Meanwhile, Bolton paints a picture of the slaveholder’s sadism, planted there inside the story, for people who were looking at the tale from a certain angle.
Annie Little, ex-slave, Waco.
Annie Little, ex-slave, Waco, Texas.
Library of Congress
In contrast to the kind of story Bolton told, interviewees speaking to black interviewers more commonly shared stories of cruelty and resistance and were open in describing the joy they felt when slavery ended. Speaking to Adella Dixon in Georgia, Berry Clay described his father’s conflicted reaction to being made into an overseer, which meant that he needed to punish his fellow slaves. “[Clay’s father] was too loyal to his color to assist in making their lives more unhappy,” Dixon reported Clay saying. “His method of carrying out orders and yet keeping a clear conscience was unique—the slave was taken to the woods where he was supposedly laid upon a log and severely beaten … [the slave would] stand to one side and … emit loud cries which were accompanied by hard blows on the log.”
While black interviewers recorded these kinds of testimonies about life in slavery, there was a conscious effort, at the federal level, to swing interviewers toward the folkloric and away from the controversial personal histories of enslavement. In 1937, Stewart finds, Lomax, then the WPA’s national editor on folkways and folk culture, redirected Ex-Slave Project interviewers to try to find out more about black folk customs and folk tales. While the information gleaned from this approach has been immensely useful for latter-day researchers trying to write histories of these aspects of black culture, Lomax privileged these stories over the ex-slaves’ assessments of slavery as an institution, preferring interviews about (as he wrote to the Georgia staff in directing their work) “the stories current at that time, the gossip of their associates, the small incidents of farm and home life, etc.”
“Pure and authentically black” came to mean Southern, rural, humble, superstitious, and uneducated.
White Americans of the 1930s were quite familiar with a particular genre of minstrelsy and plantation literature, like the Joel Chandler Harris “Uncle Remus” stories, which perpetuated stereotypes about black people while supposedly reporting on black folk culture. Under Lomax’s direction, white interviewers steeped in this ambient racism misjudged and misrepresented the stories their interviewees told them. “Interviewers unfamiliar with African American oral traditions often diminished their import,” Stewart writes, “representing the ex-slaves’ figurative language and metaphorical tales of the supernatural as a positivistic and literal embodiment of the naiveté and superstitious tendencies of black folk.” Interviewers were asked to write up their observations of the interviewees right after their encounters with the elderly informants and were asked to record whatever seemed “typical”—a directive, Stewart writes, that “invited observations that reinforced the most stereotypical images.”
The project leaders’ interest in “colorful” stories offered by black informants also resulted in the most distinctive characteristic of the narratives, to modern eyes: the painful dialect. Looking at correspondence between state and federal directors, Stewart traces the many decisions made about rendering black speech on the page. In correspondence between state and federal directors, Stewart found that white Southern directors spun out “their own racialized explanations for black folk speech. And they came up with a number of explanations for why they feel that ex-slave informants are slurring their words, or speaking differently, or leaving endings off certain words.” Stewart points out that in some instances these ways of speaking were “part of kind of a Southern regional dialect, much more than they are any kind of indication of a racialized identity.” But in their discussions about dialect, white personnel would hypothesize about the connection between this kind of speaking and a supposedly ingrained laziness.
Julia Williams Wadsworth.
Julia Williams Wadsworth.
Library of Congress
The oral histories black interviewers submitted differed in style as well as in content, rarely using dialect and taking care to show respect to their interviewees. In Florida, the members of the Negro Writers’ Unit introduced informants with descriptions meant to testify to their excellent memories (Rachel Austin’s interview with centenarian Luke Towns included this description: “Mr. Towns has been noted during his lifetime for having a remarkable memory and has many times publicly delivered orations from many of Shakespeare’s works”) and their persistence and character (Martin Richardson’s interview with Lindsey Moore was titled “An Ex-Slave Who Was Resourceful”). These stood in contrast to white interviewers’ introductions of ex-slaves, in which they often depicted their elderly informants as guileless objects of humor.
Black interviewers faced co-workers and supervisors who second-guessed their methods and their objectivity. They were accused of having “Negro bias”—a concept stemming from the racist idea that black people had an ingrained tendency toward emotionalism and also tended to lie and dissemble. “Whether whites attributed blacks’ tendency toward untruth to the forces of biology or environment,” Stewart writes, “their steadfast belief in this ‘racial’ characteristic made it very difficult for African Americans to be believed on any subject, least of all one as full of import as the institution of slavery.”
In Virginia, Eudora Ramsay Richardson, the state director, refused to believe a story that Roscoe Lewis, the director of that state’s Negro Writers Unit (and a professor at the Hampton Institute), recorded during an interview with ex-slave Henrietta King. King told Lewis that she had taken some candy at age 8 or 9 and that her slaveholder had punished her by holding her head under a rocking chair while she whipped her. The incident had resulted in a crushed jawbone and permanent disfigurement. (King said the violence gave her “a false face. …What chilluns laugh at an’ babies gits to cryin’ at when dey sees me.”) Disbelieving Lewis’ account, Richardson went to King’s home to fact-check it, thinking it was a “gross exaggeration.” She found instead that “[King] looks exactly as Mr. Lewis describes her and she told me, almost word for word the story that Mr. Lewis relates.”
White interviewers’ introductions of ex-slaves often depicted their elderly informants as guileless objects of humor.
Despite receiving confirmation in this particular case, Richardson continued to believe that Lewis was too credulous when it came to the stories of what she called “old Negros” who were “creatures of fine imagination who like to tell stories after a manner that will be pleasing to [an] audience.” It took a supposedly objective (white) editor like Richardson—who defended herself in letters to the federal directors of the project as “a liberal Southerner really!”—to see the truth of things. Richardson eventually had an all-white staff fact-check all of the material that the state’s black interviewers produced.
Brown, too, had his editorial suggestions challenged. Brown, Stewart writes, “tried to steer workers away from making bald assumptions about black character” based on their observations in the field. The Alabama state director (and member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy) Myrtle Miles complained to a higher-up after receiving such a critique from Brown: “It is still my feeling that the general criticism by your Negro editor is biased … I believe Alabamians understand the Alabama Negro and the general Negro situation in Alabama better than a critic whose life has been spent in another section of the country however studious, however learned he may be.”
Old Aunt Julia Ann Jackson, age 102.
Old Aunt Julia Ann Jackson, age 102.
Library of Congress
Whatever truths Brown and the black writers in the Negro Writers’ Units were able to slide into the WPA writings about slavery and discrimination, against the will of resistant gatekeepers like Miles and Richardson, were hard-won and risky. In the late 1930s, an anti-Roosevelt faction in Congress investigated the cultural projects of the WPA with an eye to defunding those that might be deemed “Communist.” The Federal Writers’ Project writings by black writers on racial discrimination, including Sterling Brown’s chapter in the WPA guide to Washington, D.C., on the history of racial discrimination in the city, came under scrutiny. When the Writers’ Project was turned over to state control as of 1939 as a result of these hearings, some state-published books (like The Negro in Virginia, which, Stewart writes, “was largely the result of the contributions of a talented Negro Writers’ Unit directed by Roscoe Lewis”) managed to retain a relatively honest point of view about slavery. But other states, like Georgia, when set free from federal oversight, published nostalgia-tinged histories full of myths about plantation life.
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This was fascinating and interesting, but also extremely depressing as it's overhung with such pervasive skepticism and accusations of racism when it came to the WPA's project. To capture the narratives and stories of the formerly enslaved. More...
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Together, the thousands of WPA-produced ex-slave narratives comprise one of the most fascinating sets of historical documents in American history. They’re wrapped in layers of complexity, telling stories about slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and the Depression. As Stewart’s book makes clear, some of the narratives, read at face value by wishfully thinking whites looking for historical absolution, have served to buttress Lost Cause mythology about good old “slavery times.”
Yet the body of stories also contains testimony like that given by Sam and Louisa Everett to black interviewer Pearl Randolph. The Everetts told Randolph what happened when news of emancipation reached the plantation where they were held. The slaveholder, “Big Jim,”
stood weeping on the piazza and cursing the fate that had been so cruel to him by robbing him of all his “niggers.” He inquired if any wanted to remain until all the crops were harvested and when no one consented to do so, he flew into a rage; seizing his pistol, he began firing into the crowd of frightened Negroes. Some were killed outright and others were maimed for life. Finally he was prevailed upon to stop. He then attempted to take his own life.
Such stories, Stewart points out, “provide a new way of interpreting stories of slaves who stayed on with their masters after emancipation” and who may have done so out of fear. Despite many obstacles, Randolph and other interviewers managed to get stories like the Everetts’ into the historical record. And that is valuable beyond measure.
More in Slate: Jamelle Bouie and I spoke with Henry Louis Gates about how historians came to value first-person evidence given by enslaved people in an episode of our History of American Slavery podcast series.
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Dismantled but Not Destroyed
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One alternative to tearing down Confederate monuments: creatively repurposing them.
By Rebecca Onion
170818_HIST_Remixing-Sculpture
In other countries, people have creatively repurposed statues and monuments representing vanquished ideologies.
Lisa Larson-Walker
What can be done with Confederate statues and monuments whose time has come? There’s the option of just tearing them down and throwing them out, which is satisfying and simple. I’ve seen some excellent replacement ideas floated (for every Confederate, put up a black abolitionist or another worthy crusader for civil rights; for every Confederate, put up a piece of cool public art).
Rebecca Onion Rebecca Onion
Rebecca Onion is a Slate staff writer and the author of Innocent Experiments.