Woodward, C. Vann. 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. Additional support provided by the Arkansas Community Foundation. They’re wrapped in layers of complexity, telling stories about slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and the Depression. Unfortunately, the quality of the interviews rarely matched the quantity. After the documents spent decades sitting in the Library of Congress and state library archives, George P. Rawick compiled them into a collection, publishing sixteen volumes in 1972, with Arkansas’s contribution filling three and a half volumes. …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.”. Encyclopedia of Arkansas To capture the narratives and stories of the formerly enslaved. agenda on the creation of the WPA narratives. One component of the WPA, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), sponsored unemployed writers to undertake assorted research and writing assignments, including conducting oral history interviews of ex-slaves in the Southern and border states. “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.”. The Everetts told Randolph what happened when news of emancipation reached the plantation where they were held. 1 On August 31, 1939, the Federal Writers’ Project became the Writers’ Program, and the National Technical Project in Washington was terminated. Brown, too, had his editorial suggestions challenged. 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. 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. Rate and review titles you borrow and share your opinions on them. Interviews conducted in Arkansas showed that more than half of the ex-slaves had been in servitude outside Arkansas. 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.