Long Past Slavery

Representing Race in the Federal Writers' Project

Catherine A. Stewart

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781469626260
• eBook ISBN: 9781469626277
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Passing Away of the Old-Time Negro: Folk Culture, Civil War Memory, and Black Authority in the 1930s
• Chapter Two: Committing Mayhem on the Body Grammatic: The Federal Writers’ Project, the American Guide, and Representations of Black Identity
• Chapter Three: Out of the Mouths of Slaves: The Ex-Slave Project and the “Negro Question”
• Chapter Four: Adventures of a Ballad Hunter: John Lomax and the Pursuit of Black Folk Culture
• Chapter Five: The Everybody Who’s Nobody: Black Employees in the Federal Writers’ Project
• Chapter Six: Conjure Queen: Zora Neale Hurston and Black Folk Culture
• Chapter Seven: Follow Me through Florida: Florida’s Negro Writers’ Unit, the Ex-Slave Project, and The Florida Negro
• Chapter Eight: Rewriting the Master(’s) Narrative: Signifying in the Ex-Slave Narratives
• Epilogue: Freedom Dreams: The Last Generation
• Appendix. Bibliographical Information Concerning Epigraphs
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index