CBH Talks: Documenting Slavery: The Impact and Import of the Federal Writers’ Project’s Slave Narratives

Among the many legacies of The New Deal’s WPA, the Slave Narratives of the Federal Writers’ Project hold an unprecedented place in our history. Capturing more than 2,300 first-person accounts of formerly enslaved people that were taken between 1936 and 1938, this collection of life histories, testimonies, and reminiscences constitutes the single most important documentation of a complex and fundamental chapter in America’s past. For historians, the significance of this collection is profound. For descendants of formerly enslaved people seeking to fill in stories of their ancestors, it provides dramatic evidence. And for everyone of any racial or ethnic background, these firsthand accounts of American slavery paint a vivid picture of a facet of our history that is otherwise largely erased.

Join Clint Smith, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the recent, widely acclaimed book How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America; historian John Edgar Tidwell who has written extensively on Sterling A. Brown, FWP’s national editor of Negro Affairs; and historian Catherine Stewart, author of the 2016 book Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project, for this conversation about the impact and import of the Federal Writers’ Project and Its Ex-Slave Narrative Collection. As Congress debates a proposal for a 21st century Federal Writers’ Project Act, the panelists will explore the urgency of continued efforts to archive the lived experiences and underrepresented stories of our diverse country. The program is moderated by Peabody Award-winning journalist and documentarian Brian Palmer.

This program is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, in connection with the NEH Summer Institute on the New Deal Era’s Federal Writers’ Project presented by Long Island University and Texas A&M University - Commerce. It is also part of the Center for Brooklyn History’s major public history initiative, “Brooklyn Resists.”

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Participants 

 

Brian Palmer is a Richmond, VA–based journalist and documentarian whose work focuses on illuminating what his wife and collaborator, Erin Hollaway Palmer, calls “the afterlife of Jim Crow.” His writing, photography, audio, and video have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Smithsonian Magazine, the Root, and on PBS. Palmer was a co-producer of Monumental Lies, a 2018 Reveal radio story about public funding for Confederate sites, which received the Peabody Award, National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award, and Online Journalism Award. Earlier, Palmer served as Beijing bureau chief for US News & World Report, staff writer at Fortune, and on-air correspondent at CNN. In Richmond, he helped found a nonprofit devoted to the reclamation and preservation of historic African American burial grounds. During the 2021-2023 academic years he will be the Joan Konner Visiting Professor of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Photo by Erin Hollaway Palmer.

 

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the recently released work of nonfiction How the Word Is Passed. His poetry collection Counting Descent won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Art For Justice Fund, Cave Canem, and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in New Orleans, he received his B.A. in English from Davidson College and his Ph.D. in Education from Harvard University.

 

Catherine A. Stewart is Professor of History at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. Her research interests include the New Deal, African American writers, public memory, film, and the politics of textual and visual representation. Her first book, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project, was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine. She is contributing a chapter to the Cambridge University Press series African American Literature in Transition, 1750-2015, edited by Joycelyn Moody, about the nonfiction essays of Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston. She is also working on a new book about African American women and household labor during the Great Depression, for which she was awarded a NEH Fellowship.

 

John Edgar Tidwell is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas and a visiting scholar at the NEH Institute on the FWP. He is an authority on  Sterling A. Brown, Frank Marshall Davis, and Langston Hughes—all poets who were pivotal figures in the history of African American writing—and has published foundational scholarship restoring and extending these powerful voices to current discussions of African American and American cultural expression. Among his several publications are After Winter: The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown, Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press, and Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes.