Long-lost interviews and the stories of sidelined individuals have come to light in a project designed to unsettle the accepted understanding of one of the most significant chapters of African-American history.
In 1929, a young African-American social scientist named Ophelia Settle Egypt began interviewing former slaves in the southern states of the US, recording their harrowing tales of being sold, beaten and torn from their families.
Much of what we know today about the slave experience derives from the work of Mrs Egypt and other interviewers who followed her lead. She was part of a wave of oral history efforts that developed during the 1920s and 1930s, and which took on greater momentum in 1936 with the instigation of a mass ethnographic project by the Depression-era Works Project Administration (WPA).
Several thousand interviews, mostly by unemployed white people, were conducted with former slaves as part of the WPA project. The resulting documents, collected in 39 volumes commonly referred to as the WPA Slave Narratives, have become a key source of information about slavery, which nearly a century and a half after its abolition continues to play a major role in US race relations. In particular, its legacy influences discussions about issues of socioeconomic disadvantage such as welfare and incarceration.
Dr Clare Corbould of the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University says historians from the 1970s onwards have mined the Slave Narratives to find a new, non-white perspective for the social history of slavery. But little is known about the creation of this influential work. Minimal investigation has been made into the key African-American researchers who helped bring about this extraordinary collection, or the processes and methods they used in their work.
This context is crucial to shaping our interpretation of the testimonies, which are the product not only of the former slaves who told their stories, but also of the people who wrote them down. Few of the narratives were recorded at the time, so they are not actual transcripts; it is not clear how they came to exist in the form in which they are known, or what the people involved thought of them.
Dr Corbould is seeking the stories behind these biographies as part of a four-year research project, funded by the Australian Research Council with a Future Fellowship award. So far, the experiences of Mrs Egypt – both as an African-American researcher and as a woman – are those being most brightly illuminated by Dr Corbould’s findings.
In 1929, Mrs Egypt was working as a researcher at Fisk University in Tennessee for a prominent African-American sociologist, Professor Charles S. Johnson. She persuaded Professor Johnson that she should interview former slaves and record their reminiscences, and eventually led a team of field researchers in carrying out this work.
“Ophelia Egypt was a trained social scientist and a skilled interviewer. She was also a southerner, raised by her grandparents who were ex-slaves themselves, and that gave her a real insight into and affinity with the people she interviewed,” Dr Corbould says.
Of about 100 transcripts that emerged from that study, 37 formed the basis for a published collection, Unwritten History of Slavery. Mrs Egypt also used the accounts in Raggedy Thorns, a social history of slavery written from the perspective of the slaves. It was never published and, as far as she knew, 63 of her original transcripts were lost.
Voices from history
Dr Corbould’s area of expertise is African-American history; her 2009 book Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919–1939 won awards in Australia and the US. She became curious about Mrs Egypt’s slavery research after stumbling across a cache of her letters in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York – letters written when Mrs Egypt was working for Professor Johnson.
Dr Corbould says Professor Johnson relied on his young researcher’s findings for “at least a decade’s work of publications that were hugely influential in shaping ideas about race relations and the legacy of slavery”. That Mrs Egypt was well aware of the unfairness of this is obvious in one blunt letter, in which she wrote of the irony that “Charles S. Johnson who visited the country three times and who secured not one questionnaire should be given the credit for the work”. She went on: “I am anxious to see if he mentioned the field workers who went with me day by day under a hot sun and amid many difficulties to gather the material for the study.”
The letters made Dr Corbould decide to focus on the scholarship of the 1920s and 1930s. “When you are a senior social scientist using a junior researcher’s contribution to a project, there are always issues of who did the work,” she says. “I thought, what happens to that scenario when you have a young, female, African-American researcher with very little power, working for Johnson, who is a very well-known figure in African-American history?”
Mrs Egypt left Fisk University in 1933 having received no recognition for her contribution, and became a prominent social worker. She kept up her work on Raggedy Thorns, however, and during the 1960s, several years after Professor Johnson’s death, asked Fisk University if she could use the transcripts of her original interviews.
“She was stonewalled at first, then finally got permission,” Dr Corbould says. “She was also trying to get hold of the remaining 63 interviews, which they could never find.”
Clues in the archives
Digging through 20 boxes of Mrs Egypt’s papers in the archives at Howard University in Washington, DC, Dr Corbould found drafts of the Raggedy Thorns manuscript.
There were no signs there of the missing interview transcripts, but in the course of her US archival explorations she did discover unpublished interviews and films of former slaves from the era of the late Professor Roscoe E. Lewis, director of the African-American unit of the Virginia Writers’ Project of the WPA. Some of the film is crumbling with age, but she hopes that correspondence with a curator of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, will mean it can be restored and the images transferred to DVD.
The interviews that Professor Lewis’s all-black unit conducted with more than 300 former slaves were used in The Negro in Virginia in 1940. His frustrated reaction exemplifies why understanding the context of this kind of material is so important.
“He thought the book was dreadful and subject to all sorts of interference by the white editors,” Dr Corbould says. “He spent the rest of his life, about 18 years, trying to write a different history of slavery.”
Dr Corbould intends to write not another history of slavery, but a social history about some of these researchers who collected former slave testimonies and how this body of knowledge was produced.
In that, she will be helped by her find of a ‘magic box’ in the archives at Fisk University, where she went to search through 600 boxes of documents from the late Professor Johnson, who had become the university’s first African-American president in 1946. Among that mass of material, she found the box containing several of Mrs Egypt’s long-missing interviews, a moment of great excitement for this 21st-century researcher. “There were the original drafts and redrafts of the interviews that Ophelia Egypt did and that later became the basis for understanding slavery from the slave’s point of view.”
After the best part of a century, these remarkable documents will be given a chance to throw new light on this pivotal chapter of US history.
