Remembering Slavery

Early in the 1930s interviewers from the Federal Writers' Project combed the American South in search of former slaves. The interviewers spoke with hundreds of elderly people about their experiences in slavery, and preserved the voices of some of them on primitive recording devices. The nearly-inaudible recordings were placed in the Library of Congress, unheard by the general public, but now, remastered with the aid of modern technology, they offer the only known opportunity to hear the voices of former slaves. This book-and-cassette pack of interviews and transcripts includes more than a dozen of these recordings. Those interviewed recall relationships between master and slave; survival techniques in the face of hardships; family life, marriage and childhood under slavery; experiences behind Confederate and Union lines during the Civil War; and, finally, the coming of freedom. Readings by prominent black Americans of untaped interviews complement the recordings.