Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project by Catherine A. Stewart (review)

For decades, the most cutting-edge monographs about enslavement have relied on a rich but controversial archive to tell the story of slavery from the bottom up. Comprised of interviews that were gathered in the late 1930s as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the archive, known as the “WPA (Works Progress Administration) Ex-Slave Interviews,” includes more than 2,300 interviews of formerly enslaved African Americans across sixteen states. The debates surrounding the Ex-Slave Interviews stem from the fact that most of the interviewers were white workers for the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) and their interviewees African Americans in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression. Moreover, the African-American subjects were mostly poor, elderly, and disabled, many of them hoping that compliance and agreeability would give them access to government funds. Although these factors have made old-guard scholars doubt the authenticity of the archive, others view such skepticism as a symptom of the racism that undergirds the project of African-American history.

Entering this conversation with the most definitive and thorough telling of the politics, internal debates, and racism surrounding the development of the Ex-Slave Interviews, Stewart’s, Long Past Slavery proceeds partly through traditional historical methodology and partly through literary analysis. It is also a work that will quickly emerge as the central text for anyone hoping to engage with this archive. Not only does Stewart carefully read through the interviews themselves, but she also studies federal and state records, and, most fruitfully, the abundant correspondence between federal directors and state editors. Although scholars have long suggested that the Ex-Slave Interviews amplified what Stewart calls the “competing [racial] visions of the past of slavery,” her painstaking research illuminates this chasm (33). In one example, Stewart cites Myrtle Miles, Alabama’s white state director, lambasting Sterling Brown, the WPA’s director of Negro Affairs, the lone African American in a position of authority in the project, for what she perceived to be his racially biased editorial intervention. Despite the purpose of the project being to interview former slaves, Miles did not believe “that the picture [of Alabama] should be painted in black tones” (53). Like others in the state offices, the Alabama director believed that she “knew” her “Negroes” better than Brown or any other northerner did (44).

Stewart enters the interdisciplinary realm by offering a nuanced examination of how the fields of sociology, anthropology, history, and folklore intersected with New Deal politics and the development of this unusual archive. Her main objective of placing African-American experience at the forefront of her discussion makes her book the definitive history of the Negro Writers’ Units (NWU). The rich detail that includes such descriptions as how both segregated office space and heightened scrutiny hampered the work of black interviewers is of particular value.

As Stewart’s argument progresses, she relies heavily on African-American literary theory to make her case. After providing a compelling (though not particularly new) reading of the anthropological work of Zora Neale Hurston, who took part in Florida’s NWU, she uses Hurston as a foil to demonstrate the adherence of most NWU interviewers to respectability politics. Stewart argues that, unlike Hurston, most NWU workers emphasized respectability, shaping their interviews to show how black people were worthy of citizenship. In the last chapter, her greatest foray into literary analysis, Stewart contends that former slaves were “signifying” during their interviews—in other words, that they were savvy enough to manipulate the moment for their own gains. For instance, she argues that many formerly enslaved people purposefully inverted notions of the master/slave relationship in their narratives. Thus, Mary Minus Biddie of Florida poignantly described her enslaver’s reaction to her emancipation: “Mr. Jamison . . . broke down and cried like a slave who was being lashed by his cruel master” (225–226).

The analysis in Long Past Slavery is...