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

Historians have long been fascinated with the ex-slave narratives collected by the New Deal Federal Writers' Project. Scholars of race have grappled with the accuracy of the interviews, which were often conducted—and revised—by local whites. By focusing on the interviews' implications regarding slavery, such accounts elide the importance of the narratives within their own time period. In her book, Catherine Stewart mines the little-discussed context of the Ex-Slave Project to "understand the paradoxes of the 1930s" (230). Harnessing an array of archival sources, Stewart presents the project as a site "where competing visions of African American identity" vied for "ascendance in the struggle to map the contours of black citizenship" (2). A project intended to foster national unity showcased instead the competing race-based motivations of the different groups involved in it, from federal administrators to white and black employees to the ex-slaves themselves. (For example, see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999]).

Stewart first examines the white actors. As she reveals, the government began collecting folklore as part of a social scientific wave of inquiry regarding the "Negro Problem." As they migrated to northern cities, African Americans became a "worthy object of [white] study" (27). Black folk culture, as white folklorists interpreted it, captured the public imagination. The Ex-Slave Project, featuring a cacophonous hierarchy of federal, state, and local offices, subsequently emerged in 1936. Race, Stewart asserts, "cut across these lines of authority, challenging African American voices at every level" (60–61). As interviewers and editors, white southern employees engineered the interviews to demonstrate black "unfitness for freedom and full citizenship," thereby validating Jim Crow segregation (206). Though federal administrators such as Henry Alsberg initially viewed the project as an "anthropological salvage" mission to document a disappearing rural black culture, they soon grabbed for "popular appeal" by representing former slaves as "objects of colorful interest and amusement" (64, 78, 90). Federal guidelines recommended the use of dialect to elicit authenticity—and book sales—while emphasizing such titillating subjects as superstition and voodoo. In a particularly strong section, Stewart examines the folklorist-administrator John Lomax, who marketed himself as a "great white hunter," journeying to the farthest reaches of the rural South to collect tales of black primitiveness (93).

Such ambitions clashed with the interests of black employees such as Sterling Brown, the sole black federal administrator, and the writers of the segregated Florida office's Negro Worker's Unit (NWU). These middle-class employees emphasized assimilationist, racial uplift discourse to demonstrate African Americans' "readiness for citizenship" (174). They did so, however, to little effect: Brown and the NWU had little influence over most published content. Neither did Zora Neale Hurston, briefly an NWU employee and subject of a fascinating chapter detailing her attempts as an interviewer to present herself as "black, but not too black"—as both an insider and an educated urbanite without the taint of "Negro bias" (134, 145). Stewart concludes with a chapter on the ex-slaves, who worked to "strategically position themselves in relation to white interviewers" by demanding compensation for their words and employing such black oral traditions as signifying to reveal their own "truths about slavery" (200).

Stewart's book possesses a few flaws. The narrative gives short shrift to Alsberg and Brown, who also deserve the case-study treatment provided Lomax and Hurston. Stewart also skirts the topic of Civil War memory, though, as she notes, the New Deal coincided with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Civil War. From the resurgent Ku Klux Klan to Marian Anderson's concert at the Lincoln Memorial, the racial legacies of the war scarred the 1930s. Indeed, many of the Writers Project employees belonged to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the torchbearer of the Lost Cause narrative. Though she touches on these topics...