Folk Life in Black and White

By  Milton Meltzer

Something new began for black people with the election of FDR. Presidents before him had occasionally asked advice from black leaders. But now, for the first time, blacks entered federal agencies in increasing numbers. Highly trained men and women took part as advisers in race relations and soon showed that they could do far more. Called the "Black Cabinet," they pressed in every possible way for economic and political equality. their prime goal was jobs in government and industry on the basis of ability and training--not color.

As a result, about 26 percent of the workers on WPA projects in the South were black. In the country as a whole, about 16 percent were black. in the South, they were paid less than whites, but even their lowest pay rate was higher than most blacks were earning from private industry. The WPA gave jobs to black professional and white-collar workers, too. Actors, artists, musicians, and writers were among those able to use their talent and skills, especially on the big-city projects. By 1939, more than a million blacks were earning their living from WPA.

Recalling those times, Horace Cayton, the black sociologist who headed a WPA research project, said:

The writers project appointed Sterling A. Brown the national editor of Negro affairs and made the novelist and poet Arna Bontemps a supervisor in Chicago. Among other blacks on the project were Claude McKay, Richard Wright, William Attaway, Roi Ottley, Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden, Zora Neale Hurston, Frank Yerby, Fenton Johnson, Ralph Ellison, and John H. Johnson (who later became publisher of Ebony and Black World magazines.

Richard Wright was the son of an illiterate Mississippi sharecropper. his formal schooling ended in the ninth grade. He went to Chicago at the age of nineteen, where he worked as a porter, dishwasher, substitute postal clerk, insurance agent, hospital orderly, and street sweeper. Wright's early poems and stories, published in radical magazines, won attention. he joined a group of black writers who met to read manuscripts and discuss craft problems. In 1936 he left the relief rolls to join the WPA, first on the Federal Theatre Project and soon on the Federal writers project, where he met Nelson Algren.

On the project, Wright's assignment was researching the black history of Chicago and Illinois. He was one of forty field workers digging up such facts for the Illinois guidebook. He went to the office twice a week to report his findings and to get a new assignment. late in 1936, Wright's "Big Boy" story was published in the anthology New Caravan, and was highly praised. he was reclassified on the WPA as a group coordinator at $115 a month.

In the spring of 1937, he left Chicago for New York, but was unable to effect a transfer to the writers project there until the end of the year. meanwhile he became the Harlem reporter for the Daily Worker. Back again on the WPA, he wrote the detailed, factual section on Harlem for the New York City Guide and the more comprehensive and interpretive chapter called "Portrait of Harlem" in New York Panorama. In 1938, Wright won Story magazine's $500 prize for the best work submitted by anyone on the writers project. When Native Son was published, its guaranteed success (it was the first novel by a black to be made a Book-of-the-Month Club selection), together with the award of a Guggenheim Fellowship he received, enabled Wright to quit the WPA.

Introduced to Wright by Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, with Wright's aid, got a job on the New York project in 1938. With the time and energy left him after WPA hours, Ellison wrote some stories and started a novel. (his Invisible man is considered one of the most important novels of our time.) His WPA research assignments ranged from black history to urban folklore and famous trails. He stayed with the project for four years, until it closed in 1942.

The older, more experienced black writers also profited by their WPA jobs. The project gave them an anchor in a time of despair. Bontemps, for instance, published his third novel, Drums at Dusk, while on the WPA; McKay was able to use research gathered on the job for his book Harlem: Negro Metropolis; and Hurston issued three books while on the Florida project.

But even more significant was the impetus given to serious black studies by the writers project. there were many black writers who needed work, and Alsberg hoped to engage them in the task of depicting the role of blacks in American life. Sterling A. Brown, teacher, editor, poet, and critics, took charge, enlisting the aid of many black and white experts. His office gave advice, and it planned and edited materials on black life. In addition to what appeared about blacks in the state and local guides, brown's office saw to it that special studies were undertaken and published, such as Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes and The Negro in Virginia.

While Alsberg's national staff backed the work of Brown's office, on the local projects (North as well as South) blacks constantly struggled against discrimination and the threat of pink slips. As everywhere else, they were usually the last to be hired and the first to be fired.

The most valuable work in black studies was the gathering of interviews with ex-slaves. in a massive undertaking, about 300 WPA interviewers collected some 2,300 interviews with ex-slaves in seventeen states. The number interviewed is estimated to be about 2 percent of the total ex-slave population still alive at that time. About two-thirds of those interviewed were eighty or older; many were past ninety or a hundred. In 1865, at the time of Emancipation, the age of those interviewed had been from one to fifty. the slave experience they talked about was mainly that of childhood.

Lawrence D. Riddick was one of the people who did the most to launch the interviewing of ex-slaves. Teaching black history at Kentucky State College, he believed the truth about slavery and Reconstruction could not be fully known or understood "until we get the view as presented through the slave himself."  That evidence had begun to appear as early as the eighteenth century, when the first American slave narratives were published. between 1830 and the Civil War there were hundreds more of these autobiographical accounts by fugitive slaves, most of them issued by abolitionists who wanted to challenge the benevolent portrait of slavery drawn by its apologists.

The 1930s revived interest in accounts of slave life. Historians and sociologists recognized the number of ex-slaves was rapidly diminishing. Now was the time to get the testimony of those who still survived. Scholars such as W.E.B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson were leaders of a new black generation contesting the old sympathetic view of slavery. people who had swallowed punch concocted by such white historians as Ulrich B. Phillips needed an emetic. There was a call for studies of slavery written from the standpoint of the slave.

The first attempts to secure interviews with ex-slaves were made in 1929 through independent projects at Fisk and other Southern universities. With the advent of the New Deal Reddick, who had taken part in the work at Fisk, made a pilot interview study with federal support. When the writers project was launched, John A. Lomax, a white Southerner who had made great contributions to folklore research, was asked to direct Southern work in his field. He introduced the interview method of collecting folklore and life histories. the oral history technique was applied not only to the ex-slaves but to studies of pioneers in Texas and Kansas and to the people of the Southeastern states.

Although Brown's office urged the hiring of qualified black writers, Washington headquarters had no control over personnel policy in the states. the result was that several Southern states hired whites only. But in others--especially Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Virginia--separate black units were established, whose energy was devoted chiefly to research in black culture.

The WPA collection of ex-slaves' reminiscences began sporadically in the south. A concerted regional effort was not made until April, 1937, when a sampling of interviews forwarded from the Florida project so impressed John Lomax that he proposed this work be done on a systematic basis in all the Southern and border states. Lomax's instructions to the field insisted upon the importance of recording interviews exactly as given--with no censorship.

Lomax had no control over hiring or assignments, and the great majority of the interviewers were white. their biases and methods violated sound interview procedure. the whites, as can be realized from the transcripts, were often patronizing, condescending, and sometimes insulting. the result could be stock responses, evasive answers, or compliant "yassuhs." Occasionally, white interviewers revealed both sensitivity and insight in their interview technique. In places like Florida, where the interviewers were engaged, candid, direct, deep feelings were openly expressed.

Objectively considered, the ex-slave interviews share the usual shortcomings of many historical sources. But, as the historian C. Cann Woodward wrote of them, they "nevertheless have an unusual character. Confusing and contradictory as they are, they represent the voices of the normally voiceless, the inarticulate masses whose silence historians are forever lamenting." The evidence they provide, he said, obliges historians to reexamine many old questions and assumptions about the work ethic of slaves, master-slave relationships, slave religion, slave attitudes toward white society, intermarriage, and the profound historical experiences of Emancipation and Reconstruction.

When the project interviewing ended early in 1939, the records lay unused in state archives. Benjamin A. Botkin, the folklorist who succeeded Lomax, had the interviews assembled in typescript and deposited in the Library of Congress in 1941. In 1945 he published his own brief selection from them in the volume Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery. Even though that book directed scholars' attention tot he archives in Washington, until recently, historians tended to neglect them. 

Not until 1972 did a publisher (Greenwood) print a set of nineteen volumes containing both the WPA and the Fisk interviews. Since then, a careful search of WPA materials in Mississippi archives has turned up nearly 2,000 additional pages of ex-slave interviews, apparently never forwarded to Washington. perhaps still more treasure remains to be discovered in other state files.

Source: Milton Meltzer. Violins & Shovels: The WPA Arts Projects. New York: Delacorte Press, 1976.

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updated 13 October 2007

Milton Meltzer, historian and biographer, has written more than thirty books. Among his many honors, there have been three nominations for the National Book Award. His recent books include Never to Forget: the Jews of the Holocaust; World of Our Fathers: The Jews of Eastern Europe; Taking Root: The Jewish Immigrants in America; Hunted Like a Wolf: The Story of the Seminole War; The Eye of Conscience: Photographers and Social Change; Slavery: From the Rise of Western Civilization to Today (2 volumes); and Brother, can You Spare a Dime?: The Great Depression, 1929-1933. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Mr. Meltzer was educated at Columbia University. he and his wife live in new York City.