The 1930s with the last opportunity to collect oral histories of the last generation of africanamericans that experienced slavery firsthand before they passed away. They have created through that project, it only lasted a few years, 19361939. It crated the largest repository of this testimony that we have in the u. S. , winding up with over 2300 interviews that are largely Available Online at the library of congress website. Anyone interested can use those, and scholars have used them to dramatically transform the way they write about the history of slavery and emancipation and reconsider that. My book took a slightly different tack by looking at the exslave project. What were the racial politics at the time . Prof. Stewart it was very complicated, there was still a great deal of jim crow racial segregation, not just in seven states but northern places as well. Aspects of racial segregation that would go unaddressed until the Civil Rights Movement and the postworld war ii era, resulting in famous legislation like brown v. Board of education. You are probably aware interviewers are aware that that battle continues today in terms of ensuring equality for all in the united states. There was a project in the 1930s that was, get it because it was radical in the sense that the federal government was paying unemployed writers to collect local histories and local culture, and ended up soliciting from them interviews from former slaves. That meant you had people from genetically different backgrounds, different racial groups, different ethnic or cultural groups, different educational backgrounds, different socioeconomic classes trying to talk to each other across these divides them about the very highly charged topic of slavery and what it meant for African American citizenship in the 1930s. What is the government telling these writers . Prof. Stewart it is interesting, i think it is emblematic of new deal projects and that is why i was drawn to it as a scholar and will be looking at it in my new book. It was a moment of great promise and potential. One of the sessions i attended here, a session on the new deal with major scholars, they were talking about the sense of the 1930s and the new deal as a moment of hamas and possibility, but also the fact that it was highly improvisational. The federal government was willing to try a number of unprecedented attempts to bring the economy back to life, to bring spirit back to the nation in different ways through the creation of cultural projects. It was often ad hoc. I think the federal writers project really epitomizes that ad hoc, improvisational quality in that it started under the auspices of the federal writers project. At the time it was created, it was consider the Ugly Duckling of the federal arts project. Thats because the public regarded with a great deal of skepticism and suspicion this idea, this illdefined category of unemployed writers getting put on the relief roles to do who knows what. They were called boondoggle ors and slackers and not seen as pulling their weight during the great depression. It started off as a project that was not well received by the american public, but because of its legacy, the exslave narrative, it has become the most important of the federal Arts Projects of the time. In terms of how did it develop, some federal directors received some exslave narratives from states that had undertaken it early, and that was the state of florida. It was under the direction of a southern white woman who is very interested in africanamerican culture. She was a fan of Zora Neal Hurston, as i think many of us are today. She was professionally trained as a stenographer and this woman had it in mind that she would bring Zora Neal Hurston back to florida and help her become the knee grow editor of the exslave florida project. Florida was one of the earliest dates to submit these interviews to federal directors in washington. Federal directors saw it as a rich possibility for other states to undertake as well, for a number of reasons. But this is where the complications come in. You look at the exslave project, all of these different groups and stakeholders involved in the project, they all saw the testimony as a way to articulate their own views about the legacy of slavery, whether it was a brutal or benevolent institutions, and the legacy of africanamericans coming out of emancipation. At the federal level, you had directors like john lomax, known as a folk song collector. He toured around the south often with his son, and he was appointed the director of folk ways at the federal level, and he was interested in the potential of these exslave narratives. He wanted these portraits of exslaves as these role, colorful folk people, and he thought that would be appealing to a wide audience. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the only africanamerican to be appointed as a federal director of the exslave project, and that was a famous poet and professor of english from howard university, sterling brown. He was appointed as the editor of the office of Negro Affairs in washington, and it was his unenviable task to review all of the copy sent in, all of the submissions sent in from different state directors and state and local offices, anything pertaining to black history of black culture and identity. He and his small staff were responsible for reading through it and trying to correct some of the worst stereotypes or misrepresentations of a black history and identity. Contrasting objectives and thoughts about what the project was really about. How is it perceived by the American People . Whose story was told . Prof. Stewart that is what is fascinating to me about this collection, and something that has stymied scholars, if you will, they are always running up against the amount of diversity in the collection. If you look at the collection online, there are a lot of narratives from former slaves that might surprise you. They talk about the good old days of slavery, or benevolent masters and mistresses. Then you also have come as you might expect, a number of narratives that testify to the brutality and inhumanity of the situation. You have these competing narratives not just about slavery as an institution but thinking further ahead in terms of africanamerican identity. There are Different Reasons for this. Certainly one is, and may be the most surprising discovery i made in my research is the number of state employees who were southern whites at the state director level and at local levels as interviewers who were also united daughters of the confederacy, which was an Organization Established in 1894 to preserve and memorialized the idea of the lost cause. Part of the lost cause narrative was about trying to reinforce the notion of slavery as a benevolent institution, with stories of faithful, loyal slaves and southern white largess. They were definitely trying to write over or at it the exslave narratives in different ways. It shaped the questions they asked and the answers they thought they heard. That is one layer on top of the exslaves in terms of what they what kind of sources did you have to use, to discover and pull back what is going on in this project . Prof. Stewart theres all these competing, woven tapestries, voices within the slave narrative collections themselves. One of the things most helpful to me in addition to the narratives was federal and administrative correspondence. One of the things i love, the Deal Administration and roosevelt were very interested in documenting everything. So in the National Archives there is a treasure trove of letters, back and forth between local employees, state directors, federal directors, missives from federal directors saying this is how you should approach the x slave narratives, the guidelines you should follow exslave narratives, the guidelines you should follow. And then Southern State directors disputing, putting forth their own vision of slavery, so there is a contest, a battle that you can see play out in all of these letters, back and forth between federal and state. I also want to emphasize one of the main sources i looked at were the exslave narratives themselves. I was really trying to read them in a new way, in ways scholars have not previously looked at them. The fact exslaves themselves were invested in the stories they had to tell, that they wanted to document their own individual life, histories and duringxperiences and often after slavery when they became friedman and freedwomen. So parts of southern life are not open or receptive to hearing those tales. Exslaves often had to speak indirectly, so i looked through the narratives, tried to excavate them, looking for africanamerican oral traditions, a tradition that signifies. Henry louis gates junior has talked a lot about signifying, specifically a way of telling the truth, but in a roundabout, indirect way. You have to read between the lines. Often you will find evidence of figurative language exslavers used, humor or indirection, these interesting ways in which toy spun their tales communicate the very truth of their experience even faced with a hostile audience. Did you discover new meaning . Prof. Stewart i did. It is a collection that has been combed over, very well used by scholars previously, but i feel i found new things in terms of narratives that can often look at first glance like a typical, southern paternalism, exslave narrative, if you see it in context and look for the oral traditions, you find ways in which exslaves are creating a counter narrative within their own life story, which goes the ideahe mythology, of romanticizing the old south. But you kind of have to know how to read for those signals and clues left behind. Your paper that you have presented here at oah, black what did you find out . Prof. Stewart it is research i came across working on the first book, and part of the new book im working on, specifically looking at africanamerican women and men and Domestic Service during the great depression, back in the 1930s, looking at new deal attempts to really try to elevate what was considered a menial, often lowpaid wage work in Domestic Service. One of the delightful finds i discovered in the archives, and id say a rare, unusual collection, specifically a group of undergraduate student essays written by young southern white women at a southern womens private college in the south, written for their sociology course. So i found this group of unidentified essays, where young southern white women are supposed to write on the topic of domestic servants in their own home. Their own type of narratives, if you will. Often short essays, two or three pages, but they really give all kinds of information from a contemporary perspective of what the negotiations were like within individual households within the south between africanamerican employees, men and women working in different positions, and their southern white employers. So, you always fantasize about time travel, being a fly on the wall, discovering what was actually happening in daytoday conversations and negotiations, the interactions, and those essays kinda provide that new window into documenting the 1930s experiences of Domestic Workers. What are these young women writing about . Prof. Stewart the titles, they were instructed to write about domestic help within the home, specifically Domestic Labor within my household. What is so interesting, even in the titles, because they are undergraduate students, they are kind of taking creative license, a rorschach test of what it means for them. I did a Little Research to figure out the course, the professor, the intention of the assignment, what was the goal of it. But they very often are already putting their own spin on it, their own titles. A lot of them are, the domestic servants problem in my home, the negro problem in my home. You can see that southern white women are already associating this notion of servitude with race, connecting it to this notion of africanamericans te that will occupy these domestic, menial positions. Further than that, also making assumptions about, anytime you talk about household help, you are talking about a problem of one kind or another. One student wrote, there is no Domestic Service problem in my home, because we have no negroes in my home. So theres already this kind of interesting, complicated bringing together of a notion of race, class, servitude. And what did you learn from those essays, about those who were doing the domestic work, working for these young families . Prof. Stewart absolutely. Theres so many interesting voices we get into africanamerican, Domestic Workers in the south, their personal lives. Unfortunately because these are undergraduate student essays written from a privileged, southern white perspective, the glimpses are just glimpses, very fragmentary. But they reveal new information about family relationships, about marital status, clubs and social activities of these workers, about their own households, their own Financial Arrangements trying to make ends meet at a time when they were very few Employment Opportunities for africanamericans in the south. So this new, fuller picture if you will, of africanamericans working as domestic servants. The great wealth of information about southern whites ideas about kind of the meaning of racial inequality. Many of these young southern white women are talking about, invoking this kind of confederate stereotype of the nanny, the good old faithful servants were used to have, who were wonderful, like one of the family. And this new regeneration, we dont know what to do this new work generation, we dont know what to do with them, they refused to accommodate all of our needs, they want wages, they wont work from sunup to sundo wn. So kind of a recreation of white southern attitudes about excitations about africanamericans in terms of service that are very much and problematically shaped, if you will, or informed by racial stereotypes, of africanamerican in particular women, the selfsacrificing mammy figure. I also looked at evidence of how black workers were often resisting employers demands and finding ways to strategically negotiate or navigate instruction or surveillance, we could say. So connect those two stories to today. Prof. Stewart i think you can see that theres so many relevant connections. While thats interesting to me as a scholar, exciting for me as a scholar, it is also troubling. Part of my first books title was supposed to be literal, long past slavery, interviewing former slaves about the first time, but there is also an irony in the title. Long past slavery in the 1930s, africanamericans are still trying to gain the authority with a white public to tell their own history, to create their own narratives about important events in the nations past. So long past slavery, it continues to be a legacy that remains with us, shakepes us, and could certainly continues in confederate memory that pushes equalitynst a national and democracy. That plays out every day in the news, about the forms of public memory we have about the meaning of slavery, the legacy of emancipation and the ongoing freedom struggle that continues. Stewart, thank you. Prof. Stewart it was a pleasure. I appreciate it. 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