John B. Cade's Project to document the Stories of the Formerly Enslaved (original) (raw)

Slave Narratives and the Civil War

For a century after emancipation, historians of U.S. slavery relied almost exclusively on sources written by white people. These plentiful materials ranged from slaveholders’ diaries to European travelers’ accounts, and scholars deployed them all in their fierce debates over slaves’ living conditions, productivity, and psychology. They reached radically different conclusions, comparing plantations to everything from schools to concentration camps. But something was missing. Without listening to the words of enslaved people, historians could not study slavery from their point of view. For all their disputes, early scholars focused on what masters did to or for their slaves. They paid scant attention to what slaves thought, felt, and did themselves. By examining slave-produced sources, scholars in the 1970s permanently transformed the study of American slavery. They asked new questions, adopted new research methods, advanced new arguments, and unleashed new debates. Few primary sources did more to stimulate this innovation than the ex-slave interviews conducted by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency, in the 1930s. Commonly called the “WPA Slave Narratives,” this collection of more than 2000 transcripts changed how historians understand antebellum slavery. But they also have much more to teach us about the Civil War and its aftermath.

Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South

The Southern Literary Journal, 2008

Talk not about kind and Christian masters. They are not masters of the system. The system is master of them.-J. W. C. Pennington Forty years ago, Ralph Ellison served notice that one of the legacies of Jim Crow's demise would be the remaking of American history-and stories about that remaking as well. "[W]e have reached a great crisis in American history," he declared at the 1968 meeting of the Southern Historical Association, "and we are now going to have a full American history.. .. Here in the United States we have had a political system which wouldn't allow me to tell my story officially. Much of it is not in the history textbooks" (qtd. in West 125). African Americans resorted accordingly to oral tradition for the preservation of memories and histories "even as," Ellison added, "they were forced to accommodate themselves to those forces and arrangements that were sanctioned by official history." The result in black writing, he noted drily, was "a high sensitivity to the ironies of historical writing" and "a profound skepticism concerning the validity of most reports on what the past was like" (126). These are words that anticipate to a startling degree our current debates over memories and histories of slavery and race, from controversies over Confederate flags and memorials to Brown University's recent directive to study its own history of complicity with the Atlantic slave trade. Central to those debates, first of all, is the issue of breaking the long silence of official histories on slavery, a silence imposed first by the

Reconciling with slavery in the United States: An evolving narrative

2020

This article seeks to identify the main narrative(s) about slavery that are shared at historic sites such as plantations. Specifically, I discuss findings from a microethnographic inquiry at Monticello-Thomas Jefferson's plantation in Charlottesville, Virginia where more than 600 people were enslaved over the course of Jefferson's life. This field-based inquiry in rhetoric yielded several key themes, many of which demonstrate a concerted effort to challenge dominant, white-centric narratives and to provide proper recognition and acknowledgement of enslaved persons' contributions and struggles at Monticello.

After slavery: strange fruits of aftermath

As my entry points to the ''strange fruits of aftermaths' in the title, I examine three documents, each written approximately 50 years apart. In reverse chronological order, they are a 1958 description of the funeral of a former family servant; a review of George Spring Merriam's 1906 volume, 'The Negro and the Nation'; and Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address of 1865. Together, these three documents illustrate different but interconnected strands of aftermath: 1) the construction of a nostalgic view of slavery which helped perpetuate notions of white supremacy; 2) the impact of scientific racism on the struggle for racial justice and 3) the construction of what Saidya Hartman has called the 'fiction of debt'. This paper is based on a chapter from my doctoral thesis, and is not currently published. Therefore, please do not cite it without my permission.