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Disclaimer Note!
Visitors should be warned that several of the words and descriptions from the Louisiana Works Progress Administration (LWPA) collection are considered racially offensive by today's standards. The materials are presented to provide a true historical treatment of how Black Americans were treated.
Louisiana Works Progress Administration (LWPA) Slave Narratives. 1934-1941
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Works Progress Administration (LWPA)
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was an ambitious employment and infrastructure program created by President Roosevelt in 1935, during the bleakest years of the Great Depression.
The WPA – which in 1939 was renamed the Work Projects Administration (WPA) – employed mostly unskilled men to carry out public works infrastructure projects. In addition to its well-known building and infrastructure projects, the WPA also oversaw a group of programs collectively known as Federal Project Number One. These programs employed artists, musicians, actors, and writers.
While inequities existed under the programs, many women, blacks, and other minorities found employment with the WPA. In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration sponsored a Federal Writers' Project dedicated to chronicling the experience of slavery as remembered by former slaves. African-American men and women born into slavery were interviewed. Their stories were recorded and transcribed. Between 1936 and 1938 interviewers working on behalf of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) collected more than 2,300 interviews with former slaves living in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The contents of the interview transcripts and more than five hundred black-and-white photographs of interviewees compose the largest collection of primary source materials from individuals who lived and toiled under the system of American slavery.
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Extent (size/quantity) Statement
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The Louisiana Works Progress Administration (LWPA): Slave Narratives collection consists of 50 first-person accounts of originals and some reproductions of Ex-slaves Interviews. These narratives were collected and dated in the 1940s as part of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Works Projects Administration (WPA). This collection of narratives is exclusively from the State of Louisiana. The Archives Department of the John B. Cade Library digitized the narratives from the originals and reproductions and made them publicly available. This online collection is a presentation of the Archives, Manuscripts, and Rare Books Department, John B. Cade Library, of Southern University and A&M College.
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Baham, Rouceive (Louisiana College Student, who was assigned to the project)
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Breaux (Interviewer)
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Burke (Interviewer)
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Juneau, Velma (Supervisor - Federal Writers' Project Works Progress Administration)
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Louisiana Works Progress Administration (LWPA)
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McElwee, Flossie (Interviewer)
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McKinney (Interviewer)
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Michinard (Interviewer)
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Phillips, A.W. (Contributor)
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Phillips, A.W. (Typist)
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Posey (Interviewer)
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St. Angelo, Rose (Typist)
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Slave Narratives
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Wallace, Maude H., (Interviewer)
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Administrative Information
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The collection is arranged in five series. Within each series, the names of the Ex-slaves are arranged alphabetically. The series arrangement of the records are as follows:
1. Alexandria; 2. Gretna, 3.Louisiana; 4. McDonoughville; and 5. New Orleans.
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Archives, Manuscripts and Rare Books Department
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Reproduction Rights Owner
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Archives, Manuscripts and Rare Books Department, John B. Cade Library, Southern University and A&M College.
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These are the voices of enslaved workers who were interviewed between the late 1930’s and the 1940’s, as a part of the Works Project Administration’s endeavor to preserve the experiences of formerly enslaved African Americans in Louisiana.
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Angela Proctor, Head University Archivist and Digital Librarian |
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| Staff |
Angela Proctor, Head University Archivist and Digital Librarian |
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Wash Day On The Plantation
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