The Slave Narratives were collected in the 1930s by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, which sent interviewers across the American South to record the life stories of elderly people who had been enslaved before the Civil War. The North Carolina narratives in this volume preserve the voices of men and women who experienced slavery firsthand, describing their daily lives, families, labor, and the moment of emancipation.
These interviews are among the most important primary sources in American history, representing an irreplaceable human record of an institution at the center of the nation’s history. Download this free EPUB to read some of the most powerful and affecting testimony in the American historical canon.