slave fiction essay

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Autobiography: slave narratives.

Lynn Orilla Scott
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.658
Published online: 26 July 2017

Slave narratives are autobiographical accounts of the physical and spiritual journey from slavery to freedom. In researching her groundbreaking 1946 dissertation, Marion Wilson Starling located 6,006 slave narratives written between 1703 and 1944 . This number includes brief testimonies found in judicial records, broadsides, journals, and newsletters as well as separately published books. It also includes approximately 2,500 oral histories of former slaves gathered by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s. The number of separately published slave narratives, however, is much smaller. Although exact numbers are not available, nearly one hundred slave narratives were published as books or pamphlets between 1760 and 1865 , and approximately another one hundred following the Civil War. The slave narrative reached the height of its influence and formal development during the antebellum period, from 1836 to 1861 . During this time it became a distinct genre of American literature, and achieved immense popularity and influence among a primarily white, northern readership. A few, in particular The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself ( 1845 ), displayed a high level of rhetorical sophistication. With the end of slavery, however, interest in the narratives declined sharply. Furthermore, one consequence of the social and political repression of the black population following Reconstruction was the “loss” of the slave narratives for sixty years. During the last few decades of the twentieth century , scholars recovered, republished, and analyzed slave narratives. Both historians and literary critics came to value their importance to the historiography of American slavery and to the development of African-American autobiography and fiction.

The Early Narratives

The form and content of the slave narratives evolved over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Several eighteenth-century narrators were African-born freemen of high status who contrasted their lives before captivity with their enslavement. Their narratives assailed slavery, especially the Atlantic slave trade, on moral and religious grounds. The narrator's journey through the trials of slavery to freedom was represented in conjunction with his conversion to Christianity and his westernization. Similar to the questing hero of Pilgrim's Progress ( 1678 ), the subjects of eighteenth- and early- nineteenth-century black autobiography reflected Puritan religious values and the popular modes of writing of the time, which included conversion narratives, spiritual autobiography, Indian captivity narratives, and criminal confessions. Most early black autobiographical accounts were dictated to a white amanuensis or editor who selected and arranged the former slave's oral report, “improved” the style and wording, and provided an interpretive context in the preface and in the choice of metaphors that gave shape and meaning to the former slave's story. Consequently, as William L. Andrews has pointed out, in much early African-American autobiography it is often impossible to separate the voice of the black autobiographical subject from that of the white writer recording and interpreting the story.

An important exception to this literary ventriloquism is The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself , first published in London in 1789 . The most famous and influential of the eighteenth-century slave narratives, Equiano 's Life went through eight British editions and one American edition in his lifetime and numerous editions after his death. Equiano's narrative includes descriptions of his early life among the Igbo people of Africa, his kidnapping and enslavement at eleven years of age, and the terror of the middle passage. Eventually sold to a British Royal Navy captain, Equiano was spared the crueler existence of life on a Caribbean or American plantation, and in 1766 he purchased his freedom. One of the most well-traveled men of the eighteenth century , Equiano served in the Seven Years' War in Canada and in the Mediterranean, accompanied the expedition of Constantine John Phipps to the Arctic in 1772 and 1773 , and spent six months among the Miskito Indians in Central America. A strong indictment of the Atlantic slave trade and the evils of human bondage, Equiano's narrative was presented to members of the British Parliament and played an important part in the eventual abolition of the British slave trade. It also served as a prototype for many of the later fugitive slave narratives.

The Antebellum Slave Narratives

By the 1830s slave narratives had undergone a transformation. The African, freeborn narrator had disappeared and was replaced by the American-born fugitive slave narrator who escapes southern bondage to northern freedom. American slavery had not declined following the abolition of the African slave trade in 1807 , as some had believed it would. On the contrary, the growth and profitability of cotton agriculture resulted in increasingly harsh conditions for many enslaved people. In contrast to the earlier narratives, antebellum narratives explicitly indicted slavery as an institution, emphasizing its dehumanizing and hellish aspects. Sold at antislavery meetings and advertised in the abolitionist press, the fugitive slave narratives were an activist literature that developed in the context of a growing and increasingly militant antislavery movement. As a reviewer of Henry Bibb 's narrative wrote in 1849 :

This fugitive slave literature is destined to be a powerful lever. We have the most profound conviction of its potency. We see in it the easy and infallible means of abolitionizing the free states. Argument provides argument, reason is met by sophistry. But narratives of slaves go right to the heart of men.

A number of antebellum narratives went through multiple editions and sold in the tens of thousands, far exceeding sales of contemporary works by Herman Melville , Henry David Thoreau , or Nathaniel Hawthorne . Among the best-selling were A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery ( 1837 ); Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself ( 1845 ); Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself ( 1847 ); Solomon Northrup 's Twelve Years a Slave ( 1853 ); and Josiah Henson 's second autobiography, Truth Stranger than Fiction: Father Henson's Story of His Own Life ( 1858 ). Frederick Douglass 's narrative sold more than 30,000 copies in the first five years and became an international best-seller. Douglass would go on to write two later versions of his autobiography: My Bondage and My Freedom ( 1855 ) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass ( 1881 ; expanded edition, 1892 ). Josiah Henson, who became identified with Harriet Beecher Stowe 's character Uncle Tom, of Uncle Tom's Cabin ( 1852 ), also published multiple versions of his autobiography.

The authors of the antebellum narratives wrote within an established literary tradition. Often written after the fugitive slave's story had been told at antislavery gatherings, the material was honed by repeated oral performance and influenced by the narratives of other slaves. The result is a highly formulaic body of literature with a number of features in common, beginning with the title page, which asserts that the narrative was written by the slave himself or dictated to a friend. Before the narrative proper, and sometimes after it as well, are authenticating documents written by prominent white citizens and editors who describe their relationship to the fugitive slave and testify to his good character and to the veracity of the story. In addition, the introduction often claims that the narrative understates rather than overstates the brutality of slavery.

Following the prefatory material, the narratives almost always begin with the phrase, “I was born.” Then, in contrast with the conventions of white autobiography, the slave narrator emphasizes how slavery has denied him specific knowledge of his birth and parentage. The slave narrator goes on to describe the precarious and dehumanizing aspects of slavery, including scenes where slaves are brutally beaten, sold at auction, and separated from family members. A critical turning point in most narratives describes the slave's desperate awakening in which he determines to be a slave no longer. Following this determination, he plans and eventually executes his escape. Often the details of the narrator's escape are suppressed so as not to compromise those individuals who helped him or to limit the possibilities for other slaves to use similar means of escape. However some slave narratives focus on an adventurous escape such as the Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery in a Box Three Feet Long, Two Wide, and Two and a Half High ( 1849 ). An example is Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery ( 1860 ). The antebellum slave narrative moves from south to north, from rural to urban, and from slavery to freedom. The typical narrative ends with the narrator's arrival in either the northern states or Canada and with the former slave's adoption of a new name.

Themes and Style

Drawing from techniques used in popular historical novels and sentimental fiction, the antebellum slave narratives are episodic in structure, melodramatic in tone, and didactic in their appeal to commonly held moral values. Slave narrators appealed to the religious and secular values of their white audiences, arguing that slavery dehumanized the masters as well as degraded the slaves. They often noted that the most fervently religious masters were the most brutal. Thus, the narratives sought to expose slaveholding ideology as religious hypocrisy and to distinguish the slave as the true spiritual pilgrim. Similarly, the slave narrative appealed to the national values of liberty and equality as stated in the Declaration of Independence. It is the American romance with freedom, in particular, that the nineteenth-century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker had in mind when he stated that

there is one portion of our permanent literature, if literature it may be called, which is wholly indigenous and original.… I mean the Lives of Fugitive Slaves. But as these are not the work of the men of superior culture they hardly help to pay the scholar's debt. Yet all the original romance of Americans is in them, not in the white man's novel.

In addition to arguing against slavery by appealing to the religious and political values of the white readers, the slave narratives are arguments for literacy as evidence of black humanity. European intellectuals had long equated being human—or at least being mentally and culturally superior humans—to having a written language. The value Europeans gave to writing is reflected in a key metaphor of early African-American autobiography, which Henry Louis Gates Jr. ( 1985 , p. xxvii) has identified as “the figure of the talking book.” Gates has argued that early black autobiography is a self-conscious refutation of the European charge that blacks could not write. The direct link between literacy and freedom is a thematic matrix that occurs in all of the major antebellum narratives as well. By the nineteenth century , it was generally illegal and believed dangerous to teach a slave to read and write. A number of fugitive narrators vividly recount their struggle to gain an education despite the prohibitions and denounce slavery's attempt to limit the slave's awareness of his condition and his capacity to learn. In the classic slave narrative, the acquisition of literacy is the precondition for the slave's decision to revolt against his enslavement, and literacy becomes the first step toward mental as well as physical freedom. This process is expressed most eloquently in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Written by Himself ( 1845 ). Douglass recounts the moment when he first understands the importance of literacy. He hears his master, Hugh Auld , tell his wife, “if you teach that nigger…to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.” Douglass's response is often cited as evidence of the rhetorical art, which makes his narrative the finest example of the genre.

These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought.… I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.… Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instructions, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the results that, he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn. In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both.

While the slave narratives provided a voice for black experience, they also circumscribed that voice. The antebellum slave narrator portrayed himself as an objective and representative witness of southern slavery in order to persuade white northern audiences to join the antislavery cause. This narrative stance required that the slave's subjective experience be repressed or in some cases excised from the text. The pressure to speak in representative terms of the slave's experience left little room for the individual voice or for a discussion of the narrator's interior life except as it specifically related to slavery. In her Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Antebellum Slave Narratives ( 1994 ), Frances Smith Foster has argued that “the desire to recognize oneself and to be recognized as a unique individual had to counter the desire to be a symbol, and it created the tension that is a basic quality of slave narratives.” In addition, slave narrators had to be careful not to offend their white audiences, and thus the narratives did not directly challenge the ideology of white supremacy or sharply criticize the northern racism that negatively affected the lives of the fugitive and newly freed blacks.

Women's Narratives

Male narrators and male experience dominate the slave narrative genre. Nineteenth-century cultural prohibitions against women's involvement in the public sphere carried over to the antislavery movement, in which women's “proper” role was of considerable controversy. Of the known slave narratives, women wrote only 12 percent. The first known woman's slave narrative is The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself , published in London in 1831 . Prince asserts herself as an authentic voice of the slave experience when she says,

All slaves want to be free—to be free is very sweet.… I have been a slave myself—I know what slaves feel—I can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me. The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery—that they don't want to be free—that man is either ignorant or a lying person.

The finest of the antebellum narratives written by a woman is Linda: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself . Originally published under the pseudonym Linda Brent in 1861 , the narrative was long thought to be a fiction written by Lydia Maria Child . In 1981 , Jean Fagan Yellin demonstrated that it is, in fact, the autobiography of Harriet Jacobs , who did, indeed, write it herself. Employing techniques from sentimental fiction, Jacobs describes her struggle to avoid the predatory sexual advances of her master and to gain freedom for herself and her children. While enslaved women are portrayed as passive victims of sexual exploitation in narratives written by men, women narrators portray themselves as active and heroic agents in the struggle for freedom. Women-authored narratives also tend to place a greater emphasis on the role of family relationships.

Postbellum Narratives and Beyond

Following the Civil War, newly freed blacks wrote autobiographies that clearly borrowed from the conventions of the antebellum narratives; however, the emphasis and purposes of these autobiographies were different. After 1865 slave narratives argued for full participation of black Americans in the new postwar society and therefore downplayed the past horrors of slavery. As William L. Andrews has stated in To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 ( 1986 ), narratives written during this period depicted slavery “as a kind of crucible in which the resilience, industry, and ingenuity of the slave was tested and ultimately validated.” An early example of a Reconstruction-era slave narrative is Elizabeth Keckley 's Behind the Scenes; Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House ( 1868 ). The most famous slave narrative of this post-Reconstruction period, Booker T. Washington 's Up From Slavery ( 1901 ), is a classic success story that testifies to black economic progress and promotes interracial cooperation.

The influence of slave narratives on American literature should not be underestimated. Harriet Beecher Stowe's enormously popular novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin ( 1852 ), was directly influenced by a number of slave narratives that Stowe had read before writing her novel. White authors were not only influenced by slave narratives; a few composed fraudulent ones and attempted to pass them off as genuine. Richard Hildreth 's The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore ( 1836 ) and Mattie Griffiths 's Autobiography of a Female Slave ( 1857 ) are such imitations. However, scholars have been most interested in the influence of the slave narrative on the African-American literary tradition. Vernon Loggins , Arna Bontemps , Henry Louis Gates Jr. , Robert B. Stepto , Joanne M. Braxton , and several other scholars have long argued that the antebellum slave narrative is the foundation of African-American autobiography and fiction.

A number of twentieth-century classics of African-American literature, including Richard Wright 's Black Boy ( 1945 ), Ralph Ellison 's Invisible Man ( 1952 ), Alex Haley 's The Autobiography of Malcolm X ( 1965 ), Maya Angelou 's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ( 1969 ), and Alice Walker 's The Color Purple ( 1982 ) contain many of the formal patterns and thematic concerns of the slave narrative. These patterns include the movement from south to north, from slavery or neoslavery to freedom, and from perceptual blindness to enlightenment or illiteracy to literacy. Like the slave narratives, these twentieth-century works provide a sharp critique of the effects of racial injustice and challenge America to live up to its stated values of freedom and equality. A number of twentieth-century African-American writers are interested in reimagining slavery in ways that give voice to the kinds of subjective and psychological experience repressed in the slave narrative. Examples of these neo-slave narratives include Ernest Gaines 's novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman ( 1971 ), Ishmael Reed 's parody of the slave narrative Flight to Canada ( 1976 ), Octavia E. Butler 's science-fiction novel Kindred ( 1979 ), Sherley Anne Williams 's novel Dessa Rose ( 1986 ), Toni Morrison 's novel Beloved ( 1987 ), and Charles Johnson 's novel Middle Passage ( 1990 ). As a form that embodies the collective experience of an oppressed people and the individual struggle to control one's own destiny, the slave narrative genre continues to offer a rich vein of exploration for contemporary African-American writers.

See also Autobiography: General Essay ; Haley's Autobiography of Malcolm X ; Douglass, Frederick ; and Stowe, Harriet Beecher .

ENGL405: The American Renaissance

Essay on the slave narrative.

The slave narrative can broadly be defined as any first-person account of the experience of being enslaved. Read this introductory essay on the slave narrative as a literary genre.

No experience of enslavement has been as fully recorded as that of African Americans in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Despite the large numbers of first-person accounts of slavery in the United States – hundreds from the early-nineteenth century (e.g. pamphlet-length documents and numerous book-length texts), significant numbers from the post-Civil War era, and thousands collected through the WPA during the Depression – these resources were commonly dismissed as merely abolitionist propaganda or skewed memories until the late-twentieth century. Over the past half century, however, the slave narrative in its various incarnations has helped reshape our understanding not just of slavery in the U. S. but of American culture and American literature more broadly. At the same time that these narratives are significant for the picture they paint of African-American life and culture (and American life and culture more broadly), they repeatedly emphasize the importance of the individual former slave and his or her struggles against a system that would deny his or her individuality as a human. For the purposes of this class, we will focus on what could be seen as the classic era of the slave narrative, the decades immediately preceding the Civil War when hundreds of such works were produced, including its most popular and most influential individual texts, all part of the larger anti-slavery movement intent on making Americans, especially white Northerners, recognize the true crime of slavery and the essential humanity of those enslaved.

The slave narrative can broadly be defined as any first-person account of the experience of being enslaved. Modern slave narratives, emerging from the transatlantic slave trade of Africans, first appeared in English in the late-eighteenth century with the development of a broad abolitionist movement in Britain. The first slave narratives tended to be short and often focused more on the writer's conversion to Christianity and acceptance of God's grace over the horrors experienced in slavery. The most prominent slave narrative of this period, Olaudah Equiano's The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789), mirrors this tendency even as it begins to approximate the more focused abolitionism of later narratives. In his narrative, Equiano narrates being kidnapped from his home in Africa and taken to the new world, producing a picture of Africa as a kind of Edenic region being despoiled by European greed. Over the first half of his narrative, he focuses on his experience as a slave, as he serves during the Seven Years' War on board a British privateer, expecting to earn his freedom only to be sold to a new owner in the Caribbean. He escapes the worst treatment in the Caribbean by becoming a valuable sailor for his owner, eventually accumulating enough money to buy his freedom. Unlike in many later slave narratives, however, Equiano's acquisition of freedom does not become the culminating moment of his narrative, as the second half of the narrative continues, describing his adventures (including his participation in an attempt at exploring the North Pole) and his experiences of racism and dangers of being re-enslaved, foregrounding, in the end, his religious conversion and concluding with him making an economic argument for abolitionism. Equiano's narrative reveals the formal instability of the slave narrative at the time, as it draws on several disparate literary traditions, most notably the Protestant conversion narrative, the related captivity narrative, natural history and travel narratives, and picaresque adventure fictions such as Daniel De Foe's Robinson Crusoe .

Over the course of the first decades of the nineteenth century, numerous former slaves produced published accounts of their lives, often through the help of a white amanuensis, but frequently on their own. As anti-slavery sentiment began to become both more wide-spread and more radical in the 1830s, black and white activists began to seek out more first-hand accounts of slavery's cruelties. Accounts written by the former slaves themselves served an important second purpose, providing evidence of the intellectual capacity of African Americans and thus countering claims of their mental inferiority. These dual purposes came together most forcefully, famously, and influentially in Frederick Douglass's The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845). Douglass had already established himself as a well-known abolitionist lecturer, and, in fact, he produced the narrative largely to counter claims that he had never been a slave. Much of the focus of the narrative, then, is on authenticating his life story, as he provides names and locales and, as often as possible, dates to corroborate his account. The work was immediately quite popular, with seven American and nine British editions appearing over the next five years, and more than 30,000 copies being sold. Douglass's Narrative helped to consolidate the slave narrative as a form, bringing together some of the key thematic and structural elements of earlier narratives into a more unified form, and it thus often serves as representative of the form as a whole. Douglass's Narrative begins with introductory letters from William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, two of the most prominent white abolitionists of the time. The letters attest to Douglass's truthfulness and to the fact that he wrote the narrative himself, at the same time providing readers with a template of the narrative's chief points. While many slave narratives, especially those published by the authors themselves, did not have such introductory frames, they were common to many of the more widely disseminated, longer works. This prefatory material authorized the text that followed, thus empowering the former slave to tell his or her story, but the apparent necessity of such authorization reinforced the former slave's dependence on white power structures and readership.

Like many slave narratives, Douglass's begins with a simple statement of the fact that he was born, an announcement of his existence as a human being. This standard opening of many slave narratives – "I was born" – announces the existence of the slave as a human. But in what follows, he emphasizes all the ways that the system of slavery attempted to deny that humanity and treat him like an animal, by keeping him ignorant of his birthdate, by separating him from his mother and his family, by leaving him naked and assessing his worth alongside that of farm animals. Douglass thus reinforces Garrison's overarching argument against slavery: slavery's chief crime lies in the fact that it "reduces those who by creation were crowned with glory and honor to a level with four-footed beasts". This point introduces the central rhetorical problematic of Douglass's and most other slave narratives, the need to demonstrate how slavery destroys the humanity of the slaves (and of the slave-owners) while contending for the slaves' fundamental humanity. Douglass, in other words, must at once show how the slaves have been dehumanized while simultaneously humanizing them in the eyes of his readers.

The production of the work itself by the former slave played a central role in this operation. Like many other slave narratives, Douglass's title reinforced that it was "written by himself". In a culture and society that prized literacy as one of the markers of intelligence and within an intellectual tradition that ranked non-literate, non-European cultures as fundamentally inferior, African-American literary production could provide strong evidence of black intelligence, thus rebutting pro-slavery arguments that Africans were intellectually incapable of freedom. That focus on literacy and on writing one's self into existence becomes a central theme of Douglass's and many other slave narratives. Douglass repeatedly recurs to the importance of literacy in his developing desire for freedom and in his actual escape from slavery. He recounts how Sophia Auld began to teach him the alphabet only to be warned by her husband that it was dangerous and worthless to do so, a warning that only spurred Douglass's desire. He then tells us how he used poor white boys in his neighborhood in Baltimore to teach him and how he found an old copy of the The Columbian Orator , a common primer of the time, that he used as his textbook. In describing the impact of the Orator on him, Douglass states that it "gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance". As such, he seems to suggest that literacy helps to consolidate an innate desire for freedom that slavery and enforced ignorance darkens but cannot destroy.

Foregrounding the importance of literacy, Douglass characterizes the slaves who remain illiterate as living in a darkened world where they have only an inkling of the fundamental wrongs they suffer. He furthers this depiction of how slaves are kept enslaved – but not happy – through his account of his time with the slave-breaker Covey. In this episode, Douglass emphasizes how a combination of work, discipline, mental and emotional manipulation, and violence breaks down even the most resistant slave: "I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!" Yet he also emphasizes his individual ability to rise above this dehumanization and to violently resist and re-establish his manhood and his humanity when he resists Covey and proclaims his refusal to be a "slave in fact" no matter how long he might remain a "slave in form". Despite all the deprivations of slavery, some innate human desire for freedom remains. It is in convincing his audience of that innate desire and of the importance of defending that desire that Douglass makes his strongest case to his audience.

As much as Douglass's Narrative provided a template later writers would follow, it cannot stand in for the wide-range of experiences former slaves would narrate and their often very different emphases on the slave experience. In particular, part of the success of Douglass's Narrative derived from its ability to reformulate the already standard American narrative of the self-made man. To an extent that many other slave narratives do not, Douglass emphasizes his own agency in overcoming the trials of slavery, his ability through sheer will and some luck to put himself in a position where he can escape to freedom. Such an emphasis is particularly lacking in slave narratives by women, in which the former slave's relationship to her family, especially her children, tends to be emphasized. For example, in what is now the best-known slave narrative by a woman, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), she foregrounds how familial connections both drive her desire for freedom and curtail her ability to achieve freedom. She also stresses her position as a woman, as the victim of sexual assault, directly addressing Northern white women to work on behalf of their black sisters who receive none of the protection they are supposedly guaranteed. In particular, she faces a different but parallel rhetorical position to Douglass. Like Douglass, she must make a case for her own humanity – and by extension the humanity of all slaves – while also emphasizing the dehumanizing nature of slavery. As Douglass describes how slavery emasculates male slaves, yet he is able to prove his own manhood, so Jacobs explains how slavery strips women of the kind of moral (sexual) protections that Victorian American society supposedly provided. For Jacobs, though, she feels compelled both to apologize for her sexual activity and to use it as evidence of slavery's immorality. While the turning point in Douglass's Narrative is his physical resistance to slavery in the form of Covey, Jacobs's describes how she attempts to escape the advances of her master by having a child with another white man, asking white readers not to judge her by the same standards as other women even as she evidences her place as a true woman through her devotion to her children.

In addition to the different position they take in respect to their audience, Jacobs also differs from Douglass in her emphasis on family and community. Jacobs finally attempts to evade her master – and to convince him to sell her children to their father or one of her relatives – by hiding, for seven years, in the attic of the house of her grandmother, a freed black woman. During this period of hiding, she highlights the torture of being disconnected from her children and her reliance on the support of her family and the broader slave community. While Douglass describes his commitment and intense feelings for his fellow slaves in his first attempt at escape and elaborates the significance of slave songs early in his narrative, his more individual-focused text de-emphasizes the slave community and slave culture in a way others do not. Given the incredible importance of those connections to African-American survival in slavery, it is important to recognize Douglass's relative lack of attention to those areas.

Douglass's Narrative may have been the most influential and popular work of its sort, but many others also found wide audiences, including that by William Wells Brown, another influential African-American abolitionist who would go on to publish the first African-American novel, Clotel (1853). Other popular slave narratives often featured sensational tales and escapes, such as Henry "Box" Brown's account of boxing himself up and shipping himself to the North; William and Ellen Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), in which the married couple narrates how Ellen passed as a white man with William as her slave in their escape (Wells Brown included a fictional version of this tale in Clotel ); and Solomon Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave (1853), which describes how he, a free man in the North, was kidnapped in New York and taken South. Much of the popularity of these texts derived from increasing anti-slavery sentiment in the North, but recent scholars have begun exploring in more depth the ambivalent psychological, sometimes prurient interest readers may have taken in these texts. For example, slave narratives frequently pushed accepted boundaries in discussing sexual matters, straddling a line of accusing slavery of rendering the South a den of sexual iniquity while drawing readers in through hinting at sexual details largely kept out of respectable literature of the time. Similarly, these narratives' compelling stories of psychological and physical torture, emotional turmoil, and life-threatening escapes could potentially, for some readers at least, overwhelm their political thrust. Finally, many slave narratives made quite sentimental appeals to their readers, attempting to inculcate strong identifications with the slaves by accessing readers' own familial connections, emotional ties, and moral sense of right and wrong. At the same time, though, such emotional connections could become the end themselves, offering a kind of vicarious pleasure of identification and rendering slaves nothing but pitiable victims and thus potentially lessening their political effect.

These possibly ambivalent effects of the slave narrative carry over to some of the works influenced by them during the antebellum period, most notably Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-52), and can be seen as one reason a number of African-American writers began exploring fictive literary forms in the 1850s. Stowe drew heavily on Josiah Henson's slave narrative in crafting her incredibly popular, groundbreaking work. As we will see, however, Stowe's interlacing of a form of racialism with her anti-slavery appeal and her overall characterization of the slaves as largely passive victims has, from its first appearance, been seen as problematic by black writers. For African-American authors writing in the wake of the Civil War, the slave narrative became a foundation to build on, a template of black life, and a model to escape from. For example, Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901), the most famous post-bellum slave narrative, stresses how far Washington – and the African-American people – has come since the end of slavery, in many ways attempting to erase slavery as an influence on black life. Even as it does so, however, Washington's text, as with many African-American fictional works of the era, continues the slave narrative's emphasis on describing and explaining African-American life and culture from a sociological and political framework. For many African-American writers of the twentieth-century, this emphasis seemed somewhat limiting, and slave experience in itself tended to remain in the background in African-American literature until late in the century, when a number of writers began writing what has been called the neo-slave narrative – fictional accounts of slave narrative that grew out of the reformulation of the history of slavery that emerged alongside the Civil Rights Movement. Among the most important works that fall into this genre are Margaret Walker's groundbreaking Jubilee (1966), award-winning works such as Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2004), and revisionary, experimental works such as Octavia Butler's time-travelling science-fiction novel Kindred (1979) and postmodern works such as Ismael Reed's Flight to Canada (1976) and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990).

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Slave Narratives

Introduction

Slave narratives recount the personal experiences of antebellum slaves or former slaves, and comprise one of the most extensive and influential traditions in African American literature and culture. Slave narratives were hugely popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with many going through multiple reprintings and selling tens of thousands of copies. In fact, until the 1930's slave narratives outnumbered novels written by African Americans.

This pathfinder focuses on reference sources that identify individual slave narratives, as well as how to go about finding items in our collections. While the library holds many sources concerning slavery (e.g. periodicals, newspapers, music), this pathfinder concentrates primarily on autobiographies and biographies published in book or pamphlet form. Also included is a short section on fictionalized accounts of slavery. Not included in this pathfinder is information about the United States Works Progress Administration (WPA) Slave Narrative Collection.

Background Reading

Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Foster, Trudier Harris, eds. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature . New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Call Number: Ref PS153.N5 O96 1997. This book gives a very general, but helpful overview. It is arranged alphabetically, so you can check the main entries under slave narratives and slavery; or you can check the index for entries that cross-reference slave narratives or slavery.

The following two books examine slave autobiographies as a literary genre. Andrews provides an annotated bibliography of slave autobiographies and biographies; Foster provides a particularly helpful selective bibliography of secondary sources.

Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography . Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Call Number: E 185.96 .A57 1986.

Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives . Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Call Number: PS 366 .A35 F6 1994.

Searching the Online Catalog

When searching for materials in the Newberry's collections, check the online catalog. If you know the author or title of the item you want, simply search using the Author or Title search options within the online catalog. If you do not know the author or title, you may try searching under the following subject headings:

Slaves' writings, American
Slaves--United States--Biography

You may also want to consult one of the bibliographies listed below to find specific authors or titles.

Bibliographies

North American Slave Narratives

Put together by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the North American Slave Narratives collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves and some significant fictionalized slave narratives published in English before 1920. Although this collection does not claim to be complete and final, it is fairly comprehensive. It is particularly helpful in that the bibliography can be viewed both alphabetically and chronologically. Many of the narratives have also been digitized.

Arksey, Laura, Nancy Pries, and Marcia Reed. American Diaries. Volume 1: Diaries written from 1492 to 1844; Volume 2: Diaries written from 1845-1980. Call Number: Ref Z5305.U5 A74 1983. These two volumes are guides to more than 5000 published diaries and journals; there is a focus on books that are day-to-day records as opposed to narratives or memoirs. The entries are arranged chronologically. In volume one, many of the entries concerning the subject of slavery will not be by slaves, but by slave owners and traders, visitors to the South, and abolitionists; check the index under the subject headings of slave; slavery; and slaves. In volume two, check under the same headings in the index, as well as civil war, contrabands and freedmen.

Bibliography of American Imprints to 1901 . New York: K.G. Saur, 1993. Call Number: Ref Z1215 .B47 1993. An extremely handy resource for finding printed materials. In the Subject Index, check under a variety of headings, including:

Slaves. Autobiography
Slaves. Country. Biography (e.g. Slaves. United States. Biography)
Slaves. State. Biography (Slaves. Illinois. Biography)
Slaves. Personal Narratives

You can also check for titles in the Main Index: for example, "Narrative of . . ." yields some possibilities. You can also check the Date and Place Indexes if you are interested in narratives from particular years or places.

Brignano, Russell C. Black Americans in Autobiography . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984. Call Number: Ref Z1361 .N39 B67 1984. While this bibliography broadly covers all African-American autobiography, it can still be helpful in searching out the narrower category of slave narratives. Arranged alphabetically by Author, each entry includes information about reprints; symbols for up to ten known library locations; and cross-references to other autobiographical volumes by the author or by a member of his or her family. Brignano adds short but informative descriptions for each entry as well. Also included is a checklist of post-World War II reprintings of autobiographies published before 1865.

Dumond, Dwight Lowell. A Bibliography of Antislavery in America . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c1961. Call Number: Ref Z1249 .S6 D8. This bibliography includes literature written and circulated by those active in the antislavery movement. It includes not only American publications, but also British ones that were widely circulated in the U.S. The bibliography is arranged alphabetically by author.

Matthews, Geraldine O. Black American Writers, 1173-1949: A Bibliography and Union List . Boston: G. K. Hall, 1975. Call Number: Ref Z1361 .N39 M35. This bibliography is an attempt to identify African-American materials held in repositories in six southeastern states: Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. It includes a section on "Slavery, Anti-Slavery, Slave Trade, and Personal Narratives" which is organized alphabetically by author.

Parrish, T. Michael and Robert M. Willingham, Jr. Confederate Imprints: A bibliography of Southern Publications from Secession to Surrender . Call Number: Ref Z1242.5 .P37 1987. This is a bibliography of Confederate publications, and one can find some slave narratives in the section titled "Politics, Economics, and Social Aspects." Although this section is arranged alphabetically by author, it is a bit difficult to skim because of the variety of subjects included.

Southern, Eileen and Josephine R. B. Wright. African-American Traditions in Song, Sermon, Tale, and Dance, 1600s-1920: an Annotated Bibliography of Literature, Collections, and Artworks . New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Call Number: Ref Z5956 .A47 S68 1990. While not a bibliography of slave narratives per se, this book is still immensely useful, as it provides a unique perspective to writings by and about African-Americans. It is a compilation of both primary and secondary sources, and includes works known for their explication and interpretation of African-American culture; the compilers also give priority to "firsts" in various areas first collection of slave songs, first compilation of Brer Rabbit tales, first description of a black church religious service. It is organized by time period, and then sorted into the categories of "Social Activities" (incl. items related to social customs, and holiday festivals); "Religious Experience;" and "Song." Short descriptions are given for each entry, and the book is fairly easy to browse.

Work, Monroe N. A Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America . New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1928. Call Number: Ref Z1361.N39 W8. Despite the early publication date, this book remains a standard used by researchers. Work devotes an entire section to slave narratives, as well as publications concerning other facets of slavery including: economic aspects, social aspects, the abolition movement, fugitive slaves and the underground railroad, and African-Americans as soldiers. Entries are arranged alphabetically by author within each section.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. The Pen is Ours: A Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women before 1910 with Secondary Bibliography to the Present . New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Call Number: Ref Z1229. N39 Y44 1991. Part II of this bibliography contains a list of writings by and about women who had been held in slavery and whose dictated narratives or biographies were published before the end of 1910. Entries are arranged alphabetically by author.

Fictionalized Slave Narratives

The antislavery movement in the nineteenth century generated a number of narratives about slavery, some widely read, that were subsequently revealed to be fictitious or heavily fictionalized, though sometimes based on an actual case or person.

If you know the author or title (check the North American Slave Narratives online bibliography ), search using those commands from the main catalog search page. You may also search using the following subject headings:

Slavery—Fiction
Women Slaves—Fiction
Fugitive Slaves—Fiction
Slavery—United States—Fiction
Slaves—United States—Fiction

Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin

The Newberry owns several interesting items related to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, including sheet music, plays, ballets, and translations. To find these items in the online catalog , you can search under Author for Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896, or Title for Uncle Tom's Cabin.

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Photo Essay - Slave Narratives
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Slave Narratives

Photo Essay

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 1789. Courtesy of New York Public Library.

Some 6,000 narratives written by African American slaves were published between 1700 and 1950. Slave narratives—memoirs written by enslaved or freed people—ranged in length and topic. They could be full length books, transcribed interviews, or newspaper articles. Often slave narratives served as types of teaching guides—be it information on how to escape from slavery, arguments for abolition, or spiritual meditations. The autobiographical narratives were both pedagogical and sensational. Long, descriptive titles such as A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself called readers to explore the horrors and adventures associated with slavery. The majority of slave narratives were written as reflections after slavery was outlawed but the most famous accounts were written before abolition by fugitive slaves such as Frederick Douglass, Henry "Box" Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. In the years following the Civil War, slave narratives were such a popular form of writing that some white authors fabricated narratives in order to exploit the trend. Memoirs written by slaves or former slaves—full of description, emotion, and reflection—begin the canon of African American literature and this month's Focus On article explores these narratives and their authors.

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Featured Articles

The following entries have been selected to help guide readers who want to learn more about slave narratives as a literary genre and about the people who wrote them. ( Access to the following articles is available only to subscribers .)

Primary Source Documents

A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars In the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1770)
James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw
Dying Confession of Pomp (1795)
A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture (1798)
Broteer (Venture)
Life and Adventures of Robert, The Hermit of Massachusetts (1829)
Robert Voorhis
Memoir of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave (1834)
Phillis Wheatley
Narrative of Phebe Ann Jacobs (c.1850)
Phebe Ann Jacobs
Memoir of Quamino Buccau, a Pious Methodist (1851)
Quamino Buccau
From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom (1890s)
Lucy A. Delaney
A Slave Girl's Story. Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold (1897)
Kate Drumgoold
Recollections of My Slavery Days (1922)
William Henry Singleton

Subject Entries

Autobiography: Slave Narratives
Federal Writers' Project (FWP)
Slave Narratives, Women's

Biographies

Bibb, Henry
Brown, Henry "Box"
Brown, William Wells
Burton, Annie Louise
Craft, William and Ellen
Douglass, Frederick
Equiano, Olaudah
Jacobs, Harriet Ann
Jones, Friday
Pennington, James W. C.
Truth, Sojourner
Washington, Booker T.

PRINTED FROM OXFORD AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES CENTER (www.oxfordaasc.com). © Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Medicine Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice ).

date: 28 April 2024

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photograph of a FWP photo of Mollie Williams, half in shadow

Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It

The Federal Writers’ Project narratives provide an all-too-rare link to our past.

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Image above: Portrait of Mollie Williams (Mississippi), taken as part of the Federal Writers’ Project

This article was published online on February 9, 2021.

O n a rainy Thursday afternoon in November, I stepped inside the National Museum of African American History and Culture , in Washington, D.C. On past visits, I’d always encountered crowds of tourists and school groups, a space bursting with movement and sound. But on this day, the museum was nearly empty. It seemed to echo with all the people who had been there but were no longer. For the few of us inside, social distancing was dictated by blue circles scattered on the floor.

I made my way down to the bottom level, which documents the history of slavery in America . Masks were mandatory, and something about the pieces of cloth covering everyone’s mouths seemed to amplify the silence and solemnity of what surrounded us.

I walked past the statue of Thomas Jefferson standing among bricks bearing the names of people he’d enslaved, past a cabin that enslaved people had slept in, and past the stone auction block upon which enslaved people had been sold and separated from their families.

Toward the end of a long corridor was a dimly lit room with sepia-toned photos on the walls. Photos of enslaved people holding their own children, or their enslaver’s children. Photos of fresh wounds on the backs of those who’d been beaten. Photos of people bent over fields of cotton that hid their faces.

But what was most striking about the room was the voices running through it. The words of people who had survived slavery were running on a six-minute loop. Their voices floated through the air like ghosts.

“My father was not allowed to see my mother but two nights a week,” said a woman in the voice of Mary A. Bell . “Dat was Wednesday and Saturday. So he often came home all bloody from his beatings.”

“I had to wok evva day,” said a woman in the voice of Elvira Boles . “I’d leave mah baby cryin’ in the yard, and I’d be cryin’, but I couldn’t stay.”

“My mudder word in de field,” said Harrison Beckett . “Sometimes she come in 9 or 10 ’clock at night. She be all wore out an’ it be so dark she too tired to cook lots of times, but she hafter git some food so we could eat it. Us all ’round de table like dat was like a feast.”

When I’d first encountered these floating voices years before, I was fascinated by how ordinary their stories were. These were not tales of daring escapes like those of Henry “Box” Brown , who in 1849 contorted his body into a wooden crate for 27 hours as it was delivered from the slave state of Virginia to abolitionists in Pennsylvania—mailing himself to freedom. Nor were they the stories of Frederick Douglass , who as a teenager, in 1833, fought his white slave breaker with such force that the man never hit Douglass again. Nor were they the stories of Harriet Jacobs , who, in an attempt to escape the physical and sexual abuses of slavery, hid in an attic for seven years.

From the January 1867 issue: Frederick Douglass’s ‘An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage’

Brown became a global celebrity who turned his escape routine into a one-man show that traveled throughout the United States and England. Douglass and Jacobs wrote autobiographies that became best sellers, and that today are staples in classrooms around the world. Theirs are the stories I learned as a child, and there’s great value in teaching kids stories of resistance, of Black people not being passive recipients of violence. But I remember how, after reading them, I found myself wondering why every enslaved person didn’t just escape like these famous figures did. The memory of that thought now fills me with shame.

The stories swirling about the room weren’t famous accounts of extraordinary people; rather, they were the words of all-but-forgotten individuals who bore witness to the quotidian brutality of chattel slavery. These stories were the result of the Federal Writers’ Project —a New Deal program that was tasked with collecting the oral histories of thousands of Americans. From 1936 to 1938, interviewers from the FWP gathered the firsthand accounts of more than 2,300 formerly enslaved people in at least 17 states. The members of the last generation of people to experience slavery were reaching the end of their lives, and so there was an urgency to record their recollections. In scale and ambition, the project was unlike any that had come before it. The Federal Writers’ Project ex-slave narratives produced tens of thousands of pages of interviews and hundreds of photographs—the largest, and perhaps the most important, archive of testimony from formerly enslaved people in history.

While many of these narratives vividly portray the horror of slavery—of families separated, of backs beaten, of bones crushed—embedded within them are stories of enslaved people dancing together on Saturday evenings as respite from their work; of people falling in love, creating pockets of time to see each other when the threat of violence momentarily ceased; of children skipping rocks in a creek or playing hide-and-seek amid towering oak trees, finding moments when the movement of their bodies was not governed by anything other than their own sense of wonder. These small moments—the sort that freedom allows us to take for granted—have stayed with me.

When I first came across the narratives, I was confused as to why I had never, not once in my entire education, been made aware of their existence. It was as if this trove of testimony—accounts that might expand, complicate, and deepen my understanding of slavery—had purposefully been kept from view.

grid of 14 photographs of formerly enslaved people from FWP

For many Black Americans, there is a limit to how far back we can trace our lineage. The sociologist Orlando Patterson calls it natal alienation : the idea that we have been stripped of social and cultural ties to a homeland we cannot identify. I have listened to friends discuss the specific village in Italy their ancestors came from, or the specific town in the hills of Scotland. No such precision is possible for Black Americans who are the descendants of enslaved people. Even after our ancestors were forcibly brought to the shores of the New World, few records documented their existence. The first census to include all Black Americans by name was conducted in 1870, five years after slavery ended. Trying to recover our lineage can be a process of chasing history through a cloud of smoke. We search for what often cannot be found. We mourn for all we do not know.

But the descendants of those who were interviewed for the Federal Writers’ Project have been given something that has been denied to so many Black Americans: the opportunity to read the words, and possibly see the faces, of people they thought had been lost to history.

Because these narratives are not often taught in school, many people come across them for the first time later in life. Several historians told me that their encounters with these stories had shifted the trajectory of their personal and intellectual lives. Catherine A. Stewart, a historian at Cornell College, in Iowa, and the author of Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project , remembers sitting in the basement of the university library as a graduate student, making her way through reels of microfilm. “I will just never forget this sensation I had of these stories—of these life histories of these individuals, personal stories and experiences of enslavement—just leaping off the page,” she said.

Read: A priceless archive of ordinary life

For years, the collections had been largely ignored. As Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller note in Remembering Slavery , an edited volume of selected narratives, historians throughout the mid‑20th century came up with a range of reasons not to take them seriously. Some argued that because the people who were interviewed, in the 1930s, had been children when slavery ended, their memories were unreliable. Others claimed that the narratives couldn’t be trusted because they weren’t an adequate statistical sample: Those who were interviewed represented approximately 2 percent of the formerly enslaved population still alive in 1930.

Perhaps the most insidious reason to dismiss the narratives came from the historian Ulrich B. Phillips, whose conception of slavery as a civilizing institution for the enslaved shaped many Americans’ understanding of it in the early-to-mid-20th century. Phillips complained of “Negro bias,” believing that Black Americans were “too close” to the subject of slavery and thus unable to be objective about it—a criticism that has been used to undermine Black writing and research on issues of racism since the earliest days of Black life in America.

That view began to change with the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, when historians, intellectuals, and activists came to see slavery as the root cause of racial inequality. Interest in the Federal Writers’ Project narratives grew.

The Black Lives Matter movement has further pushed historians to revisit these stories. The past several years—and particularly the months since last summer’s racial-justice protests—have prompted many people to question what we’ve been taught, to see our shared past with new eyes. The FWP narratives afford us the opportunity to understand how slavery shaped this country through the stories of those who survived it.

N oah Lewis had been doing genealogical research for years, trying to learn as much as possible about his family history, when he discovered that his great-great-grandfather, a man named William Sykes , had been interviewed as part of the Federal Writers’ Project ex-slave-narrative collection. He wanted to see the original documents himself, so he traveled from his home in Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., to visit the Library of Congress.

“It was an amazing experience,” he told me. “I had never seen photographs of him before … That was just mind-blowing all by itself.”

In the black-and-white photograph of William Sykes that accompanies his narrative, he is 78 years old and facing the camera, his eyes hidden behind a pair of dark glasses. He has a white mustache that stretches over his mouth and a long goatee that hangs from his chin. He appears to be furrowing his brow.

“He kind of reminds me of my older brother, Jimmy,” Lewis said.

Lewis had read books that detailed the physical and psychological violence of slavery; he had seen photos of enslaved people and understood the brutal conditions in which they worked. But there was something different about reading the narrative of his direct ancestor—someone from his own family who, only a few generations earlier, had been in chains.

In his narrative, William Sykes describes being a child in North Carolina and seeing the soldiers of the Union Army make their way into Confederate territory. Sykes’s enslaver, fearful for his own life and worried that the Union soldiers might confiscate his human property, escaped with his enslaved workers into the mountains.

While we wus dar one day, an’ while Mr. Jim Moore, de Jedge’s daddy am in town de missus axes my cousin Jane ter do de washin’. Jane says dat she has got ter do her own washin’ an dat she’ll wash fer de missus termorrer. De missus says “you ain’t free yit, I wants you ter know.” “I knows dat I’s not but I is ‘gwine ter be free’ ”, Jane says. De missus ain’t said a word den, but late Sadday night Mr. Jim he comes back from town an’ she tells him ’bout hit. Mr. Jim am some mad an’ he takes Jane out on Sunday mornin’ an’ he beats her till de blood runs down her back.

Sykes was a child; the detail of blood running down Jane’s back stayed with him the rest of his life.

Lewis said that, like me, he’d grown up with an incomplete understanding of slavery. “As a young child, I remember thinking to myself, You know, hey, if slavery was so bad, why didn’t my people fight harder to try to get out of it? ” Jane’s story showed that it wasn’t so simple.

Lewis himself was born in 1953 on an Army base in Heidelberg, Germany, where his father was stationed. His family returned to the U.S. when he was just 10 months old. When he was 13, they moved to Aldan, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. As far as Lewis knows, his was the first Black family in Aldan, and he says they were not welcomed with open arms.

archival photo of William Sykes; Noah Lewis’s parents, 1952

“A couple days after we moved in, we woke up that morning, and somebody had written on our car windshield i hate niggers .” His father came out of the house with a shotgun and yelled loud enough for everyone in the neighborhood to hear: “I don’t care if you don’t like me, but if you start playing with my property, there will be trouble.”

Lewis said that while the FWP narratives can be emotionally difficult to get through, he’s also found “a certain joy” in reading them. “This is your relative, and it’s them speaking, and it brings them to life. They remind you that they were a person, not a stat, not a little side note, not a little entry in a genealogical chart. They were a real, living, breathing human being. That’s what that document kind of really hits you with.”

Read: Illuminating the whole American idea

But not everyone feels the way Lewis does. Six years ago, he attended a family reunion in New Jersey and decided to share what he’d discovered. Standing in front of about 30 people in folding chairs in a relative’s backyard, Lewis read Sykes’s words. Some of those present were old enough to have known Sykes when they were children—and some felt deeply hurt, and embarrassed, by parts of what Sykes was portrayed as having said.

For example, some sections of his narrative implied that life under slavery was good:

I knows dat Mister Long an’ Mis’ Catherine wus good ter us an’ I ’members dat de food an’ de clothes wus good an’ dat dar wus a heap o’ fun on holidays. Most o’ de holidays wus celebrated by eatin’ candy, drinkin’ wine an’ brandy. Dar wus a heap o’ dancin’ ter de music of banjoes an’ han’ slappin’. We had co’n shuckin’s, an’ prayer meetin’s, an’ sociables an’ singin’s. I went swimmin’ in de crick, went wid old Joe Brown, a-possum huntin’, an’ coon huntin’, an’ I sometimes went a-fishin’.

Read one way, these sorts of details might be seen as softening the horrors of slavery, making the gruesome nature of the institution more palatable to readers who aren’t prepared to come to grips with what this country has done. Read another way, though, they might reveal the humanity of those who were enslaved, and show that despite circumstances predicated on their physical and psychological exploitation, they were still able to laugh, play, celebrate, and find joy.

Other sections of Sykes’s account, however, are more difficult to reconcile. Toward the end of the narrative he’s depicted as having said:

We ain’t wucked none in slavery days ter what we done atter de war, an’ I wisht dat de good ole slave days wus back. Dar’s one thing, we ole niggers wus raised right an’ de young niggers ain’t. Iffen I had my say-so dey’d burn down de nigger schools, gibe dem pickanninies a good spankin’ an’ put ’em in de patch ter wuck, ain’t no nigger got no business wid no edgercation nohow.

After Lewis finished, some of his relatives told him that he shouldn’t have read the narrative to them. They felt that Sykes’s words reflected poorly on them as a family and on Black people in general. But they didn’t just blame Sykes; they blamed the white person who’d interviewed him, who they believe must have manipulated Sykes or changed his words. “A typical example of white people trying to make us look ignorant,” they told him.

This issue of manipulation in the interviews is something historians have had to wrestle with. The narratives were rarely verbatim transcriptions. Many interviewers altered their subjects’ dialect to make it seem more “authentically” Black. As Catherine Stewart writes in her book, “FWP decisions about how to depict [dialect] on the page reveal more about how the black vernacular was used to represent black identity than about the actual speech patterns of ex-slave informants.” And historians have worried that in a violent, segregated society, when white interviewers showed up on a Black person’s doorstep, the formerly enslaved might have told the interviewers what they thought they wanted to hear, rather than what had actually happened.

The project did employ some Black interviewers, but the majority were white southerners. Some were the descendants of slaveholders—in certain cases, descendants of the families that had enslaved the very same people they were sent to interview—or members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization known for pushing a narrative of slavery that was sympathetic to the Confederate cause.

Anna Deavere Smith: We were the last of the nice Negro girls

When Stephanie Jones-Rogers, a historian at UC Berkeley and the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South , showed early portions of her book to friends, some questioned why she hadn’t changed the language of the interviews. They worried that the narratives portrayed formerly enslaved people as uneducated and illiterate. “There may have been some manipulation,” Jones-Rogers told me, and that should be accounted for and taken seriously. Still, she felt that changing the language would risk changing the specific meaning behind how these individuals wanted to tell their story. And it would ignore the fact that, unfortunately, many of them were , by nature of circumstance, uneducated and illiterate—a reflection of the way the insidious legacy of slavery had continued to shape their lives.

Daina Ramey Berry, the chair of the history department at the University of Texas at Austin, told me that there is no source a historian can use that isn’t compromised by bias in some way, and the notion that we should ignore the narratives because of their imperfections would mean applying a standard to them that is not applied across the board. “The big excuses that people have as to why they push back against them is that they’ll say, ‘Well, they’re biased,’ ” she said. “And I’m always like, ‘I don’t understand why you can read a plantation owner’s letters, or his journal—or her journal—and not even question that.’ ”

Lewis understood his relatives’ concerns. Still, he couldn’t help but feel disappointed that they didn’t appreciate how remarkable it was that this narrative existed at all. For Lewis, it was a piece of history, a piece of them. It was like finding treasure—even if the jewels aren’t cut as cleanly as you’d like, they’re still worth something.

Explore the March 2021 Issue

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

Lewis’s interest in history would ultimately change the course of his life. As he was doing his genealogical research, he went all the way back to the American Revolution, trying to discover whether he had relatives who had been enslaved in the British colonies. He came across the book Black Genealogy , by the historian Charles L. Blockson. There, Lewis encountered the story of a man named Edward “Ned” Hector, a Black soldier who fought in the Revolutionary War, one of thousands of Black people to fight on the side of the Americans. During the Battle of Brandywine, in September 1777, Hector and his regiment were under attack and ordered to abandon their guns and retreat for safety. Hector, however, seized as many abandoned guns as he could, threw them in his wagon, and warded off British soldiers to salvage the only equipment his company had left.

Learning about Hector was transformative for Lewis. He thought this history of Black contributions to the American project should be taught in his children’s classrooms—but not just through books or lectures. The history had to be brought to life. It had to be made real. “So I figured it would be a much better way of getting across to the kids about Hector if I came as Hector,” he said.

His first presentation was in his daughter’s fifth-grade classroom, in a makeshift costume that he still laughs about today. His pants were blue hospital scrubs, with a pair of long white socks pulled over the bottoms of the legs. He wore a yellow linen vest, a souvenir-shop tricornered hat, and a woman’s blouse. “It was very bad, extremely bad,” he said. Still, the teachers and students loved his presentation, and he was asked to come back again. And again. “After a while, one of the teachers said, ‘You got something really good here. Maybe you might want to consider taking this more public, out to other schools and places.’ I thought about that. And I said, ‘You know, that’s not a bad idea.’ ”

About three years later, Lewis decided to leave his full-time job running an electronics-repair shop so he could dedicate more time to his reenactment work, which he had begun getting paid to do. Since then, he’s performed as Ned Hector in classrooms, at memorial sites, and at community festivals and has become a staple of the colonial-reenactment community.

In a video of one performance , he’s dressed in a blue wool jacket—typical of those worn by American soldiers during the Revolutionary War—and a matching tricornered hat with a large red feather. In his hands, the musket he holds is not simply a musket, but an instrument that helps him transport the audience back more than two centuries. It becomes a paddle, rising and falling in front of his chest as he tells the story of Black soldiers helping other American troops cross a river during battle. He places it just below his chin as if it were a microphone amplifying his story, or a light meant to illuminate his face in the darkness.

In another video , Lewis stands in front of a school group. “How would you like to have your families, your loved ones, dying for somebody else’s freedom, only to be forgotten by them?” He pauses and scans the crowd. “If you are an American , you share in African American history, because these people helped you to be free.”

Watching Lewis, I was impressed by how he brought the Revolution to life in ways that my textbooks never had. How he told stories of the role Black people played in the war that I had never heard before. How in school—except for Crispus Attucks’s martyrdom during the Boston Massacre—I don’t think I had ever been made to consider that Black people were part of the American Revolution at all. It reminded me of how so much of Black history is underreported, misrepresented, or simply lost. How so many stories that would give us a fuller picture of America are known by so few Americans.

I n the photograph accompanying the interview of Carter J. Johnson, he stands in front of a wooden cabin in the town of Tatum, Texas. He wears denim overalls and a collared shirt. His head is cocked, his brow furrowed. On the porch behind him is a woman in a patterned dress.

Janice Crawford had never seen a photo of her mother’s father. When she saw this picture, she told me, it was listed under the name Carter J. Jackson, but Crawford couldn’t find a Carter Jackson in the census records for that area. She recognized some of the names he mentioned in his narrative from her genealogical research, and showed the photo to her mother, who immediately recognized her father. Carter J. Jackson was in fact Carter J. Johnson. The interviewer must have made a mistake.

Crawford’s mother was born to two unwed parents. They lived nearby, but the man she called Papa, the man she always thought of as her father, was Carter Johnson. Johnson, a deacon in the local church, and his wife, Sally Gray Johnson (whom Crawford called Big Mama, and who is the woman on the porch in the photo), took her in and raised her as their own. Crawford never knew her grandfather—he died nine years before she was born—but his presence was still in the air as she grew up.

Crawford’s mother didn’t have a photograph of her father, and it meant a great deal to Crawford to be able to give her one. “It was very emotional to me,” she said.

She remembers her mother telling her a story, long before she read it in the narrative, about how Johnson and other enslaved people had been forced to walk from Alabama to Texas while guiding their owner’s cattle and horses and a flock of turkeys the entire way. She couldn’t understand how someone could make other people walk so far, for so long.

In the narrative, Johnson says that his mother, a woman named Charlotte from Tennessee, and his father, a man named Charles from Florida, had each been sold to a man named Parson Rogers and that he’d brought them to Alabama, where Johnson was born.

Johnson says that in 1863—the year President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation—Rogers brought 42 of his enslaved workers to Texas, where the proclamation was not being enforced. There, they continued to be enslaved by Rogers for four years after the war ended .

What Johnson describes was not uncommon. Despite the Emancipation Proclamation, enslavers throughout the Confederacy continued to hold Black people in bondage for the rest of the war. And even after General Robert E. Lee surrendered, on April 9, 1865, effectively signaling that the Confederacy had lost the war, many enslavers in Texas and other states did not share this news with their human property. In the narratives, formerly enslaved people recount how the end of their bondage did not correspond with military edicts or federal legislation. Rather, emancipation was a long, inconsistent process that delayed the moments when people first tasted freedom.

Johnson’s narrative opens and closes with stories of separation. Near the beginning he says:

I had seven brothers call Frank and Benjamin and Richardson and Anderson and Miles, Emanuel and Gill, and three sisters call Milanda, Evaline and Sallie, but I don’t know if any of ’em are livin’ now.

Then, toward the end, he speaks about the last time he saw his mother:

Me and four of her chillen standin’ by when mammy’s sold for $500.00. Cryin’ didn’t stop ’em from sellin’ our mammy ’way from us.

“The fact that his mother and several of his siblings were sold away, and he was standing there watching this happen,” Crawford said, her voice cracking. “That’s just—that’s just heartbreaking.”

I asked Crawford about the first line of Johnson’s narrative, a line striking in how direct it is:

If you’s wants to know ’bout slavery time, it was Hell.

“Well, you know, it’s just kind of gut-wrenching, isn’t it?” she said. “It was hell. And that’s the word. When my mother saw that word she just kind of jumped. Because she said she’d never heard him curse. And to her, he wasn’t talking about heaven and hell, in the way that, you know, a preacher or minister might. And it was jarring to her.”

Carter J. Johnson archival photo; photo of Emma Lee Johnson as a child

Crawford’s genealogical research was driven in part by a desire to trace her biological lineage, because her mother had been adopted. But she also began searching for those who had enslaved her family. In the census records, she found a Rogers who matched her grandfather’s description of “Massa Rogers.” Then, in a Texas newspaper, she found an article written by one of Rogers’s descendants that celebrated the family’s local history, despite all that that history included.

“These folks are proud of their heritage,” Crawford told me. “Even though it includes the fact that their people enslaved other people.”

Crawford wrote to the newspaper, which put her in touch with the article’s author. She didn’t say that his family had enslaved hers. She simply said that, based on her research, the two families were “connected.” But she believes he understood. It was a small town, and the names she mentioned should have made the nature of the connection obvious.

I wondered what Crawford had been hoping to get from these exchanges. Did she want an apology? A relationship? Something else?

She told me she’d been looking for information about her family, trying to recover names of ancestors that had never entered the public record. The man promised to send her some documents from his family members but never did. More important, she added, “I was hoping that they’re acknowledging our humanity. And that just like he is interested in and proud of his ancestry, so am I.”

“I would like to say that I’m an observer, and that I can be emotionally detached,” she said, but “it just brings tears to my eyes, how they were treated.” One of the things that left Crawford most unsettled was that the Rogers family back then had claimed to espouse the principles of Christianity. “The people that enslaved my ancestors were ministers, pastors, preachers.”

For Crawford, reading Johnson’s words was the entry point into an entire world of ex-slave narratives. “They really weren’t fed well. They weren’t housed well. They were just required to work from sunup to sundown. They were whipped,” she told me. “It is horrendous. But still, in all, I feel so blessed to have found that document.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because it’s a link to our shared history,” she said. “We existed. We conquered. We overcame.”

L ucy Brown didn’t know her age when she was interviewed for the Federal Writers’ Project on May 20, 1937, in Durham, North Carolina. She had no birth certificate, no sense of what year she’d come into this world. Brown’s testimony is shorter than many of the others, in part because she was so young—perhaps only 6 or 7—as slavery entered its final days.

“I wuz jist a little thing when de war wuz over,” she said.

We belonged to John Neal of Person County. I doan know who my pappy wuz, but my mammy wuz named Rosseta an’ her mammy’s name ’fore her wuz Rosseta. I had one sister named Jenny an’ one brother named Ben.

The narrative is a mix of small memories she carried with her from her early childhood and memories that had been passed on to her from her mother.

Gregory Freeland, like both Lewis and Crawford, came across the narrative of his great-great-grandmother while researching his family history. He was raised just outside Durham, where he lived with his mother and his great-grandmother—Lucy’s daughter. He found the narrative only after she had died.

When Freeland was a child, his family members would tell stories about their lives, but he wasn’t interested in hearing them. “I was sort of ready to get away from that, that slavery thing,” he told me. “So I never paid attention. It seemed like schoolwork.”

Now he wishes he’d asked his great-grandmother about her life, and her mother’s life. He felt grateful for having stumbled onto this narrative, and for how connected it made him feel to a history that he’d previously taken for granted. “This is the link to the past,” he said.

Freeland was drafted in 1967 to serve in the Vietnam War. He was stationed in Korea when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and according to Freeland, the Army worked to “keep the temperature down” after King’s death so that Black soldiers—who were fighting a war for a country that still didn’t afford them basic rights—wouldn’t get too upset. The strange dissonance of being sent to the other side of the world to fight for a country that had just killed the leader of your people stayed with Freeland long after he came back to the U.S.

The GI Bill paid for him to go to college, and covered most of graduate school, where he studied political science. For the past 30 years, he’s been a professor at California Lutheran University, where he teaches courses on race, politics, and the civil-rights movement—subjects he feels are urgent and necessary for students at this college with a tiny Black population.

He told me he’s “trying to keep this history alive, because it’s getting further and further away.”

The Durham of Freeland’s childhood smelled of tobacco. He remembers the ubiquity of chicken noises, mixed with music from people’s houses as they sang while they cooked or listened to the radio on the porch. His family grew fruits and vegetables in their yard, and Freeland helped kill the chickens and hogs they raised. “I had to go out and wring the chickens’ neck,” he told me. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it happen, but you grab the chicken by the neck and wring it, wring it, wring it until the body pops off. And when the body pops off, it flops around for a while.”

“My students,” he said, “they can’t fathom that life was like that.”

Freeland grew up in the same town where his great-great-grandmother had settled after the Civil War. Known then as Hickstown—named for a white landowner, Hawkins Hicks—the community had begun as an agricultural settlement for the formerly enslaved on the western edge of Durham. Over the course of several decades, it became a self-reliant Black community where the formerly enslaved, their children, and their children’s children all lived together. This history is reflected in Lucy Brown’s narrative:

I can’t tell yo’ my age but I will tell yo’ dat eber’body what lives in dis block am either my chile or gran’chile. I can’t tell yo’ prexackly how many dar is o’ ’em, but I will tell you dat my younges’ chile’s baby am fourteen years old, an’ dat she’s got fourteen youngun’s, one a year jist lak I had till I had sixteen.

As nearby Duke University grew, so too did Hickstown, which became known as Crest Street. Residents served as food-service workers, housekeepers, maintenance staff. By the 1970s, the community had more than 200 households, and more than 60 percent of residents worked for the university, according to the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina. This included Freeland’s mother, who walked every day from the dirt roads surrounding their home to the paved streets near Duke. And though many of the jobs available did not pay much, it was a tight-knit community of people deeply invested in one another, and in the history of the community their ancestors had built.

Crest Street came under threat in the 1970s with the planned expansion of the East-West Expressway, which would slice directly through the center of this century-old Black community. The residents decided to fight the plan . They hired a team of lawyers and filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Transportation, citing Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination “under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” In 1980, the U.S. Department of Transportation ruled that the highway project could not move forward as proposed, because it would disproportionately affect Black residents.

Representatives from the North Carolina Department of Transportation and members of the Crest Street community began meeting to see if they could come to an agreement. Crest Street residents invited officials to visit their homes, so that they could see what the construction project would have demolished. Ultimately, a compromise was reached in which the residents would all move to an area that was adjacent to their original neighborhood, keeping the community largely intact.

Listening to Freeland tell this story, I thought about how remarkable it was that in this same place where formerly enslaved people had built a community for themselves after generations of bondage, Black people once again had to defend themselves against a government that was attempting to take away a sort of freedom.

For Freeland, stories of towns like Crest Street, and the activists who kept the community together, are just as essential to document as the stories of his formerly enslaved great-great-grandmother. “I’d like to interview people who lived through the segregationist era,” he told me. “And I’d like to interview those people who participated in making change—Black people who are maybe my age, who grew up in this kind of community—before we pass on.”

“Who is going to remember,” he said, “if nobody’s there to tell it?”

Freeland is right. There are other stories of the Black experience that should be collected—and soon. Recently, I’ve become convinced of the need for a large-scale effort to document the lives of people who lived through America’s southern apartheid; who left the land their families had lived on for generations to make the Great Migration to the North and West; who were told they were second-class citizens and then lived to see a person who looked like them ascend to the highest office in the land. Their stories exist in our living rooms, on our front porches, and on the lips of people we know and love. But too many of these stories remain untold, in many cases because no one has asked.

What would a new Federal Writers’ Project look like? How could we take the best of what the narratives of the 1930s did and build on them, while avoiding the project’s mistakes?

When I raised the idea with the historians I interviewed, their voices lit up with energy as they imagined what such a project might look like.

“Historians would definitely need to be in charge,” Stephanie Jones-Rogers told me. Specifically, Black scholars should lead the project. “There’s a way in which to not only center the Black experience, but also to privilege Black intellect, Black brilliance,” she said. “It would be a project like none we’ve ever seen.”

Daina Ramey Berry thought family members should conduct the interviews. “Almost like a StoryCorps on NPR,” she said, “because I think you’re going to get a more authentic story about what life was like.” Berry thought that even well-intentioned strangers might re-create some of the same dynamics in place in the 1930s. She worried about the implications, again, of having federal workers going into older Black folks’ homes and asking them deeply personal questions about what may have been a traumatic time in their lives.

Catherine Stewart believes that there would be important benefits to having such a project led by the federal government: “Funding, first and foremost, at a level other agencies and nonprofit organizations simply don’t have.” She added that the federal government already has the infrastructure this sort of project would require—in places like the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Library of Congress. The government also has the ability to ensure that the public has access to it.

When I began reading the Federal Writers’ Project ex-slave narratives, I thought about my own grandparents. I thought about my grandfather, and how his grandfather had been born into bondage. About my grandmother, and how the grandparents who raised her had been born just after abolition. About how, in the scope of human history, slavery was just a few moments ago. I thought, too, of everything my grandmother and grandfather have seen—born in 1939 Jim Crow Florida and 1930 Jim Crow Mississippi, respectively, and now living through the gravest pandemic in a century and watching their great-grandchildren, my children, grow up over FaceTime.

About a year ago, I decided to interview them. I spoke with them each individually, an audio recorder sitting on the table between us, and listened as they told me stories about their lives that I had never heard. My grandfather and his siblings hid in the back room under a bed while white supremacists rode on horseback through their community to intimidate Black residents. As my grandmother walked to school on the red-dirt roads of northern Florida, white children passing by on school buses would lower their windows and throw food at her and the other Black children. For as much time as I’d spent with them, these were the sorts of stories I hadn’t heard before. The sorts of stories that are not always told in large groups at Thanksgiving while you’re trying to prevent your toddler from throwing mac and cheese across the room.

My children will, in a few decades, be living in a world in which no one who experienced the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 will still be alive. What happens to those people’s stories if they are not collected? What happens to our understanding of that history if we have not thoroughly documented it?

Some of this work is already being done—by the Southern Oral History Program and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, for instance—but not on a scale commensurate with what the Federal Writers’ Project did. That requires financial and political investment. It requires an understanding of how important such a project is.

Imagine if the government were to create a new Federal Writers’ Project. One committed to collecting, documenting, and sharing the stories of Black people who lived through Jim Crow, of Japanese Americans who lived through internment, of Holocaust refugees who resettled in America, of veterans who fought in World War II and the Vietnam War. And stories like those of the people in Freeland’s great-great-grandmother’s town, who fought to keep their community together when the state wanted to split it apart. There are millions of people who experienced extraordinary moments in American history, and who won’t be around much longer to tell us about them. Some of these moments are ones we should be proud of, and some should fill us with shame. But we have so much to learn from their stories, and we have a narrowing window of time in which to collect them.

I keep thinking of something Freeland told me, and how his words speak to both the stakes and the possibility of this moment.

“We survived,” he said. “And I’m still around.”

Next: Read Damon Young on the man who who photographed Black Pittsburgh.

This article appears in the March 2021 print edition with the headline “We Mourn for All We Do Not Know.”

Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation and Freedom

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Collections in Context
Teaching the Collection
Advanced Collection Research

Memoirs and Slave Narratives

While the SAEF project includes many materials created by African Americans, a special category among these are memoirs and autobiographies. The publications give us unique insights into the experiences of Black people, enslaved and free, by sharing the details of their lives. "Slave Narrative" is the term given to this literary genre, serving a powerful role in the independence and political identity of many Black people.

Ukawsaw Gronniosaw's Narrative

Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, who also used the English name James Albert, published the first known English-language slave narrative. This eighteenth-century story of an African man's journey from freedom in Bornu (now Nigeria) to enslavement in the Americas and final to freedom again, this time in England, captured the attention of many who had ignored the plight of slavery. Scholar Henry Louis Gates, however, points out that this early narrative is different from later narratives, which generally had a strong abolitionist stance. Gronniosaw's narrative was so popular in England, it was translated into other languages. SAEF contains both English and Welsh language copies.

Popular Literature: Types of Narrative

From the eighteenth century through the end of the nineteenth, slave narratives were perhaps the most widely published form of African American literature. Formerly enslaved people published detailed stories of their sufferings, self-emancipations, fugitivity, and freedom with active spiritual and political goals. Thousands of narratives were recorded in this time, and over a hundred were published in full pamphlet or book form.

Spiritual Focus

Many Black writers used their narratives to promote their own religious conversion or evangelical missions. Examples in the SAEF collection include:

John Jea, The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher , 1811
Daniel H. Peterson, The Looking-Glass: Being a True Report and Narrative of the Life, Travels, and Labors of the Rev. Daniel H. Peterson, a Colored Clergyman; Embracing a Period of Time from the Year 1812 to 1854, and Including His Visit to Western Africa , 1854

Abolitionist Focus

Other Black authors used their narratives to focus primarily on abolitionist political goals. Examples in the SAEF collection include:

Moses Roper, A Narrative of Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery , London, 1837
Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself , Boston, 1849
William Wells Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave , Boston, 1847

Progressive Goals

Especially following the Civil War, though in some cases before, narratives began to have an expanded focus on successful life post-slavery. Examples in the SAEF collection include:

Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House , 1868
Austin Steward, Twenty-two years a slave, and forty years a freeman; embracing a correspondence of several years, while president of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada West , 1857
Samuel Harrison, Rev. Samuel Harrison : his life story as told by himself , 1899

Slave Narrative: Formal Style

Autobiography scholar James Olney provided a primer to the standard format for this literary genre in his 1984 article "I Was Born": Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature ," one that can be traced in many of our examples:

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The freedom to remember: narrative, slavery, and gender in contemporary Black women's fiction

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Nicole M Gipson

Nicole M Gipson PhD

In 1780, my ancestor Marguerite escaped the Guillory plantation in Opelousas in the Louisiana Territory. She traveled over two hundred kilometers and arrived in New Orleans where she became a free woman. Now within her rights and despite her illiteracy, she sued her former owners for the freedom of her four children - and won. This memoir deals with both the historical Marguerite and her legal battles for freedom for herself and her children and picks up her fictional avatar, 'Binta' where the facts leave off.

SMART M O V E S J O U R N A L IJELLH

Abstract Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) is a modern day rendition of the nineteenth-century genre of the slave narrative. This fictionalized narrative, based on the true story of Margaret Garner, a slave woman from Kentucky, falls under the rubric of the neoslave narrative. This new literary form is developed by the twentieth-century writers to engage their historical and literary past. The paper analyses how Morrison’s Beloved as a twentieth-century “slave narrative” re-reads nineteenth-century female slave author Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and fills up the silences left in the work of the earlier Black woman. This text is not the simple renewal of the nineteenth-century narrative as it revises and recreates the concept of sexuality and motherhood, two vital concerns of Black women. Keywords: Slave narrative, sexuality, motherhood, recreates.

The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism's Philosophy of History

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Markus Nehl focuses on black authors who, from a 21st-century perspective, revisit slavery in the U.S., Ghana, South Africa, Canada and Jamaica. Nehl's provocative readings of Toni Morrison's A Mercy, Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother, Yvette Christiansë's Unconfessed, Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes and Marlon James's The Book of Night Women delineate how these texts engage in a fruitful dialogue with African diaspora theory about the complex relation between the local and transnational and the enduring effects of slavery. Reflecting on the ethics of narration, this study is particularly attentive to the risks of representing anti-black violence and to the intricacies involved in (re-)appropriating slavery's archive.

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White Slave Fiction, So-Called

Article contents
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Laura R Fisher, White Slave Fiction, So-Called, American Literary History , Volume 33, Issue 1, Spring 2021, Pages 29–49, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajaa043

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In the early twentieth century, the widespread belief that young white women were at risk of being captured and forced into sex work led to significant legislative victories, and this crisis also shaped US literature in surprising ways. When writing about so-called white slavery crossed over from the spheres of journalism, social reform, and the law into fiction, authors devised a suite of quasi-empirical literary techniques that turned the dubious facts of white slavery into the stuff of popular art. Novelists drew heavily on juridical and social scientific evidence to lend authority and specificity to stories that they insisted (counterfactually) were gravely true. White slavery fiction marries empiricism with sensationalism, data with melodrama, cold statistics with exaggeration and falsehood. This essay examines the literary empiricism of Reginald Wright Kauffman’s 1910 novel The House of Bondage and the amateur literary criticism of progressive anti-vice reformers to examine a tradition of mutual borrowing between nonfictional genres such as the report, tract, and newsletter and modern US fiction. An analogy between slavery and forced sex work was pivotal to the social critique that white slavery novels existed to forward. Yet the genre’s catalyzing metaphor circulated a radically dehistoricized, racist conception of enslavement for a twentieth-century white readership, drawing its figurative vocabulary and sense of political urgency from chattel slavery while eliminating any concern with Black men, women, or children.

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Writing Tips

Tuesday, October 02, 2018

Writing about slavery in historical fiction.

The Nailers all returned to work & executing well some heavy orders, as one from D. Higinb.m for 30.000. Xd. Moses, Jam Hubbard Davy & Shephard still out & to remain till you order otherwise—Joe cuting nails—I had given a charge of lenity respecting all: (Burwell absolutely excepted from the whip alltogether) before you wrote: none have incurred it but the small ones for truancy & yet the work proceeds better than since George.

Our Shared Responsibility

Writing slavery in historical fiction, 1. don’t sanitize the truth., 2. but don’t glorify it either., 3. remember to write people who are people..

1. Are there two named characters of color? 2. Do they have dialogue? 3. Are they not romantically involved with one another? 4. Do they have any dialogue that isn’t comforting or supporting a white character? 5. Is one of them visibly not magic ?

Understand What You’re Taking On

3 comments:.

Great post. Thought-provoking. I'm writing about blacks and whites in 1952 (but reflecting back on slavery issues). It's tough to write authentically. Thanks for all your observations.

This is very timely to me as I have a friend who was lip-lashed for writing about slavery in her historical novel, by an editor. I am sending her the link. Thanks for this.

I've been considering a story idea that would require involving slavery. I've not done a historically based novel before and the idea of traversing a story terrain with slavery in the thick of its folds has been a bit daunting. I find your tips very helpful as I work through building this story idea out. Thank you very much. And yes, this is now one of my bookmarks for quick reference.

American Literary History

White Slave Fiction, So-Called

Laura R. Fisher
Oxford University Press
Volume 33, Number 1, Spring 2021
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In the early twentieth century, the widespread belief that young white women were at risk of being captured and forced into sex work led to significant legislative victories, and this crisis also shaped US literature in surprising ways. When writing about so-called white slavery crossed over from the spheres of journalism, social reform, and the law into fiction, authors devised a suite of quasi-empirical literary techniques that turned the dubious facts of white slavery into the stuff of popular art. Novelists drew heavily on juridical and social scientific evidence to lend authority and specificity to stories that they insisted (counterfactually) were gravely true. White slavery fiction marries empiricism with sensationalism, data with melodrama, cold statistics with exaggeration and falsehood. This essay examines the literary empiricism of Reginald Wright Kauffman's 1910 novel The House of Bondage and the amateur literary criticism of progressive anti-vice reformers to examine a tradition of mutual borrowing between nonfictional genres such as the report, tract, and newsletter and modern US fiction. An analogy between slavery and forced sex work was pivotal to the social critique that white slavery novels existed to forward. Yet the genre's catalyzing metaphor circulated a radically dehistoricized, racist conception of enslavement for a twentieth-century white readership, drawing its figurative vocabulary and sense of political urgency from chattel slavery while eliminating any concern with Black men, women, or children.

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Top 30 Books About Slavery (Fiction)

Many historical fiction authors have confronted our nation’s cruel, inhumane past by crafting books about slavery.

In the early 17th century, Dutch traders first captured Africans for forced labor in tobacco fields and planted the seeds of slavery in America. All Thirteen Colonies legalized slavery, but it was particularly important to the South’s economy. Large cotton plantations below the Maxon-Dixon line used and abused slaves sold through the Atlantic slave trade.

After the bloody Civil War ended in 1865, slavery was formally abolished in the United States. However, slavery is still practiced today with an estimated 30 million living enslaved worldwide.

Books about slavery don’t shy away from this traumatic social justice issue; they follow characters living through its brutal effects. Even in the fiction genre, authors pull our attention and heartstrings by portraying historically accurate accounts on the reality of slavery. Readers connect with dehumanized slaves who are severed from their African homeland and forced into unspeakable acts. Certain scenes can be tough to witness, but books about slavery also celebrate the ingenuity and bravery of slaves who fought for freedom. Back-breaking work and deprivation lead to stories of triumph over great adversity.

Gain a better appreciation for African American history by picking up the following books about slavery.

#1 – The Glory Field

Walter dean myers.

the-glory-field-books-about-slavery-fiction

Spanning nearly 250 years, The Glory Field is an emotionally charged YA novel about the ongoing turmoil of one African American family. The story begins with young Muhammad Bilal who’s captured in Sierra Leone and sent to the Americas on a slave ship. Readers then meet one of Muhammad’s descendants, Lizzy, who works on the Live Oaks plantation in South Carolina. After the Civil War ends, Lizzy’s son Elijah struggles for freedom in Chicago.

#2 – The Confessions of Nat Turner

William styron.

the-confessions-of-nat-turner-books-about-slavery-fiction

Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Styron’s controversial novel tells a first-person narrative about a Black slave named Nat Turner. In 1831, Nat leads a slave revolt that causes the deaths of dozens of white people in Virginia. After capture, he’s urged by a smug attorney, Thomas Gray, to “confess” his crimes. Nat Turner tells his story through flashbacks from a jail cell while awaiting execution.

#3 – The Book of Negroes

Lawrence hill.

the-book-of-negroes-books-about-slavery-fiction

Adapted into a television mini-series, The Book of Negroes introduces an 11-year-old Aminata Diallo as she’s captured from her West African village in 1750. She’s shackled aboard a slave ship and sent to a cruel master, Robinson Appleby. But Solomon Lindo, an Indigo grader, helps Aminata escape to New York. There she’s recruited by the Black British Loyalists and makes a tension-filled passage with 1,200 former slaves back to Africa.

#4 – Beloved

Toni morrison.

Toni Morrison’s spell-binding novel tells the harrowing tale of Sethe, a young mother who escapes slavery at the Sweet Home plantation. After just 28 days of freedom in Ohio, a posse hunts her under the Fugitive Slave Act. Fated for abuse and torture, Sethe kills her two-year old daughter before her capture. But years later when the Civil War ends, the child’s ghost appears to haunt Sethe’s home.

#5 – Nightjohn

Gary paulsen.

One of Gary Paulsen’s most popular books about slavery is Nightjohn. Set in the 1850s on the Waller plantation, this YA novel is narrated by a young female slave named Sarny. She witnesses a scarred man being dragged and beaten in chains. Sarny learns that the man, John, was an escaped slave who returned to teach others to read. John begins teaching Sarny the alphabet, despite threats of dismemberment.

#6 – Copper Sun

Sharon m. draper.

As a National Book Award finalist, Copper Sun is a multi-faceted story painting the shocking reality of the Atlantic slave trade. 15-year-old Amari is happily living in an Ashanti village when slavers invade and murder her family. With her beloved Besa, Amari’s shackled and sent to auction in the Carolinas. Percival Derby purchases her as his son’s 16th birthday present. Amari’s systemically raped and stripped of everything, except hope.

#7 – Roots: The Saga of an American Family

roots-the-saga-of-an-american-family-books-about-slavery-fiction

Published in 1976, Roots is perhaps one of the most well-known books about slavery in America. Kunta Kinte, a young Gambian man, is captured and sent to Maryland on a British slave ship. After being bought by John Waller, Kunta tries to escape four times. Hunters eventually cripple him by amputating his right foot. Kunta marries Waller’s cook, Bell, and the saga follows the enslaved lives of their descendants.

#8 – Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet beecher stowe.

uncle-toms-cabin-books-about-slavery-fiction

Noted as the 19th century’s second best-selling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a literary masterpiece centered on Uncle Tom, a long-suffering Black slave. To pay master Shelby’s debt, Tom is sold and sent down the Mississippi River. Thus begins Tom’s plight of being traded to several brutal slave masters. Despite unbearable anguish, he remains dedicated to inspiring fellow slaves and preaching the Word of God.

#9 – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

adventures-of-huckleberry-finn-books-about-slavery-fiction

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gives insights into pre-Civil War culture in the Mississippi River Valley through the eyes of a curious 13-year-old boy. Raised by the town drunk, Huck is placed in Miss Watson’s guardianship. However, his father kidnaps him and takes him to Jackson’s Island. Here Huck is reunited with Watson’s slave, Jim, who has escaped auction. Together the pair venture towards freedom in Illinois.

#10 – Gone With the Wind

Margaret mitchell.

gone-with-the-wind-books-about-slavery-fiction

Most identify Gone With the Wind for the love story between Rhett and Scarlett, but the Southern fiction novel also offers perspective on slavery. Scarlett O’Hara is the spoiled young daughter of a wealthy slaveholder in Georgia. As Civil War sparks, the plantation’s men rush off to battle. Union soldiers soon loot her home in Sherman’s March to the Sea, leaving Scarlett desperate and penniless.

#11 – Invisible Man

Ralph ellison.

invisible-man-books-about-slavery-fiction

Ralph Ellison’s debut bildungsroman novel introduces a young, nameless Black man whose color renders him invisible. Once his high school’s valedictorian, the narrator has been expelled from his Southern Negro college for showing the reality of Black life to a white trustee. Puzzled, he moves north to New York City to seek truth. He finds a mixed-race “Brotherhood” and joins the fight for equality tracing back to slavery.

#12 – The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

Ernest j. gaines.

the-autobiography-of-miss-jane-pittman-books-about-slavery-fiction

Dramatized on TV by actress Cicely Tyson, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a realistic fiction novel depicting a Black woman who has lived 110 years. Jane was born into slavery on a Louisiana plantation. Orphaned, she works in the Big House until she’s freed under the Emancipation Proclamation. From Ohio to Texas, the story follows Jane’s legendary life through the Black Power movement of the 1960s.

#13 – The Book of Night Women

Marlon james.

the-book-of-night-women-books-about-slavery-fiction

Though fiction, Marlon James’ novel explores the real, cruel practices of slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the 18th century. Lilith, a daring green-eyed orphan, was born into slavery. As she matures, her beauty draws unwanted attention and Lilith must fight off rape. She’s then placed under Homer’s care at the Big House. Here Lilith learns that Homer leads the Night Women, a female slave group plotting revolt.

#14 – Mandingo

Kyle onstott.

Mandingo centers around a fictional Alabama plantation called Falconhurst that’s owned by Warren Maxwell and his son Hammond. The slaves are treated as animals and forced to breed to produce enslaved children for auction. When traveling to his Cousin Beatrix’s plantation, Hammond purchases a virile Mandingo slave named Ganymede. The Maxwells soon capitalize on Mede’s unparalleled strengths by forcing fighting matches and wagering their bets.

#15 – Cane River

Lalita tademy.

Touted among the best books about slavery by Oprah’s Book Club, Cane River follows five generations of African American women. The story begins in 1834 with nine-year-old Suzette, a house servant for a Creole planter. Her life dreams are dashed when a Frenchman makes her his mistress. Suzette’s daughter, Philomene, faces a similar fate in Narcisse Fredieu’s “side family.” But can her light-skinned daughter, Emily, find hope after the Civil War?

#16 – Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons

Ann rinaldi.

hang-a-thousand-trees-with-ribbons-books-about-slavery-fiction

Belonging to Ann Rinaldi’s Great Episodes series, this historical fiction novel portrays the life of Phillis Wheatley. Born in Senegal, she recounts her capture by African slavers and her horrendous journey on the Middle Passage. In America, Phillis’ is sold to John Wheatley in 1761. The prominent master educates her and encourages her to write. Soon Phillis stuns the nation by becoming the first published Black poet.

#17 – Absalom! Absalom!

William faulkner.

absalom-absalom-books-about-slavery-fiction

Absalom! Absalom! is a Southern Gothic novel focused on Thomas Sutpen, a poor white man from West Virginia. Thomas travels with some slaves to Jefferson, Mississippi, with the goal of gaining wealth. He purchases spacious land from a Native American tribe and erects Sutpen’s Hundred. Soon Thomas Sutpen is married to Ellen Coldfield and a powerful plantation patriarch. But his dynasty could fall into decadence as the Civil War rages.

#18 – The Good Lord Bird

James mcbride.

the-good-lord-bird-books-about-slavery-fiction

Among the books about slavery to win the National Book Award for Fiction, The Good Lord Bird tells the story of Henry Shackleford, a young slave in the Kansas Territory. One day, Henry accidentally meets the legendary abolitionist John Brown in a tavern. Disguised as a girl, he escapes with Brown’s help. Soon Henry finds himself joining the anti-slavery crusade and beginning the cataclysmic raid on Harpers Ferry.

#19 – Kindred

Octavia e. butler.

Kindred is a wildly popular time-travel tale centered on a young Black writer, Dana, who lives in California in 1976. While celebrating her 26th birthday, Dana’s abruptly snatched and transported back to the Antebellum South. Here she meets her ancestors: a spoiled white slaveholder and his enslaved concubine. Dana’s summoned to save Rufus, the owner’s drowning son. Each time she’s forced to return, the more dangerous her journey becomes.

#20 – The Kitchen House

Kathleen grissom.

the-kitchen-house-books-about-slavery-fiction

Unlike most books about slavery, The Kitchen House focuses on a young, white girl named Lavinia who’s orphaned on her voyage from Ireland. She’s sent to a 19th century tobacco plantation in Virginia. Belle, the master’s illegitimate Black daughter, takes her under her wing. Lavinia begins caring for the opium-addicted mistress. She attempts befriending the slaves, but finds her skin color leaves her straddling two different worlds.

#21 – Sacred Hunger

Barry unsworth.

sacred-hunger-books-about-slavery-fiction

Taking placed in England during the Age of Enlightenment, Sacred Hunger is a historical novel following Matthew Paris, a physician. His wife Ruth died while he was imprisoned for writings contrary to the Bible. Left with nothing, Paris accepts a job on the Liverpool Merchant, a slave ship owned by his uncle William Kemp. But as the ship sets sail with its African cargo, disease strikes and threatens mutiny.

#22 – I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly

Joyce hansen.

i-thought-my-soul-would-rise-and-fly-books-about-slavery-fiction

Within the Dear America series, this YA novel presents the diary of Patsy, a shy 12-year-old slave living in South Carolina in 1865. After teaching herself to read and write, Patsy secretly records her observations of slave life. She offers glimpses into the changing politics as the Civil War ends and Reconstruction begins. Readers watch as Patsy determines what freedom means to her.

#23 – A Respectable Trade

Philippa gregory.

a-respectable-trade-books-about-slavery-fiction

Taking place in Bristol in 1787, A Respectable Trade introduces Frances Scott, a wealthy, well-connected English woman. She agrees to a mutually convenient marriage with a merchant, Josiah Cole. Together they develop a respectable fortune by trading sugar, rum, and slaves. Mehuru, a former priest from Yoruba, is among their newest slaves. Drawn to his warm, caring nature, Frances finds an intimate bond with Mehuru that sparks forbidden love.

#24 – A Million Nightingales

Susan straight.

a-million-nightingales-books-about-slavery-fiction

Starting the Rio Seco trilogy, Susan Straight introduces Moinette Antoine, a beautiful, self-taught slave of mixed race. At age 14, she’s taken from her mother at the Bordelons’ sugarcane plantation in New Orleans. Despite escape attempts, Moinette is sold to Laurent de la Rosiére. She becomes pregnant by rape and gives birth to a boy, Jean-Paul. With the help of a lawyer, Julien Antoine, Moinette seeks freedom for her son.

#25 – Our Nig

Harriet e. wilson.

Our Nig beautifully fuses two types of books about slavery: the slave narrative and sentimental novel. Harriet E. Wilson is credited with being the first African American novelist published in North America in 1859. In this landmark work, she portrays Frado, a mulatto girl abandoned by her white mother after her father’s death. Frado grows up enslaved on a plantation in 19th century Massachusetts.

#26 – Property

Valerie martin.

Named with the “10 best historical novels” by The Observer, Valerie Martin’s writing weaves the story of Manon Gaudet and her servant, Sarah. As the master’s wife, Manon lives on a thriving sugar plantation in Louisiana. She’s been given Sarah as a wedding present, but resentment of the slave soon grows. Sarah has become her husband’s unwilling mistress. Audiences are drawn into a dramatic triangle set against the backdrop of the Civil War.

#27 – I, Dred Scott

Shelia p. moses.

i-dred-scott-books-about-slavery-fiction

Dred Scott was born into slavery in Virginia in the late 18th century. Growing up with the master’s family, he traveled to several free Northern states. Reaching adulthood with his wife Harriett, Dred learns that the Missouri Compromise’s stipulations would end his slavery. With abolitionist lawyers, he decides to sue for freedom. What ensues is an 11-year legal struggle with the Supreme Court that’s immortalized in U.S. history.

#28 – Sweetsmoke

David fuller.

Sweetsmoke is a meticulously researched historical mystery novel following the life of Cassius Howard, a secretly literate slave. He’s learned that Emoline, a freed Black woman who served as his mentor, has been murdered. Cassius risks everything, including his life, to uncover the answers of her brutal death and avenge her loss. His investigation leads to Underground Railroad conspirators, Northern spies, and an unlikely friend, Quashee.

#29 – Flash for Freedom!

George macdonald fraser.

flash-for-freedom-books-about-slavery-fiction

George MacDonald Fraser’s historical series continues with Flash for Freedom! In this fifth book, a game of cards causes Harry Flashman to forfeit his ambition for the House of Commons. Instead, he settles for the West African slave trade under the command of Captain John Charity Spring. Traveling up the Mississippi River, Flashman finds himself as a plantation slave driver and then a slave stealer assisted by Congressman Abraham Lincoln.

#30 – Chains

Laurie halse anderson.

As the American Revolution begins, 13-year-old slave Isabel is waging her own war for freedom. Upon their master’s death, Isabel and her sister Ruth were promised escape from the brutal bonds of slavery. However, a sudden twist of fate makes them the property of the malicious Lockton family. Isabel connects with a fellow slave, Curzon, who has secret ties with the Patriots. Will she risk becoming a spy to cast off her chains?

These top 30 fiction books about slavery allow readers to view one of America’s most painful periods through the eyes of courageous, inspiring characters seeking to overcome their bondage for liberty.

See also: Top 30 Books About Slavery (Nonfiction)

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The Narrative Matters: Guidelines on Writing about Slavery

January 25, 2016 Cazzie Reyes Opinion News

Earlier this week, one of the headlines in The Guardian posed the question: What happens when children’s books fail to confront the complexity of slavery? Referring to the controversial cover of A Birthday Cake for George Washington depicting a smiling black cook and his daughter baking a cake for the president, the article’s author posits that keeping the narrative about chattel slavery honest is constant work.

In addition, it’s not just representations in popular media and creative mediums that more or less water down the history of slavery. Textbooks such as the one published in Texas saying ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations’ wrongly suggests that slavery was some form of voluntary migrant work. Historic sites and house museums referring to slaves as “servants” in order to dissuade visitors’ discomfort do so at the risk of minimizing the abuses faced by slaves.

Challenges and problems with portrayals of slavery continue on to the present. We’ve already talked about the visual stereotypes for human trafficking . This post discusses points to keep in mind when writing or talking about human trafficking today.

When referring to a person who is or was trafficked, ask what they’d prefer to be called whenever possible. Some want to be identified as victims, while others want to be called survivors. Moreover, there are people that don’t want to be forever associated with those two terms and would like to be acknowledged by the life and work they’ve carried out after their trafficking ordeal.

Next, use adjectives carefully. When describing those in slave-like conditions, it’s easy to see the despair and only call them helpless, hopeless or powerless. However, these words create a savior mindset and ignore the fact that trafficked people have the agency and ability to make choices and be active participants in their own recovery. On that note, avoid infantilizing trafficked people. For example, don’t call women “girls.”

Last, check the text throughout the story to see how individuals are framed. Is the narrative overemphasizing the fact that a trafficked person is also an illegal immigrant? Is the prostituted person called a stripper or a sex worker? Doing so creates bias against him or her, suggests complicity and assigns culpability.

Cite peer reviewed articles and use statistics from reputable sources, but be transparent about the limitations of these studies. Furthermore, be aware of the possibility that what might be true for one group of people might not be true for an individual.

Additionally, try to be inclusive and to reflect the global distribution of human trafficking. Oftentimes, men, boys, women and transgendered people are left out because popular discourse is completely focused on girls forced into prostitution.

To close, just as mentioned in the visual stereotypes post, avoid telling sexualized and graphic stories if the only purpose is to sensationalize or trivialize someone’s experience. There are times when people who survived trafficking wish to disclose all that happened to them, and yes, absolutely give them the space to do that. But, be mindful of how you use their narratives in the future.

Amidst the controversy and social media backlash, Scholastic stopped distributing A Birthday Cake for George Washington . This instance is a reminder of how differently we all interpret and think of slavery. It is also an opportunity for us to reevaluate the way we talk about human trafficking and slavery. After all, the stories that we tell are pivotal to the way that people today – and generations from now – understand slavery, both chattel and its more modern forms.

Topics: News

About the Author

Cazzie Reyes

Cazzie reyes graduated from bradley university with a bachelor's degree in international studies and a minor in women's studies. , related posts.

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Around that same time, my father got a subscription to The New Yorker . (For the cartoons. I’m serious.) I remember one cover had something to do with Malcolm X , and there were these small illustrations of white faces on it, with the words “white devil” floating around them. I saw this magazine in the bathroom a few times a day for a week, and it stung and confused me every time. I didn’t understand it. Why were they devils? Was that even okay to say? Was I a white devil? What the hell did I do?

The next year, I went to junior high in west L.A., a bigger and far more racially diverse school than the one I had graduated from. Because everyone was different at this school, because I was different, I began to truly understand what difference meant. People sometimes identified me as “white girl” in the hallways, and it made sense. After all, I was white. Really white: I burned easily, I wore Converse and shorts from the Gap, and my parents listened to The Grateful Dead . Twice I was asked, snickering, if my name was Becky. I learned some Spanish slang. I learned that some kids went to school on Saturday, to master their parents’ native tongues. A boy in English class pointed out that Black History month was the shortest month of the year–and that blew my mind. It had never occurred to me.

It was at this school, with my sense of self and the world all shook up, that I read Roots . Haley called his book “faction”–fiction mixed with fact, and later genealogists debunked his claim that the book told his actual family history. None of that mattered to me then–or matters now. My teacher had assigned it as a novel, and like all good fiction, it felt authentic. I devoured the book, and I couldn’t get it off my mind. I can still remember how I felt reading the section on the slave ship, Kunta Kinte packed in with hundreds of other slaves: the darkness, the suffering, the stench of bodies. I had learned about the Middle Passage in school, but it wasn’t until it was translated into narrative that it affected me so. I was appalled and frightened by a history I already knew, for the story of slavery is far more powerful than a “unit” on it.

In the eighth grade, I began to understand that I, and every American, had inherited something shameful. I began to connect race to history to power, and it was all because of a book.

2. Reading narrative requires empathy. The character’s perspective becomes your own, and through this relationship you begin to feel as another person would. As I read Roots , I felt what Kunta Kinte felt, saw what he saw, and by becoming him, I understood intimately the horrors of slavery. It’s why nonfiction slave narratives, like those of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass , were so important to the abolitionist movement, and why fictional slave narratives persist today.

But stories also require complicity: the reader participates in the action of the story simply by imagining and interpreting it. As Zadie Smith points out in this short interview :

Fiction is like a hypothetical area in which to act. That’s what Aristotle thought—that fictional narrative was a place to imagine what you would do in this, that, or the other situation. I believe that, and it’s what I love most about fiction.

I agree with Smith here, and it’s why I don’t like books that make that arena of ethics too simplistic. I don’t need my characters to be heroic; in fact, I prefer them not to be. Their choices should be difficult, their situations complicated, and if they emerge from events unaffected or unscathed, then they do not seem authentic. They stop mattering to me.

But what if a novel’s “hypothetical area in which to act” is a historical landscape that places pressures on its characters that we haven’t experienced ourselves? What if that landscape is the antebellum South? My empathy is immediately ignited by these stories, but so too is my complicity. As a white reader, I’m simultaneously made to understand the experience of slavery, and I also must wrestle with how I’m implicated in that past. For although I identify with the book’s main characters, there’s another part of my brain that knows I can’t. If this book were made into a movie, I think, I’d look more like the overseer’s wife than the protagonist . I know I’m not the only one who’s experienced that awful feeling. On goodreads a few months ago, some dolt wrote that he hated books about slavery because, and I paraphrase: “I wasn’t the one to rape your great, great, great grandmother!” In other words, it wasn’t his fault slavery happened, he didn’t want to hear any more about it. And that’s the thing: slave narratives keep us hearing about it, they keep that chain between the past and the present alive. For me, reading one can be complicated and uncomfortable business, and it’s partly why I continue to seek them out.

3. But only partly. In Victor La Valle’s Year in Reading post , he wrote:

I don’t know about you, but when I read that book takes place during slavery my defenses go up immediately. It’s going to be “serious” and “important” and “teach us something” and….oh, I’m sorry, I almost fell asleep.

He’s right–“serious” and “important” are sometimes just synonyms for “boring.” But good books about slavery are readable, very much so. Is it wrong to say they’re entertaining? Well, they can be. This isn’t “tea towel” fiction, it’s fiction where the stakes are high, and people’s lives are at risk. There are secrets. There is real fear. The power dynamics between characters are complicated and fascinating, or they should be. People are fighting for a sliver of self that isn’t owned and denigrated by another person, and that makes me care and keeps me turning the pages.

What research on the subject Jones undertook was, in fact, quickly derailed after he happened upon an account of a white slave owner who spent her days abusing one of her black slaves, a little girl, by beating her head against a wall. “If I had wanted to tell the whole story of slavery, Americans couldn’t have taken that,” Jones told an interviewer. “People want to think that there was slavery, and then we got beyond it. People don’t want to hear that a woman would take a child and bang her head against the wall day after day. It’s nice that I didn’t read all those books. What I would have had to put down is far, far harsher and bleaker.

Marlon James, on the other hand, did seem to read all of those books, and his novel faces those harsh realities head on. But Jones and James’ books are similar in that their characters are multidimensional, no matter their race, and the smallest dramas are specific and deeply felt, which makes these historical backdrops all the more real for a contemporary reader. In the Book of Night Women , for instance, Lilith becomes romantically involved with her Irish overseer, Quinn. He believes, as an Irishman, that he understands oppression as she does, but she knows that can’t be (and we, as readers of this narrative, know it, too). Their relationship is tender and sexy at times, and weird and upsetting at others. And usually it’s all of those qualities simultaneously, and you feel at once turned on, repelled, skeptical, nervous, grateful and vulnerable.

Dana’s white husband Kevin is also taken into the past with her, and it’s here that the book is most compelling and thought-provoking to me. In Maryland, Dana and Kevin must play slave and master in order to spend the night together, and after Kevin’s trapped in the past for years, he takes on the same speech patterns as the whites during that time. The couple want to believe that their personal relationship can remain pure, that the political and social climate of slavery won’t infect their interactions, but that’s impossible. The very first time Dana returns from Maryland, she momentarily mistakes Kevin for a white southerner, out to hurt her, and she is frightened of him. The past has already trespassed onto the present, where she is supposed to feel safe and equal. It happens quickly.

With Kindred , I identified with Dana, even if, were I to time travel back to antebellum Maryland, my problems would probably be more similar to Kevin’s. But like Dana, I’m a woman who lives in Los Angeles. Like Dana, I’m a writer. And like Dana before she time travels, I’ve read about slavery, and so I can only approach it as a reader. Because Dana is a modern woman, she is wearing pants when she is transported, and in antebellum Maryland, characters ask her why she’s dressed as a man. They want to know why she talks as she does. And how she learned to write. They wonder aloud if she thinks she’s white–she sure does carry herself that way. Maybe Dana’s belief in her own equality ties her more strongly to me, a contemporary female reader, than race ties her to the black slaves in antebellum Maryland. Or it only does, until a point. Or it does and it doesn’t, at the same time. Either way, Butler has performed a kind of identity magic trick with her novel. By experiencing this world as Dana does, as any contemporary person would, I too must suffer at the hands of slavery.

Edan Lepucki is a staff writer and contributing editor for The Millions. She is the author of the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me , the New York Times bestselling novel, California , and Woman No. 17 . She is the editor of Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers As We Never Saw Them .

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Your current subscription allows you to be actively logged in on up to three (3) devices simultaneously. click on continue below to log out of other sessions and log in on this device., 15 nonfiction and fiction titles for young readers about slavery in the united states.

As we commemorate the lives and history of Black peoples in the United States this February, SLJ has curated lists of fiction and nonfiction books that can be paired in the classroom to offer a nuanced presentation of major historical events of Black history.

montage of nonfiction covers on the topic of slavery in the U.S.

In this roundup, we feature books that cover some of the experiences lived by the enslaved in this country, from 1619 (the first slave ship) to 1865 (Juneteenth).

Lewis, Cicely. Resistance to Slavery. ISBN 9781728439068. Smith, Elliott. Abolitionism . ISBN 9781728439099. ––––. Jim Crow. ISBN 9781728439075. ––––. The Slave Trade. ISBN 9781728439051. ––––. Slavery and Reconstruction. ISBN 9781728439105. ––––. Slavery and the Civil War. ISBN 9781728439082. ea vol: Lerner. Jan. 2022. Gr 4-8 –This series is part of the Read Woke Books imprint in partnership with Cicely Lewis, who wrote the introductory letter found in each book. The titles cover events and important figures from the beginning of slavery in America up through the Jim Crow era. A note encourages readers to view the photos and illustrations critically, and additional reflection questions are scattered throughout the books. In “Primary Source Voices,” QR codes access recordings of formerly enslaved persons or other historical narratives, while the “Take Action” section offers virtual trips to national historic sites and museums as well as ideas for how to become politically active. There is also a Read Woke reading list in the back matter of each title. VERDICT An important purchase for those who want to broaden the perspectives in their American History collection.

Rolle, Sojourner Kincaid . Free at Last: A Juneteenth Poem . illus. by Alex Bostic. Sterling. May 2022. ISBN 9781454943747. Gr 1-4 –Juneteenth, an important celebration of the end of slavery, was first celebrated in Texas in 1865. This was several years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, when enslaved individuals learned of their freedom. Rolle’s poem offers glimpses of the joy of freedom, the hardships of the years after, and how Juneteenth has evolved over time. Many lines directly quote the Emancipation Proclamation, such as “All who live in bondage here shall from now until be free.” Spreads give more context to the meaning behind the freedom Juneteenth celebrates, through depictions of formerly enslaved individuals moving forward and finally celebrating in modern times with friends and family. The poem has an overall lyrical feel that evokes a range of emotions, from sadness for the realities of the many hardships still faced right after emancipation, to the hope and resilience of newfound freedom. In the author’s note, Rolle includes more of the history behind Juneteenth, which only became recognized as a national holiday in 2021. This book presents historical moments in an accessible way, through artwork and poetry. VERDICT A worthy purchase for elementary libraries needing nonfiction texts for the Juneteenth holiday.

Giddens, Rhiannon. Build a House . illus. by Monica Mikai. Candlewick. Oct. 2022. ISBN 9781536222524. Gr 3 Up –In a few short stanzas, this story-song encapsulates and sets to haunting, minor-key music the African American experience of being taken as slaves and forced to work, then emancipated only to continue to face endless racism. Radiant artwork shows people working hard and trying to make a living as well as the anguish of being displaced and having to start over. At the end of the book, there is a QR code that provides a link to a performance of the song by Giddens on banjo and Yo-Yo Ma on cello that helps bring the musical part of the song alive. This is a difficult topic to discuss with younger children who are typically the audience for picture books, but the historical Black experience in America gains an excellent conversation starter here, in any study about racism or the American past. VERDICT A beautifully illustrated song about the African American experience, with realistic depictions of work and experiences; this is a great choice for libraries looking for new ways to tell stories about slavery, reparations, and the ongoing need for social justice.

Luqman-Dawson, Amina. Freewater . Little, Brown. Feb. 2022. ISBN 9780316056618. Gr 5-8 –Sometimes, to be free, you have to make a life in a place where no one can find you. Freewater is such a place. With their mother leading the way, Homer and his younger sister Ada try to escape their hellish lives of slavery on the Southerland Plantation. But Homer remembers his promise of freedom to his friend Anna; his mother turns back for her but is caught. Homer and Ada run to nearby river and plunge into the raging waters that carry them into the Great Dismal Swamp. Lost and disoriented, they are rescued by Suleman, a mysterious and taciturn guide who leads them through the inhospitable swamp to Freewater, a settlement of escaped men, women, and children living in freedom. Slowly, Homer begins to appreciate living and working together to contribute to the thriving community. But what about his mama? Plagued by guilt about his mother’s capture, Homer decides to return to the plantation to rescue his mother and Anna. His new friends from Freewater pledge to return with him. Using a hand-drawn map that (unbelievably) survives multiple drenchings, Homer and company undertake the seemingly impossible rescue. Told from many alternating points of view, it is somewhat challenging to keep the characters straight at the outset. While using archeological evidence of settlements of formerly enslaved people within the Great Dismal Swamp as the basis for the text, the story itself is a speculative look into such a community. VERDICT A fascinating look at a fictional Black resistance settlement in a little-known place.

Williams, Katherine. Freedom Soldiers . Hard Ball. Jun. 2019. ISBN 9781732808850. Gr 9 Up –Harriet Roberson aspires to become a courier to rescue fugitive slaves from the American South to free Black settlements in Canada via the Underground Railroad. She escaped from slavery with her mother, Abiah, across the frozen Ohio River in Virginia years before and comes of age on the Elgin Settlement in the Buxton community of Ontario. Harriet secretly yearns for her father, Jacob, to miraculously reunite with her and Abiah, though she is unaware of his whereabouts. Harriet develops into a young woman hungry for freedom, education, and equality. She falls in love with Thaddeus Childs, a dedicated courier traumatized by painful memories of enslavement who agonizes over having left his family behind in the North Carolina Great Dismal Swamp community. Despite the Fugitive Slave Act threatening their lives, Harriet and Thaddeus bond together to fight and destroy slavery. Williams has crafted a smart YA novel that presents the stories of Black people liberating themselves from slavery through grassroots community networks. Readers will enjoy the juxtaposition of the accounts of the settlers and their descendants in the United States and Canada. Williams brings alive lesser-known African American and African Canadian historical figures of the Underground Railroad. VERDICT This is an intelligent pick for readers who are looking for stories depicting enslaved, fugitive, and free Black people as change agents for their liberation during slavery in the African diaspora.

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Slavery isn’t just a Southern story. The North benefited from stolen labor.

“The Stolen Wealth of Slavery” traces the financial profits from enslaved labor, which fueled the rise of Northern banking institutions – some of which still exist.

By Barbara Spindel Contributor

April 25, 2024

In the years leading up to the Civil War, some of the biggest enslavers in the United States were not Southern plantation owners, as one might expect, but Wall Street bankers. Northern capitalists like James Brown and his brothers provided lines of credit to clients in the South, who offered their plantations – and the enslaved men, women, and children forced to work on them – as collateral. After the Panic of 1837, bankers like the Browns assumed legal possession of these “assets” when planters defaulted on their loans.

Investigative journalist David Montero untangles the economic ties binding the Browns and other Northern business owners to the slaveholders of the South in “The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations.” In his searing and meticulous account, the author argues that slavery has been wrongly perceived as a primarily Southern story. While slavery was centered in the South, Montero observes that much of the wealth it created flowed north.

Those who benefited most from the system of bondage were the men who owned the brokering firms, ships, insurance companies, and banks that turned commodities like cotton, rice, tobacco, and sugar into profits. These enterprises, Montero writes, were “at great physical distance from enslaved people themselves yet directly profiting from that enslavement.”

The author isn’t merely interested in establishing the North’s complicity. Rather, he demonstrates that, in what he calls “the largest money-laundering operation in American history,” Northern business leaders used wealth with roots in slavery to finance legitimate industries. That wealth, he writes, became “the foundations of America’s industrial revolution, a sweeping phase of modernization deeply connected to, though seemingly untouched by, slavery’s chain.” Montero counters the myth that the fortunes created from stolen labor were destroyed during the Civil War.

Because some of the corporate entities seeded with profits from slavery still exist, the book makes a compelling argument for providing some form of restitution to Black communities. The Browns, for instance, who ended up in possession of hundreds of enslaved people, founded corporations that live on as the multibillion-dollar investment banks Alex. Brown and Brown Brothers Harriman.

The book’s final chapters cover the movement for reparations. Montero profiles activists like attorney Deadria Farmer- Paellmann, who has brought suit against companies with proven links to slavery. Farmer-Paellmann, Montero writes, has “tied corporations to the enormous wealth gap that afflicts African Americans today, arguing that the stolen Black labor that made corporations rich was wealth deprived to Black people and their descendants for generations.”

To date, JPMorgan Chase & Co. is the only American company that has offered any type of restitution for profiting from slavery: In the mid-19th century, the bank held 13,000 Black people as collateral for loans. In 2005, it pledged $5 million in scholarship money for Black students.

Some of Montero’s claims seem overstated, for instance, calling the 19th-century corporate directors of Wall Street “the most active white nationalists of their era, or of any era, in the history of the United States.” Still, at a time when most Americans oppose reparations, “The Stolen Wealth of Slavery” has undeniable force. It has the potential to change minds both about the historical damage that’s been done and about the role corporations can play in repairing it.

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An NPR editor who wrote a critical essay on the company has resigned after being suspended

FILE - The headquarters for National Public Radio (NPR) stands on North Capitol Street on April 15, 2013, in Washington. A National Public Radio editor who wrote an essay criticizing his employer for promoting liberal reviews resigned on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, a day after it was revealed that he had been suspended. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

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NEW YORK (AP) — A National Public Radio editor who wrote an essay criticizing his employer for promoting liberal views resigned on Wednesday, attacking NPR’s new CEO on the way out.

Uri Berliner, a senior editor on NPR’s business desk, posted his resignation letter on X, formerly Twitter, a day after it was revealed that he had been suspended for five days for violating company rules about outside work done without permission.

“I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems” written about in his essay, Berliner said in his resignation letter.

Katherine Maher, a former tech executive appointed in January as NPR’s chief executive, has been criticized by conservative activists for social media messages that disparaged former President Donald Trump. The messages predated her hiring at NPR.

NPR’s public relations chief said the organization does not comment on individual personnel matters.

The suspension and subsequent resignation highlight the delicate balance that many U.S. news organizations and their editorial employees face. On one hand, as journalists striving to produce unbiased news, they’re not supposed to comment on contentious public issues; on the other, many journalists consider it their duty to critique their own organizations’ approaches to journalism when needed.

FILE - A sign for The New York Times hangs above the entrance to its building, May 6, 2021, in New York. In spring 2024, NBC News, The New York Times and National Public Radio have each dealt with turmoil for essentially the same reason: journalists taking the critical gaze they deploy to cover the world and turning it inward at their own employers. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

In his essay , written for the online Free Press site, Berliner said NPR is dominated by liberals and no longer has an open-minded spirit. He traced the change to coverage of Trump’s presidency.

“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed,” he wrote. “It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”

He said he’d brought up his concerns internally and no changes had been made, making him “a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love.”

In the essay’s wake, NPR top editorial executive, Edith Chapin, said leadership strongly disagreed with Berliner’s assessment of the outlet’s journalism and the way it went about its work.

It’s not clear what Berliner was referring to when he talked about disparagement by Maher. In a lengthy memo to staff members last week, she wrote: “Asking a question about whether we’re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions. Questioning whether our people are serving their mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful and demeaning.”

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo revealed some of Maher’s past tweets after the essay was published. In one tweet, dated January 2018, Maher wrote that “Donald Trump is a racist.” A post just before the 2020 election pictured her in a Biden campaign hat.

In response, an NPR spokeswoman said Maher, years before she joined the radio network, was exercising her right to express herself. She is not involved in editorial decisions at NPR, the network said.

The issue is an example of what can happen when business executives, instead of journalists, are appointed to roles overseeing news organizations: they find themselves scrutinized for signs of bias in ways they hadn’t been before. Recently, NBC Universal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde has been criticized for service on paid corporate boards.

Maher is the former head of the Wikimedia Foundation. NPR’s own story about the 40-year-old executive’s appointment in January noted that she “has never worked directly in journalism or at a news organization.”

In his resignation letter, Berliner said that he did not support any efforts to strip NPR of public funding. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism,” he wrote.

David Bauder writes about media for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder

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NPR Investigations: Off The Mark

Historical markers are everywhere in america. some get history wrong.

Laura Sullivan

Nick McMillan

The stately Fendall Hall in Eufaula, Ala., has a historical marker that does not accurately portray how the home's original owners were cotton brokers and were part of the slave trade in the 1800s. Andi Rice for NPR hide caption

The stately Fendall Hall in Eufaula, Ala., has a historical marker that does not accurately portray how the home's original owners were cotton brokers and were part of the slave trade in the 1800s.

The sound of the party filters across the mansion's lawn long before you see it: Dozens of guests spill out onto the front porch of the stately Fendall Hall in Eufaula, Alabama.

It's an engagement party, and past the people drinking white wine in the main hall is one of the home's historians, Susan Campbell.

Curious, fascinating and offensive markers from around the U.S.

She swings open the door to the expansive backyard.

"They had, like, 5 acres or so," Campbell says of the former owners, the Young-Dent family. They built the house in the late 1850s.

But you might already know this, because planted in the front yard of this historical home is a large, black-and-gold, square metal historical marker with the seal of the Alabama Historical Commission — and it says so.

Edward Brown Young was a "banker, merchant and entrepreneur," it says. He "organized the company which built the first bridge" in Eufaula, and his daughter married a Confederate captain in the "War Between the States."

What the marker doesn't mention, however, is that Young was a cotton broker, one of the most powerful men in the slave trade. Nor does it mention that he owned nine slaves, according to the federal 1860 census.

The historical marker that omits parts of the Young-Dent family's past is on the grounds of Fendall Hall in Eufaula. The back side of the marker says Edward Brown Young was a "banker, merchant and entrepreneur." The back side also says that he "organized the company which built the first bridge" in Eufaula and that his daughter married a Confederate captain in the "War Between the States." Andi Rice for NPR hide caption

And while the sign claims the company he organized built the bridge, that bridge, spanning the Chattahoochee River, was actually designed, managed and built by a slave named Horace King , a renowned and gifted engineer, along with a large group of enslaved men.

Campbell says she'd like to see more of this information included.

"But that's because I'm a Northerner, not a Southerner," she says. She moved to the South 20 years ago from Michigan. She says most people she knows here wouldn't agree with her.

A civil rights memorial in Alabama expands to document lynching victims' stories

"I mean, they know," she says, glancing over at the revelers on the porch. "They know it. But [they] don't necessarily want to be reminded."

That's the difficult thing about the truth. It's just not as fun to throw parties in places where terrible things happened.

How the U.S. tells its own story is a debate raging in schools , statehouses and public squares nationwide. It has led to social movements and angry protests. But for more than a century, historical markers have largely escaped that kind of scrutiny.

With more than 180,000 of them scattered across the U.S., it's easy to see why:

Susan Campbell, a local historian, sits on the front porch of Fendall Hall. She says she'd like to see more information about the Young-Dent family included on the historical marker at the mansion. Andi Rice for NPR hide caption

Susan Campbell, a local historian, sits on the front porch of Fendall Hall. She says she'd like to see more information about the Young-Dent family included on the historical marker at the mansion.

Even governments don't really know what they all say. Many state officials told NPR that they have no idea what signs are in their state, what stories they tell or who owns them.

And while markers often look official, the reality is that anyone can put up a marker — more than 35,000 different groups, societies, organizations, towns, governments and individuals have. It costs a few thousand dollars to order one.

Over the past year, NPR analyzed a database crowdsourced by thousands of hobbyists, looking to uncover the patterns, errors and problems with the country's markers. The effort revealed a fractured and often confused telling of the American story, where offensive lies live with impunity, history is distorted and errors are sometimes as funny as they are strange.

About the data The Historical Marker Database was launched by J.J. Prats in 2006. It includes over 180,000 active markers in the United States, contributed by thousands of hobbyists. Anyone who sees a marker can take a photo and submit it to the website. Entries are reviewed by editors to make sure that the marker is permanent, is located outdoors and has information beyond just names, dates and titles.

NPR's analysis of the database for the data points in this story can be accessed here .

Three separate states , for example, have markers that claim to be the place where anesthesia was discovered. Two states, Kentucky and Missouri , both claim to be the home of Daniel Boone's bones. Michigan and Alabama both claim to be the home of the first railroad west of the Allegheny Mountains, while Maryland and New Jersey both claim to have sent the first telegram.

Texas , on the other hand, claims to be the home of the first successful airplane flight — completed by a man who was neither of the Wright brothers.

Meanwhile, dead animals are rampant. Florida marks a dead alligator named Old Joe; California marks a dead horse — also named Old Joe. Arizona put up a marker for a donkey that drank beer. California thought it had a dead mastodon until a marker explained it was actually a dead circus elephant .

Somewhat dead humans are also popular. There are markers memorializing 14 ghosts , two witches , one vampire , a wizard and a couple who, a New Hampshire marker says, may have been abducted by aliens.

But the deeds of men are far more prevalent, even if questionable. Nevada marks a man who killed 11 people in the 1850s, even though it notes he had "few, if any redeeming traits." Arizona, on the other hand, marks the grave of a man the local town wrongly hanged for stealing a horse in 1882. It says, "He was right. We was wrong. ... Now he's gone."

There are markers to "world famous" items that few could likely pinpoint: soda water , cantaloupes , roofing slate , mustard , frozen custard , French-style cheese , beef jerky , a Santa Claus school , bourbon ball candy and dozens of others.

These are not to be outdone by the "world's best" cheddar cheese , hobby garden or seed rice , or even the "world's greatest" waterfall , harbor , gold mine , battleship , oil field , rodeo clown , roller coaster or chicken , among many others.

Landmarks fall, memories fade. Civil rights tourism may protect Mississippi history

While some markers date back centuries, they proliferated in the 20th century, meant to capture the attention of traveling Americans who had hit the road for the first time in their new cars. The markers brought business and tourism to out-of-the-way towns. Today the roadsides and public squares of America are replete with markers that fulfill their most basic purpose, offering a simple, often sterile recounting of an interesting moment in place and time.

But over the past century, many markers have also become symbols of the country's dark and complicated past, in some cases erected not to commemorate history but to manipulate how it is told, NPR found.

From the Atlantic through the Plains, more than 270 markers describe Native Americans as " savage ," " hostile " or " semi-civilized ," or they use racial slurs .

In the West and Southwest, markers herald the work of missionaries and praise rangers without mentioning the violence and cultural destruction they often inflicted .

Across the South, markers honor notable men and notable houses without mentioning the forced, free labor that made both the homes and the men's wealth possible. NPR found that nearly 70% of markers that mention plantations do not mention slavery .

Illustration of a small historical marker indicating a section break.

A fractured version of history

Particularly distorted is the Civil War, one of the single most marked topics nationwide. NPR's analysis revealed more than 500 markers that describe the Confederacy in glowing terms , vilify the Union , falsify the reasons for the war or recast Confederate soldiers as the war's true heroes .

At least 65 markers appear to promote a racist philosophy called the Lost Cause , which claims, among other things, that Black people enjoyed being enslaved.

Many of those Confederate markers weren't written in error, NPR found. They were part of a plan.

One of them is in Tuskegee, Ala., a city that Council Member Johnny Ford describes as the "citadel of the Civil Rights Movement."

Standing in the town square, he ticks off aspects of the city's famous history: home of the Tuskegee Airmen, Tuskegee University, Booker T. Washington's National Business League. It was also the birthplace of Rosa Parks.

Close to 90% of its residents are Black, he points out.

But in the middle of the square is a stone marker depicting two Confederate flags that says: "Honor the brave. With God as our vindicator. Erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy to the Confederate soldiers of Macon County."

By Ford's reading, that marker "reflects the fight to preserve slavery," he says. "That is not a positive sign for us here in our community."

Ford and other citizens of Tuskegee have tried for decades to remove the marker, which, like many Confederate stone markers, also has a Confederate soldier on top.

Johnny Ford, former mayor of Tuskegee, Ala., and a current council member, stands near an accurate historical marker that was installed in the town square during his term as mayor. Ford is currently fighting to have a Confederate marker and statue removed from the square. Andi Rice for NPR hide caption

But they can't. Because like thousands of markers nationwide, it was put up by a private group — in this case, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization made up almost entirely of white women.

"They said they built it in honor of the Confederate dead, which we respect," Ford said. "Honor their dead, but not in a public place. Put it in some museum."

But museum exhibits were not what the United Daughters of the Confederacy was after. While the group's monument-building efforts are well known, NPR's analysis found that the United Daughters also helped erect more than 600 historical markers, far surpassing the efforts of any other Civil War heritage group.

Exploring the Clotilda, the last known slave ship in the U.S., brings hope

These markers congratulate men for fighting for " the cause ," " a sacred cause ," " their righteous cause " and " a lost cause " and for their " patriotic devotion ," " heroism unsurpassed " and " faultless valor " as they fought to break the country apart to keep men, women and children enslaved and preserve what the markers describe as their " glorious heritage ."

A "fairer flag was never furled," declares one monument in Montgomery, Ala., not of the American flag, but the Confederate flag. In Sherman, Texas, a marker that the United Daughters of the Confederacy rededicated in 1996 claims Confederate soldiers' actions will "teach future generations ... Southern chivalry."

The group put up at least three markers for and memorials to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. It put up a marker outside Concord, N.C., to the KKK itself, though that one has been removed.

Council Member Johnny Ford and other residents of Tuskegee covered the town square's Confederate marker and monument with plastic. Ford has been trying to have the marker and statue removed since the 1970s, but the United Daughters of the Confederacy has fought to keep it in place. Andi Rice for NPR hide caption

Lately, Ford and the United Daughters have been battling in court. But Ford says it's hard to know whom he's fighting.

"There are no daughters that live here," Ford said. "I think they're mostly dead. They don't pay any taxes here. Yet they want to dominate our square."

Jay Hinton, a lawyer an hour away in Montgomery who represents the group in court, told NPR in an interview that the women just want to honor dead Confederate soldiers. He acknowledged that few, if any, United Daughters live in the area.

Tax records show that the group, based in Richmond, Va., has $11 million in assets, with an annual revenue of $1 million to $2 million.

Asked why the United Daughters want to keep a marker in a place they don't live, in a town that doesn't want it, for soldiers who died 160 years ago, Hinton said it's the women's choice to make. While the 1906 town deed filed in the courthouse across the street gave the land for the marker to the United Daughters to keep as a "park for white people," Hinton says the group has always let everyone use the park.

"We're pretty comfortable, and it makes us feel like good citizens to say that we didn't discriminate, and therefore we shouldn't be made to [remove the marker]," he said. "We think we get to keep the dirt because we've been doing what we ought to be doing from a constitutional perspective."

Nationwide, markers from Civil War heritage groups like the United Daughters outnumber comparable Union groups' markers by more than 2-to-1, NPR found. Confederate hospitals and Confederate cemeteries follow a similar pattern.

In all, markers about Confederates or the Confederacy are prolific, with more than 12,000 mentions. But the words "slave" and "slavery" show up only about half as many times.

Members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy stand in front of a monument they commissioned of Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan and his men in Lexington, Ky., in 1911. The group has put up more than 600 markers and monuments to the Confederacy nationwide. R.L. McClure/Library of Congress hide caption

When they do, many tell a racist myth about " faithful " slaves or otherwise diminish the reality of slavery . Others markers use racist language or support white supremacy .

As groups like the United Daughters disappeared from Tuskegee and other areas, historical markers gave those organizations and their message lasting and, in many cases, national visibility. The United Daughters put up markers as far away as Arizona , New Mexico and Washington , which weren't even states at the time of the war.

Officials with the United Daughters did not respond to NPR's requests for comment. But in a statement on its website, the organization says that its markers "simply represent a memorial to our forefathers who fought bravely" and that its members have "stayed quietly in the background, never engaging in public controversy."

That's not the history NPR found.

In November 1914, the United Daughters gathered for the group's annual convention at the swanky DeSoto hotel in Savannah, Ga., to hear the keynote speaker, the group's national historian, Mildred Lewis Rutherford.

"Slavery was no disgrace," Rutherford told the women, according to records from the convention. "The Negro race should give thanks daily. ... [Slaves] were the happiest set of people on the face of the globe. ...

"In all the history of the world, no peasantry was ever better cared for, more contented or happier," she said.

As she read these words, there hadn't been a slaveholder in the U.S. for half a century. But Rutherford's speech drove toward her final point: Slaveholders needed to be defended.

Code Switch

Do the words 'race riot' belong on a historic marker in memphis.

"These wrongs must be righted and the Southern slaveholder defended as soon as possible," she said.

Records in state archives show the group began requiring chapters to form "memorial marker committees" and focus their efforts on fundraising.

And they haven't stopped. While many groups have begun taking down Confederate symbols, the United Daughters of the Confederacy has helped put up 47 more markers over the last two decades.

"Markers are a reflection of the people who erect them"

So it was no surprise that when Bryan Stevenson arrived in Montgomery in the 1980s, long before he gained national acclaim for his work as executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative , and went looking for markers about slavery, he couldn't find one.

Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, stands on the grounds of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Andi Rice for NPR hide caption

Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, stands on the grounds of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

He says he counted 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy back then as he drove around town. "Almost a preoccupation with mid-19th-century history," he recalls. "But you could not find the word 'slave,' 'slavery' or 'enslavement' anywhere in the city."

In 2013, Stevenson thought that this should change. He called up the Alabama Historical Association. He says the group sounded supportive.

"They said, 'Oh, if it's truthful, just give us the information and we'll put it up,''' Stevenson recalls. "We went to them and gave them a 60-page memo documenting the history we had investigated. And we got an email back that said, 'Yeah, your information is all true and correct, but we can't put up markers about slavery. That would be too controversial.'"

In that moment, Stevenson says, he understood what the United Daughters and other groups had figured out a century earlier: If you want to own the narrative, write it yourself.

Working with communities, Stevenson and his organization have now privately funded and erected more than a hundred markers telling the stories of lynchings in America.

Duplicates of new markers line the pathway at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. The Equal Justice Initiative has worked with more than 100 communities to help put up markers telling the stories of lynchings and racial terror. Andi Rice for NPR hide caption

Many communities have embraced the markers . A few markers have faced hostility . Two were stolen after they went up .

They're just a small dent in the vast landscape of Confederate markers, but Stevenson says he's not looking for even numbers.

"If we are effective at telling the truth about our history," he says, "we will change our relationship to honoring things that are not honorable. We will."

The association that once turned Stevenson down now has new leadership. Scotty Kirkland took over as chairman of the association's Historical Marker Committee in 2015, and he agrees with Stevenson.

"Markers are a reflection of the people who erect them," Kirkland says. "The first markers put out by the association, it looks like they were basically done by fiat. There's no real racial diversity in these stories. There are no women marked in these early markers."

Kirkland says the group is now funding a History Revealed initiative for new stories. The association has quietly removed the Confederate flag from several markers over the past couple of years.

Scotty Kirkland stands in front of a new historical marker in Montgomery, where he is chairman of the Alabama Historical Association's Historical Marker Committee. The committee is trying to move on from Confederate stories through its new History Revealed program. Andi Rice for NPR hide caption

But changing the narrative can be hard, especially when old markers are rarely rewritten or removed.

Many state officials told NPR that, outside the publicly sourced database or markers they helped sponsor, they have no way to know the entirety of the markers in their states.

Only a few states, including Alabama, Pennsylvania and Minnesota, have undertaken efforts to review existing markers. In Minnesota, officials drove out to 206 markers that the state historical society either paid for or helped put up. Officials told NPR they discovered every single one of them had a problem — from grammar issues to offensive language.

Meanwhile, three states — Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee — recently passed laws prohibiting the removal of markers on public land, making little allowance for how old, wrong, misguided, confusing or offensive they might be.

In the absence of being able to take markers down, many heritage organizations find it easier to just add new ones. In Alabama, another group, the Alabama Historical Commission — whose director controversially left in 2004, saying pro-Confederate attitudes pushed him out — now says it too is ready to move on from Confederate stories.

On a recent day, historian Theo M. Moore, who until recently was the commission's African American heritage coordinator, stood in front of one of the group's newest efforts. It's a marker to Claudette Colvin, a young Black woman who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus before Rosa Parks.

Moore says it's "a reminder that this was a place of importance."

Theo M. Moore, a historian and a former staff member of the Alabama Historical Commission, says telling the truth about the past is a way the country can move forward. Andi Rice for NPR hide caption

Theo M. Moore, a historian and a former staff member of the Alabama Historical Commission, says telling the truth about the past is a way the country can move forward.

"We've been taught the same history, especially in the South," he says. "This is how all these stereotypes come about. What is presented all the time is negativity."

As if on cue, a neighbor, Arthur Sanders, walks across the street to tell Moore how much he likes the new marker.

"Our neighborhood disappeared, man, but that," he says, pointing to the marker, "that makes a difference because it's the start of trying to get our neighborhood back."

Moore smiles. As he gets back in his car, Moore says he knows it's just a metal sign. Most people don't even read them. But as he pulls away, he says Sanders is right: how you tell history shapes how you see the future.

And lately, he says, something else has been bothering him.

"We have all these cities named after Creek Native Americans: Wetumpka, Tuskegee, Notasulga, Loachapoka, Opelika, Tuscaloosa. ... That's all Native American, right?" he says, pausing. "Where's, you know, where's their markers?"

The Native American story

Across the country, more than 15,000 markers mention Native Americans. But the history written on them often isn't theirs.

If there are two sides on the American frontier, NPR found the nation's historical markers come down solidly on the side of white settlers. At least 200 markers tell an eerily similar American tale: Native Americans attacked innocent white settlers for no reason .

Darla Gebhard knows this story well.

A research librarian at the Brown County Historical Society in New Ulm, Minn., she walked through a 170-year-old cemetery there, past rows of gravestones.

Brown County Historical Society researcher Darla Gebhard touches a grave marker at the New Ulm City Cemetery in New Ulm, Minnesota. Jaida Grey Eagle for NPR hide caption

Brown County Historical Society researcher Darla Gebhard touches a grave marker at the New Ulm City Cemetery in New Ulm, Minnesota.

"I'll show you what was going through their mind if we come over here," she says. "You'll see the gravity of it."

She stops in front of dozens of graves. Their names have faded with time: John Schneider, Julius Fenske, Ernst Dietrich and many more. But the words carved underneath are clear:

"Killed by Indians, killed by Indians, killed by Indians," Gebhard says, reading each one. "You have entire families that lost their lives. This is what the reality was for them in 1862."

Gebhard is right — this was the reality for many people who lived on the Minnesota plains in the 1800s. It wasn't, however, the reality for all the people who lived here.

Numerous gravestones from the 1800s within the New Ulm City Cemetery read "Killed by Indians." Jaida Grey Eagle for NPR hide caption

Numerous gravestones from the 1800s within the New Ulm City Cemetery read "Killed by Indians."

John Robertson, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe and a descendant of Minnesota Dakotas, stood at the edge of an expansive field in southern Minnesota known as Cansa'yapi, homeland of the Lower Sioux Indian Community in an area the federal government calls the Lower Sioux Agency.

"We're looking out over what would have been in 1862 the tall grass prairie," he says. "Even today you don't see any trees, and that's the way it would have been for 250 miles."

Three years ago, Minnesota agreed to return 114 acres of the prairie back to the tribe, acknowledging the land had never belonged to the state in the first place.

When tribal members took over the property, they also took over management of 22 state historical signs. As Robertson heads out onto a nearby path, he sums up what many of them said.

John Robertson is a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton tribe and a descendant of Minnesota Dakotas. Jaida Grey Eagle for NPR hide caption

John Robertson is a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton tribe and a descendant of Minnesota Dakotas.

"You know, this poor settler family was massacred, and they had no defenses — the women were violated and the children were taken," he says. "I mean, that's the kind of language that are on these markers ."

Robertson, who is site manager for the property, says tribal members spent a long time considering each one. And then they made a decision: to take them all down.

Road signs in Idaho are being changed to include Native American voices

On a recent day, Robertson heads out on the trails to see how things are going, along with Amber Annis, who is Cheyenne River Lakota and an associate vice president with the Minnesota Historical Society. They're helping the tribe replace the signs. As a crew bangs new signs into the ground, they toss the old ones into a heap on the grass.

Robertson says it wasn't just the signs that called tribal members savages or described violent acts that troubled him. It was all the signs they weren't even on — as if the history of this place hadn't happened at all.

John Robertson watches as workers install new signs on property that is now managed by tribal members. Laura Sullivan/NPR hide caption

John Robertson watches as workers install new signs on property that is now managed by tribal members.

Annis stops in front of a stone building along the path and reads the old sign. "The [Stone Warehouse] is 43 by 23 feet, 20 feet in height, with a good substantial cellar 8 feet deep," she says. "The cellar walls are 3 feet. The first-story walls [are] 2 feet, and the second-story walls are 18 inches thick."

Robertson shakes his head. The sign, including all the dimensions, isn't wrong, he says. It's oblivious.

The warehouse was the spark that started the U.S.-Dakota wars. It's why all those settlers in the cemetery died and an untold number of Dakotas with them.

"This was the flashpoint of the actual war beginning here and the establishment of the conquered status of the Dakota nation," Robertson explains.

A century-old marker sits in front of the historic Stone Warehouse, which played a critical role in the U.S.-Dakota wars. The Lower Sioux Indian Community is putting up new markers to tell that story and many others on land the tribe now manages. Laura Sullivan/NPR hide caption

The Dakotas were once one of the most formidable forces in the Americas, known for their brilliant political and military strategy. But after the U.S. government took their land and prohibited them from hunting or farming, the tribe was forced to accept a treaty. One of the things it promised was food payments from the Stone Warehouse.

Except that in the summer of 1862, the government, mired in the Civil War, stopped providing food. According to letters from the time, the federal agent in charge locked the warehouse, and the main trader told the Dakotas they could " eat grass or their own dung ."

Facing starvation after years of broken promises, the Dakotas declared war.

Robertson reads the beginning of the new sign, which will be written in both Dakota and English.

"The warehouse was a central scene during the outbreak of the U.S.-Dakota War in 1862," the new sign says. "Its contents were burned out during the war but the structure remained."

John Robertson holds a version of the new signs, which are written in both Dakota and English. Laura Sullivan/NPR hide caption

John Robertson holds a version of the new signs, which are written in both Dakota and English.

As Robertson and Annis continue down the gravel path, the new signs tell the story of the Dakotas: the arrival of the Europeans on their land, the loss of that land, the decimation of the tribe. They are plot points obscured by the old signs.

Robertson stops at one old sign that tells of a boat landing that it says "was perhaps the busiest spot at the agency which brought steamboats, supplies and even tourists here in the 1850s."

These tourists, it says, enjoyed the "sights and sounds" of the blacksmith shop and sawmill.

But that's not the whole story. Newspaper advertisements from 1858 show that tour guides promised tourists that they could watch Dakota warriors in traditional dress collect food payments.

Amber Annis, associate vice president of the Minnesota Historical Society, stands inside the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. The organization is helping the Lower Sioux Indian Community replace old markers and tell their own story. Jaida Grey Eagle for NPR hide caption

"Being Native, you grow up, wherever you go, you already know it's going to be something that's not true," Annis says. "It's harmful. I have two daughters. I think about them a lot. When they come to places like this, they will be able to see themselves in different ways."

Some of the new signs detail the Dakotas' military successes, including a victory over a company of Fort Ridgely soldiers near the river.

But Robertson and Annis know how the story ends. The federal government marshaled hundreds of soldiers until the Dakotas surrendered and then hanged 38 of them and removed the rest of the tribe from Minnesota. Robertson says he's not trying to change that history.

He's trying to explain why it mattered.

"Hopefully when you read it, the sign is going to speak to you in a different and continuing way," Robertson says. "That's the goal of the signage. Then you would say, 'I heard something about that,' or 'I want to know more about that.' And it's going to be alive for you. I hope."

John Robertson is the site manager of land known as Cansa'yapi, homeland of the Lower Sioux Indian Community in Morton, Minnesota. Jaida Grey Eagle for NPR hide caption

John Robertson is the site manager of land known as Cansa'yapi, homeland of the Lower Sioux Indian Community in Morton, Minnesota.

Throughout the rest of the state, though, the signs speak the same way they did a hundred years ago.

On a grassy median in a busy New Ulm intersection, one marker describes the "depredations of the savages" who "massacred nearly all the whites."

Another , using a racial slur, claims Native Americans "had no pity for women or children." In Morton, a marker praises the "brave, faithful ... loyal Indians who saved the lives of white people." Rarely are Native Americans referred to by name.

On the New Ulm courthouse lawn, a marker congratulates the settlers for creating New Ulm.

"It's paying homage to the pioneers who founded the territory of Minnesota," says Gebhard, the Brown County historian.

Asked whether the Dakotas could say they founded the area, Gebhard says, "Oh, absolutely. And so if the Dakotas put up a marker saying this is our homeland, they would be absolutely correct in doing so."

Darla Gebhard walks through the New Ulm City Cemetery, where many settlers who died in the U.S.-Dakota wars are buried. Jaida Grey Eagle for NPR hide caption

Darla Gebhard walks through the New Ulm City Cemetery, where many settlers who died in the U.S.-Dakota wars are buried.

But this idea of dueling markers — that stories can be told two ways, should be told in two ways — is problematic for historians.

"It doesn't do justice to the idea that we want to tell a full and complete story," says Chantel Rodriguez, senior public historian with the Minnesota Historical Society, which is reviewing the state's markers. "That means weaving together the perspectives. What if you only see one marker and not the other? The reason why we feel the need to have separate markers is because we want to retain the original story."

The courageous stories of both settler families and Native American families can be told together. But they rarely are.

On the back of the courthouse pioneer marker in New Ulm is the name of every town resident who died in the U.S.-Dakota wars fighting for their families. There's no marker in the database that lists the names of the Dakotas who died fighting for theirs.

Gebhard said a member of the Dakotas asked her about this once.

"I was doing a downtown tour with a Dakota person, and she asked me, 'What do people in New Ulm think about the Dakota war?'" Gebhard recalls. "And I said, 'They don't.' And then this person said, 'Well, why is that?' And I said, 'Because we won.'"

On the New Ulm courthouse lawn, a marker congratulates settlers' founding of the territory of Minnesota. The symbol on the Native person's clothing was an ancient cultural sign for many Dakota tribes. Laura Sullivan/NPR hide caption

A murder shrouded in secrecy

When it comes to the nation's history, though, exactly who "we" is, is no longer clear. Where once markers might have merely entertained travelers, by sheer volume over the course of a century they have become, instead, an entire nation's history book, its first social media campaign.

They spread hate, and joy. And they have unlocked secrets, even ones from a long-forgotten murder on the edge of a two-lane highway near Gadsden, Alabama.

A local from the area, Jerry Smith, pulled his car onto U.S. 11. Asked what Gadsden is known for, he paused.

"Not a damn thing," he said.

But that's not true, at least not anymore. Just up this road is a new historical marker saying otherwise. Smith was just a teenager when it all started in 1963, as he drove down this highway in his green Chevrolet Corvair.

That's when he saw a strange man walking down the road, with a sign over his body, pulling a wagon. Smith knew he was what Alabama's then-governor, George Wallace, had warned about.

Civil rights activist William Lewis Moore holds a protest sign in Binghamton, N.Y., in 1963. Moore was shot dead on April 23, 1963, on a highway in Etowah County, Ala., while he was on a one-man crusade to protest segregation. Press & Sun-Bulletin via AP hide caption

"His favorite term was 'outside agitators,'" Smith says of Wallace. "If they would leave us alone in Alabama, everything is fine. But these 'outside agitators' are fanning racial fire. Well, it was George Wallace that was fanning racial fire. But, you know, early on I might have been a little too dumb to know that."

As he slowed down to pass the man, Smith was surprised to see that he looked just like any other guy. The two locked eyes. Smith thinks the man may have even smiled a little.

So when, just a couple of hours later, someone shot the man point-blank in the face and throat and left his body on the side of the road, Smith was deeply troubled. And yet, no one dared talk about it.

"There was a lot of people that thought this guy, walking down the road pulling a buggy, we didn't need him," Smith remembers. "And there was some people that [said] he's not fit for being here. We oughta kill him, you know?"

The man was William Lewis Moore, a white postal worker from Baltimore, on a one-man protest march. His murder has never been solved.

For years, it bothered Smith. What bothered him more, though, was the silence.

"The years passed by — other things happened," Smith says. "This lost significance in the eyes of Alabamians."

The grocery store that William Lewis Moore stopped in is still standing in Gadsden, Alabama. Laura Sullivan/NPR hide caption

The grocery store that William Lewis Moore stopped in is still standing in Gadsden, Alabama.

And then one day, as he was driving, it dawned on Smith what he could do about it.

"I thought, 'At least we ought to have a plaque,'" he says.

At first, people told him not to do it. Let the past lie, they said. One person even messaged him on Facebook saying that it might be dangerous.

But Smith kept talking about it, calling people. And then one afternoon, he went and made a speech in front of the county commission, and the commissioners voted unanimously to pay for it.

On the day it was unveiled, several dozen people came out in the rain to see it.

"William Lewis Moore ... was assassinated at this location during a 400-mile protest march from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi," reads the marker, planted in a gravel patch between the road and the train tracks. Someone left flowers at its base.

Then, something strange happened. People in the community started talking openly about the murder. Moore's death was no longer a community secret. It was history — public history — right there on the side of the road.

Civil rights activist Carver Neblett leads nine Freedom Marchers from Tennessee across the Georgia state line on May 1, 1963. The group retraced the route traveled by postal worker and civil rights activist William Lewis Moore, who was shot in Alabama on April 23, 1963. Horace Cort/AP hide caption

And now at the diner, the town museum, even the local sheriff's office, lots of people will tell you details that many people knew: that Moore stopped at a grocery store along the road, that he got into a confrontation with the store manager in the parking lot, that the manager's name was Floyd Simpson.

"He's the one everyone thought did it, thinks did it," says Johnny Grant, the assistant sheriff for Etowah County, who has spent 48 years in law enforcement here, speaking publicly about Simpson for the first time.

Grant hadn't joined the sheriff's office yet at the time of the murder, but some of his closest friends were on duty that night. Grant says they all suspected Simpson.

He says he even quietly reinvestigated the case years ago, when he became chief investigator, to see whether more could be done. But Simpson was already dead. He died 26 years ago.

The idea of Simpson as suspect wasn't too much of a stretch. There was the public confrontation, for one thing. And Grant says police records show Simpson was in the Ku Klux Klan.

Plus, a witness saw what looked like Simpson's Buick sitting on the side of the road just before the murder. And finally, a state forensic technician said he believed the bullet matched Simpson's gun.

But the grand jury declined to indict Simpson, and people in the town put the whole thing behind them.

Jerry Smith stands by a historical marker that describes how civil rights activist William Lewis Moore died in 1963. Laura Sullivan/NPR hide caption

Jerry Smith stands by a historical marker that describes how civil rights activist William Lewis Moore died in 1963.

"The evidence, to me, I would have charged him," Grant says, "and I would have been able to charge him now, however many years later. But they took it to the grand jury, and the grand jury refused to indict him."

Today, Grant is also an Etowah County commissioner. When Jerry Smith came forward one day asking for marker money, Grant quickly voted yes. He says he wanted the story told.

"That was just hate," Grant says of the murder.

He calls the marker one of the best things the county has done.

"It will always be a black eye to Etowah County," Grant says of the killing. "I just hope as law enforcement they did everything they could to solve it."

Now, that black eye is on the side of the road for everyone to see, part of the American story. Moore's marker and tens of thousands of others like it are all pieces of that story, staked into the ground to mark a place in time and make it permanent.

But, like the story of William Lewis Moore's death, how the nation sees its past keeps changing anyway.

Audio for this story was produced by Graham Smith. It was edited by Robert Little. Additional reporting by Tilda Wilson and Tirzah Christopher. Design, development and illustrations by Connie Hanzhang Jin. Graphics editing by Alyson Hurt. Digital project coordination by Desiree F. Hicks. Photo editing by Emily Bogle. Copy editing by Preeti Aroon.

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Guest Essay

I Thought the Bragg Case Against Trump Was a Legal Embarrassment. Now I Think It’s a Historic Mistake.

A black-and-white photo with a camera in the foreground and mid-ground and a building in the background.

By Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Mr. Shugerman is a law professor at Boston University.

About a year ago, when Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, indicted former President Donald Trump, I was critical of the case and called it an embarrassment. I thought an array of legal problems would and should lead to long delays in federal courts.

After listening to Monday’s opening statement by prosecutors, I still think the district attorney has made a historic mistake. Their vague allegation about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election” has me more concerned than ever about their unprecedented use of state law and their persistent avoidance of specifying an election crime or a valid theory of fraud.

To recap: Mr. Trump is accused in the case of falsifying business records. Those are misdemeanor charges. To elevate it to a criminal case, Mr. Bragg and his team have pointed to potential violations of federal election law and state tax fraud. They also cite state election law, but state statutory definitions of “public office” seem to limit those statutes to state and local races.

Both the misdemeanor and felony charges require that the defendant made the false record with “intent to defraud.” A year ago, I wondered how entirely internal business records (the daily ledger, pay stubs and invoices) could be the basis of any fraud if they are not shared with anyone outside the business. I suggested that the real fraud was Mr. Trump’s filing an (allegedly) false report to the Federal Election Commission, and that only federal prosecutors had jurisdiction over that filing.

A recent conversation with Jeffrey Cohen, a friend, Boston College law professor and former prosecutor, made me think that the case could turn out to be more legitimate than I had originally thought. The reason has to do with those allegedly falsified business records: Most of them were entered in early 2017, generally before Mr. Trump filed his Federal Election Commission report that summer. Mr. Trump may have foreseen an investigation into his campaign, leading to its financial records. He may have falsely recorded these internal records before the F.E.C. filing as consciously part of the same fraud: to create a consistent paper trail and to hide intent to violate federal election laws, or defraud the F.E.C.

In short: It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up.

Looking at the case in this way might address concerns about state jurisdiction. In this scenario, Mr. Trump arguably intended to deceive state investigators, too. State investigators could find these inconsistencies and alert federal agencies. Prosecutors could argue that New York State agencies have an interest in detecting conspiracies to defraud federal entities; they might also have a plausible answer to significant questions about whether New York State has jurisdiction or whether this stretch of a state business filing law is pre-empted by federal law.

However, this explanation is a novel interpretation with many significant legal problems. And none of the Manhattan district attorney’s filings or today’s opening statement even hint at this approach.

Instead of a theory of defrauding state regulators, Mr. Bragg has adopted a weak theory of “election interference,” and Justice Juan Merchan described the case , in his summary of it during jury selection, as an allegation of falsifying business records “to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 election.”

As a reality check: It is legal for a candidate to pay for a nondisclosure agreement. Hush money is unseemly, but it is legal. The election law scholar Richard Hasen rightly observed , “Calling it election interference actually cheapens the term and undermines the deadly serious charges in the real election interference cases.”

In Monday’s opening argument, the prosecutor Matthew Colangelo still evaded specifics about what was illegal about influencing an election, but then he claimed , “It was election fraud, pure and simple.” None of the relevant state or federal statutes refer to filing violations as fraud. Calling it “election fraud” is a legal and strategic mistake, exaggerating the case and setting up the jury with high expectations that the prosecutors cannot meet.

The most accurate description of this criminal case is a federal campaign finance filing violation. Without a federal violation (which the state election statute is tethered to), Mr. Bragg cannot upgrade the misdemeanor counts into felonies. Moreover, it is unclear how this case would even fulfill the misdemeanor requirement of “intent to defraud” without the federal crime.

In stretching jurisdiction and trying a federal crime in state court, the Manhattan district attorney is now pushing untested legal interpretations and applications. I see three red flags raising concerns about selective prosecution upon appeal.

First, I could find no previous case of any state prosecutor relying on the Federal Election Campaign Act either as a direct crime or a predicate crime. Whether state prosecutors have avoided doing so as a matter of law, norms or lack of expertise, this novel attempt is a sign of overreach.

Second, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the New York statute requires that the predicate (underlying) crime must also be a New York crime, not a crime in another jurisdiction. The district attorney responded with judicial precedents only about other criminal statutes, not the statute in this case. In the end, the prosecutors could not cite a single judicial interpretation of this particular statute supporting their use of the statute (a plea deal and a single jury instruction do not count).

Third, no New York precedent has allowed an interpretation of defrauding the general public. Legal experts have noted that such a broad “election interference” theory is unprecedented, and a conviction based on it may not survive a state appeal.

Mr. Trump’s legal team also undercut itself for its decisions in the past year: His lawyers essentially put all of their eggs in the meritless basket of seeking to move the trial to federal court, instead of seeking a federal injunction to stop the trial entirely. If they had raised the issues of selective or vindictive prosecution and a mix of jurisdictional, pre-emption and constitutional claims, they could have delayed the trial past Election Day, even if they lost at each federal stage.

Another reason a federal crime has wound up in state court is that President Biden’s Justice Department bent over backward not to reopen this valid case or appoint a special counsel. Mr. Trump has tried to blame Mr. Biden for this prosecution as the real “election interference.” The Biden administration’s extra restraint belies this allegation and deserves more credit.

Eight years after the alleged crime itself, it is reasonable to ask if this is more about Manhattan politics than New York law. This case should serve as a cautionary tale about broader prosecutorial abuses in America — and promote bipartisan reforms of our partisan prosecutorial system.

Nevertheless, prosecutors should have some latitude to develop their case during trial, and maybe they will be more careful and precise about the underlying crime, fraud and the jurisdictional questions. Mr. Trump has received sufficient notice of the charges, and he can raise his arguments on appeal. One important principle of “ our Federalism ,” in the Supreme Court’s terms, is abstention , that federal courts should generally allow state trials to proceed first and wait to hear challenges later.

This case is still an embarrassment, in terms of prosecutorial ethics and apparent selectivity. Nevertheless, each side should have its day in court. If convicted, Mr. Trump can fight many other days — and perhaps win — in appellate courts. But if Monday’s opening is a preview of exaggerated allegations, imprecise legal theories and persistently unaddressed problems, the prosecutors might not win a conviction at all.

Jed Handelsman Shugerman (@jedshug) is a law professor at Boston University.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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In 1845 the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself became an antebellum international best seller. A fugitive from Maryland slavery, Douglass spent four years honing his skills as an abolitionist lecturer before setting about the task of writing his autobiography. The genius of Douglass's Narrative ...
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Article contents

The Early Narratives

The Antebellum Slave Narratives

Themes and Style

Women's Narratives

Postbellum Narratives and Beyond

Further Reading

Related Articles

ENGL405: The American Renaissance

Introduction

Background Reading

Searching the Online Catalog

Bibliographies

Fictionalized Slave Narratives

Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin

Have a Question?

Photo Essay

Featured Articles

Primary Source Documents

Subject Entries

Biographies

Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It

Explore the March 2021 Issue

Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation and Freedom

Memoirs and Slave Narratives

Ukawsaw Gronniosaw's Narrative

Popular Literature: Types of Narrative

Spiritual Focus

Abolitionist Focus

Progressive Goals

Slave Narrative: Formal Style

The freedom to remember: narrative, slavery, and gender in contemporary Black women's fiction

Related Papers

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS

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Top 30 Books About Slavery (Fiction)

#1 – The Glory Field

#2 – The Confessions of Nat Turner

#3 – The Book of Negroes

#4 – Beloved

#5 – Nightjohn

#6 – Copper Sun

#7 – Roots: The Saga of an American Family

#8 – Uncle Tom’s Cabin

#9 – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

#10 – Gone With the Wind

#11 – Invisible Man

#12 – The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

#13 – The Book of Night Women

#14 – Mandingo

#15 – Cane River

#16 – Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons

#17 – Absalom! Absalom!

#18 – The Good Lord Bird

#19 – Kindred

#20 – The Kitchen House

#21 – Sacred Hunger

#22 – I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly

#23 – A Respectable Trade

#24 – A Million Nightingales

#25 – Our Nig

#26 – Property

#27 – I, Dred Scott

#28 – Sweetsmoke

#29 – Flash for Freedom!

#30 – Chains

Books We Love

The Narrative Matters: Guidelines on Writing about Slavery

About the Author

Cazzie Reyes