Catherine A. Stewart. Long Past Slavery

The narratives of formerly enslaved African Americans, collected by employees of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), have been key sources for the history of antebellum slavery for nearly half a century, even as historians have long recognized the challenges of interpreting them. In Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project, Catherine A. Stewart provides a fresh perspective by situating the FWP’s Ex-Slave Project within the intellectual and cultural contexts of the 1930s, mining the archival sources that trace its development and operation from 1936 to 1939, and illuminating the conflicting perspectives of its federal and state leaders, white and African American employees in several states, and formerly enslaved people themselves. Through the work of these diverse actors, “the Ex-Slave Project became the site where competing visions of African American identity, past and present, vied for ascendance in the struggle to map the contours of black citizenship in the nation’s future” (2).

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