Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4

by United States. Work Projects Administration

"Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from…" is a collection of histories compiled between 1936 and 1938 by the Federal Writers' Project. The collection contains over 2,000 interviews with formerly enslaved individuals across seventeen states, preserving their life stories before they were lost. However, historians debate its reliability, as primarily white interviewers conducted the interviews during the Jim Crow era, raising questions about whether interviewees modified their accounts due to racial dynamics and whether the collection presents a distorted view of slavery.